8 research outputs found
Dynamic Product Assembly and Inventory Control for Maximum Profit
We consider a manufacturing plant that purchases raw materials for product
assembly and then sells the final products to customers. There are M types of
raw materials and K types of products, and each product uses a certain subset
of raw materials for assembly. The plant operates in slotted time, and every
slot it makes decisions about re-stocking materials and pricing the existing
products in reaction to (possibly time-varying) material costs and consumer
demands. We develop a dynamic purchasing and pricing policy that yields time
average profit within epsilon of optimality, for any given epsilon>0, with a
worst case storage buffer requirement that is O(1/epsilon). The policy can be
implemented easily for large M, K, yields fast convergence times, and is robust
to non-ergodic system dynamics.Comment: 32 page
Low Power Dynamic Scheduling for Computing Systems
This paper considers energy-aware control for a computing system with two
states: "active" and "idle." In the active state, the controller chooses to
perform a single task using one of multiple task processing modes. The
controller then saves energy by choosing an amount of time for the system to be
idle. These decisions affect processing time, energy expenditure, and an
abstract attribute vector that can be used to model other criteria of interest
(such as processing quality or distortion). The goal is to optimize time
average system performance. Applications of this model include a smart phone
that makes energy-efficient computation and transmission decisions, a computer
that processes tasks subject to rate, quality, and power constraints, and a
smart grid energy manager that allocates resources in reaction to a time
varying energy price. The solution methodology of this paper uses the theory of
optimization for renewal systems developed in our previous work. This paper is
written in tutorial form and develops the main concepts of the theory using
several detailed examples. It also highlights the relationship between online
dynamic optimization and linear fractional programming. Finally, it provides
exercises to help the reader learn the main concepts and apply them to their
own optimizations. This paper is an arxiv technical report, and is a
preliminary version of material that will appear as a book chapter in an
upcoming book on green communications and networking.Comment: 26 pages, 10 figures, single spac
Human Factors in Agile Software Development
Through our four years experiments on students' Scrum based agile software
development (ASD) process, we have gained deep understanding into the human
factors of agile methodology. We designed an agile project management tool -
the HASE collaboration development platform to support more than 400 students
self-organized into 80 teams to practice ASD. In this thesis, Based on our
experiments, simulations and analysis, we contributed a series of solutions and
insights in this researches, including 1) a Goal Net based method to enhance
goal and requirement management for ASD process, 2) a novel Simple Multi-Agent
Real-Time (SMART) approach to enhance intelligent task allocation for ASD
process, 3) a Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) based method to enhance emotion and
morale management for ASD process, 4) the first large scale in-depth empirical
insights on human factors in ASD process which have not yet been well studied
by existing research, and 5) the first to identify ASD process as a
human-computation system that exploit human efforts to perform tasks that
computers are not good at solving. On the other hand, computers can assist
human decision making in the ASD process.Comment: Book Draf
Stock Market Trading Via Stochastic Network Optimization
We consider the problem of dynamic buying and selling of shares from a collection of stocks with random price fluctuations. To limit investment risk, we place an upper bound on the total number of shares kept at any time. Assuming that prices evolve according to an ergodic process with a mild decaying memory property, and assuming constraints on the total number of shares that can be bought and sold at any time, we develop a trading policy that comes arbitrarily close to achieving the profit of an ideal policy that has perfect knowledge of future events. Proximity to the optimal profit comes with a corresponding tradeoff in the maximum required stock level and in the timescales associated with convergence. We then consider arbitrary (possibly non-ergodic) price processes, and show that the same algorithm comes close to the profit of a frame based policy that can look a fixed number of slots into the future. Our analysis uses techniques of Lyapunov Optimization that we originally developed for stochastic network optimization problems.