Collaborative distributed decision making for large scale disaster relief operations: Drawing analogies from robust natural systems

One of the most ignored, but urgent and vital challenges confronting society today is the vulnerability of urban areas to extreme events. Current organization of response systems, predominantly based on a command and control model, limits their effectiveness and efficiency. Particularly, in decision‐making processes where a large number of actors may be involved. In this article, a new distributed collaborative decision‐making model is proposed to overcome command and control limitations encountered in stressful, hostile, chaotic, and large‐scale settings. This model was derived by borrowing concepts from the collective decision making of honeybees foraging, a successful process in solving complex tasks within complex settings. The model introduced in this article was evaluated through differential equations, i.e., continuous analysis, and difference equations, i.e., discrete analysis. The most important result found is that the best available option in any large‐scale decision‐making problem can be configured as an attractor, in a distributed and timely manner. We suggest that the proposed model has the potential to facilitate decision‐making processes in large‐scale settings. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 11:28–38, 2005     

Piecewise Deterministic Markov Control Processes with Feedback Controls and Unbounded Costs

The control of piecewise-deterministic processes is studied where only local boundedness of the data is assumed. Moreover the discount rate may be zero. The value function is shown to be solution to the Bellman equation in a weak sense; however the solution concept is strong enough to generate optimal policies. Continuity and compactness conditions are given for the existence of nonrelaxed optimal feedback controls.     

国家关键技术管理计算机系统研究

本文根据国家关键技术管理工作的特点，本着提高决策质量，满足用户要求的原则，分析和设计国家关键技术管理计算机系统，为高层次宏观决策提供丰富的信息支持。     

一类经典”秘书问题”的推广

”秘书问题”在最优停时理论的发展中曾起过重要作用 ,实际中的一类问题与”秘书问题”有类似之处 ,但比”秘书问题”更复杂 .本文将经典”秘书问题”进行推广 ,建立了一类比经典”秘书问题”更有实际意义的模型 ,并给出了该类模型的解 .     

Integration and propagation of a multi-criteria decision making model in constraint programming

In this paper we propose a general integration scheme for a Multi-Criteria Decision Making model of the Multi-Attribute Utility Theory in Constraint Programming. We introduce the Choquet integral as a general aggregation function for multi-criteria optimization problems and define the Choquet global constraint that propagates this function during the Branch-and-Bound search. Finally the benefits of the propagation of the Choquet constraint are evaluated on the examination timetabling problem.     

On Characterizations of Proper Efficiency for Nonconvex Multiobjective Optimization

In this paper, nonconvex multiobjective optimization problems are studied. New characterizations of a properly efficient solution in the sense of Geoffrion's are established in terms of the stability of one scalar optimization problem and the existence of an exact penalty function of a scalar constrained program, respectively. One of the characterizations is applied to derive necessary conditions for a properly efficient control-parameter pair of a nonconvex multiobjective discrete optimal control problem with linear constraints.     

Time Consistent Dynamic Risk Measures

We introduce the time-consistency concept that is inspired by the so-called “principle of optimality” of dynamic programming and demonstrate – via an example – that the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) need not be time-consistent in a multi-stage case. Then, we give the formulation of the target-percentile risk measure which is time-consistent and hence more suitable in the multi-stage investment context. Finally, we also generalize the value-at-risk and CVaR to multi-stage risk measures based on the theory and structure of the target-percentile risk measure.     

Non-Euler–Lagrangian Pareto-optimality Conditions for Dynamic Multiple Criterion Decision Problems

In this paper the problem of verifying the Pareto-optimality of a given solution to a dynamic multiple-criterion decision (DMCD) problem is investigated. For this purpose, some new conditions are derived for Pareto-optimality of DMCD problems. In the literature, Pareto-optimality is characterized by means of Euler-Lagrangian differential equations. There exist problems in production and inventory control to which these conditions cannot be applied directly (Song 1997). Thus, it is necessary to explore new conditions for Pareto-optimality of DMCD problems. With some mild assumptions on the objective functionals, we develop necessary and/or sufficient conditions for Pareto-optimality in the sprit of optimization theory. Both linear and non-linear cases are considered.