Discrete Event Control Of Stochastic Networks Multimodularity And Regularity

Opening new directions in research in both discrete event dynamic systems as well as in stochastic control, this volume focuses on a wide class of control and of optimization problems over sequences of integer numbers. This is a counterpart of convex optimization in the setting of discrete optimization. The theory developed is applied to the control of stochastic discrete-event dynamic systems. Some applications are admission, routing, service allocation and vacation control in queuing networks. Pure and applied mathematicians will enjoy reading the book since it brings together many disciplines in mathematics: combinatorics, stochastic processes, stochastic control and optimization, discrete event dynamic systems, algebra.

From foundations to state-of-the-art; the tools and philosophy you need to build network models.

This book is dedicated to Jinhua Cao on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Jinhua Cao is one of the most famous reliability theorists. His main contributions include: published over 100 influential scientific papers; published an interesting reliability book in Chinese in 1986, which has greatly influenced the reliability of education, academic research and engineering applications in China; initiated and organized Reliability Professional Society of China (the first part of Operations Research Society of China) since 1981. The high admiration that Professor Cao enjoys in the reliability community all over the world was witnessed by the enthusiastic response of each contributor in this book. The contributors are leading researchers with diverse research perspectives. The research areas of the book iclude a broad range of topics related to reliability models, queueing theory, manufacturing systems, supply chain finance, risk management, Markov decision processes, blockchain and so forth. The book consists of a brief Preface describing the main achievements of Professor Cao; followed by congratulations from Professors Way Kuo and Wei Wayne Li, and by Operations Research Society of China, and Reliability Professional Society of China; and further followed by 25 articles roughly grouped together. Most of the articles are written in a style understandable to a wide audience. This book is useful to anyone interested in recent developments in reliability, network security, system safety, and their stochastic modeling and analysis.

Wireless video communications encompass a broad range of issues and opportunities that serve as the catalyst for technical innovations. To disseminate the most recent advances in this challenging yet exciting field, Advanced Video Communications over Wireless Networks provides an in-depth look at the fundamentals, recent technical achievements, challenges, and emerging trends in mobile and wireless video communications. The editors have carefully selected a panel of researchers with expertise in diverse aspects of wireless video communication to cover a wide spectrum of topics, including the underlying theoretical fundamentals associated with wireless video communications, the transmission schemes tailored to mobile and wireless networks, quality metrics, the architectures of practical systems, as well as some novel directions. They address future directions, including Quality-of-Experience in wireless video communications, video communications over future networks, and 3D video communications. The book presents a collection of tutorials, surveys, and original contributions, providing an up-to-date, accessible reference for further development of research and applications in mobile and wireless video communication systems. The range of coverage and depth of expertise make this book the go-to resource for facing current and future challenges in this field.

The goal of this book is to provide an approach to the corresponding geometric theory of nonautonomous discrete dynamical systems in infinite-dimensional spaces by virtue of 2-parameter semigroups (processes).

This fundamental exposition of queueing theory, written by leading researchers, answers the need for a mathematically sound reference work on the subject and has become the standard reference. The thoroughly revised second edition contains a substantial number of exercises and their solutions, which makes the book suitable as a textbook.

Monotonicity in Markov Reward and Decision Chains: Theory and Applications focuses on monotonicity results for dynamic systems that take values in the natural numbers or in more-dimensional lattices. The results are mostly formulated in terms of controlled queueing systems, but there are also applications to maintenance systems, revenue management, and so forth. The focus is on results that are obtained by inductively proving properties of the dynamic programming value function. A framework is provided for using this method that unifies results obtained for different models. The author also provides a comprehensive overview of the results that can be obtained through it, in which he discusses not only (partial) characterizations of optimal policies but also applications of monotonicity to optimization problems and the comparison of systems. Monotonicity in Markov Reward and Decision Chains: Theory and Applications is an invaluable resource for anyone planning or conducting research in this particular area. The essentials of the topic are presented in an accessible manner and an extensive bibliography guides towards further reading.