Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Recent Advances In Accumulating Priority Queues, Na Li

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis extends the theory underlying the Accumulating Priority Queue (APQ) in three directions. In the first, we present a multi-class multi-server accumulating priority queue with Poisson arrivals and heterogeneous services. The waiting time distributions for different classes have been derived. A conservation law for systems with heterogeneous servers has been studied. We also investigate an optimization problem to find the optimal level of heterogeneity in the multi-server system. Numerical investigations through simulation are carried out to validate the model.

We next focus on a queueing system with Poisson arrivals, generally distributed service times and nonlinear priority accumulation functions. We …

Developing An Optimal Model For Infant Home Visitation, Isaac Atuahene

Doctoral Dissertations

The United States, Great Britain, Denmark, Canada and many other countries have accepted home visitation (HV) as a promising strategy for interventions for infants after births and for their mothers. Prior HV studies have focused on theoretical foundations, evaluations of programs, cost/benefit analysis and cost estimation by using hospital/payer/insurance data to prove its effectiveness and high cost. As governments and private organizations continue to fund HVs, it is an opportune time to develop and formulate operations research (OR) models of HV coverage, quality and cost so they might be used in program implementation as done for adult home healthcare (HHC) …

Stochastic Optimization Via Forward Slice, Bob A. Salim, Lurdes Y. T. Inoue

UW Biostatistics Working Paper Series

Optimization consists of maximizing or minimizing a real-valued objective function. In many problems, the objective function may not yield closed-form solutions. Over many decades, optimization methods, both deterministic and stochastic, have been developed to provide solutions to these problems. However, some common limitations of these methods are the sensitivity to the initial value and that often current methods only find a local (non-global) extremum. In this article, we propose an alternative stochastic optimization method, which we call "Forward Slice", and assess its performance relative to available optimization methods.

Principal Component Analysis And Optimization: A Tutorial, Robert Reris, J. Paul Brooks

Statistical Sciences and Operations Research Publications

No abstract provided.