Single item stochastic lot sizing problem considering capital flow and business overdraft

This paper introduces capital flow to the single item stochastic lot sizing problem. A retailer can leverage business overdraft to deal with unexpected capital shortage, but needs to pay interest if its available balance goes below zero. A stochastic dynamic programming model maximizing expected final capital increment is formulated to solve the problem to optimality. We then investigate the performance of four controlling policies: ($R, Q$), ($R, S$), ($s, S$) and ($s$, $\overline{Q}$, $S$); for these policies, we adopt simulation-genetic algorithm to obtain approximate values of the controlling parameters. Finally, a simulation-optimization heuristic is also employed to solve this problem. Computational comparisons among these approaches show that policy $(s, S)$ and policy $(s, \overline{Q}, S)$ provide performance close to that of optimal solutions obtained by stochastic dynamic programming, while simulation-optimization heuristic offers advantages in terms of computational efficiency. Our numerical tests also show that capital availability as well as business overdraft interest rate can substantially affect the retailer's optimal lot sizing decisions.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure

Towards Confident Body Sensor Networking

With the recent technology advances of wireless communication and lightweight low-power sensors, Body Sensor Network (BSN) is made possible. More and more researchers are interested in developing numerous novel BSN applications, such as remote health/fitness monitoring, military and sport training, interactive gaming, personal information sharing, and secure authentication. Despite the unstable wireless communication, various confidence requirements are placed on the BSN networking service. This thesis aims to provide Quality of Service (QoS) solutions for BSN communication, in order to achieve the required confidence goals.;We develop communication quality solutions to satisfy confidence requirements from both the communication and application levels, in single and multiple BSNs. First, we build communication QoS, targeting at providing service quality guarantees in terms of throughput and time delay on the communication level. More specifically, considering the heterogeneous BSN platform in a real deployment, we develop a radio-agnostic solution for wireless resource scheduling in the BSN. Second, we provide a QoS solution for both inter- and intra-BSN communications when more than one BSNs are involved. Third, we define application fidelity for two neurometric applications as examples, and bridge a connection between the communication QoS and application QoS

The Process of Lesson Planning

This paper shows how to prepare a lesson plan for an ESL classroom. It is based on the author\u27s personal experience as a beginning teacher. The paper presents an overview and the author\u27s view of the process of lesson planning and discusses the factors which affect teaching. At the end of the paper, sample lesson plans are provided to further illustrate the author\u27s idea

Law of large numbers for branching symmetric Hunt processes with measure-valued branching rates

We establish weak and strong law of large numbers for a class of branching symmetric Hunt processes with the branching rate being a smooth measure with respect to the underlying Hunt process, and the branching mechanism being general and state-dependent. Our work is motivated by recent work on strong law of large numbers for branching symmetric Markov processes by Chen-Shiozawa [J. Funct. Anal., 250, 374--399, 2007] and for branching diffusions by Engl\"ander-Harris-Kyprianou [Ann. Inst. Henri Poincar\'e Probab. Stat., 46, 279--298, 2010]. Our results can be applied to some interesting examples that are covered by neither of these papers