BACKGROUND An effective health workforce is essential for achieving health-related new Sustainable Development Goals. Odisha, one of the states in India with low health indicators, faces challenges in recruiting and retaining health staff in the public sector, especially doctors. Recruitment, deployment and career progression play an important role in attracting and retaining doctors. We examin...

For a large class of Markov Decision Processes, stationary (possibly randomized) policies are globally optimal. However, in Borel state and action spaces, the computation and implementation of even such stationary policies are known to be prohibitive. In addition, networked control applications require remote controllers to transmit action commands to an actuator with low information rate. Thes...

by Parisa Rashidi, M.S. Washington State University December 2007 Chair: Diane J. Cook In current work we introduce CASAS, an adaptive smart home system that utilizes machine learning techniques in order to dynamically adapt to user advice or changes in daily routine activities. The main components of CASAS include a frequent and periodic activity miner (FPAM), a hierarchal activity model (HAM)...

Policy-based management of the security of a military communications network can simplify the configuration process, while increasing security and availability. An effective policy-based approach requires analysis of policies for inconsistencies, and for desired security properties. It also must provide for the refinement of high-level security goals into concrete policies. This paper defines a...

In this paper, we analyze how lack of credibility and transparency of monetary and fiscal policies undermines the effectiveness of macroeconomic policies to isolate the economy from commodity price fluctuations. We develop a general equilibrium model for a commodity exporting economy where macro policies are conducted through rules. We show that the responses of output, aggregate demand, and in...

We provide a framework in which we link the valuation and asset allocation policies of defined benefits plans with the lifetime marginal productivity schedule of the worker and the pension plan formula. In turn, we examine the retirement policies that are implied by the primitives of the model and the value of pension obligations. Our model provides an explicit valuation formula for a stylized ...

Model predictive control (MPC) is a favored method for handling constrained linear control problems. Normally, the MPC optimization problem is solved on-line, but in ‘explicit MPC’ an explicit precomputed feedback law is used for each region of active constraints (Bemporad et al., 2002). In this paper we make a link between this and the ‘self-optimizing control’ idea of finding simple policies ...

We consider a stochastic control model in which an economic unit has productive capital and also liabilities in the form of debt. The worth of capital changes over time through investment, and also through random Brownian fluctuations in the unit price of capital. Income from production is also subject to random Brownian fluctuations. The goal is to choose investment and consumption controls wh...