Matching Items (3)
Description
TaxiWorld is a Matlab simulation of a city with a fleet of taxis which operate within it, with the goal of transporting passengers to their destinations. The size of the city, as well as the number of available taxis and the frequency and general locations of fare appearances can all be set on a scenario-by-scenario basis. The taxis must attempt to service the fares as quickly as possible, by picking each one up and carrying it to its drop-off location. The TaxiWorld scenario is formally modeled using both Decentralized Partially-Observable Markov Decision Processes (Dec-POMDPs) and Multi-agent Markov Decision Processes (MMDPs). The purpose of developing formal models is to learn how to build and use formal Markov models, such as can be given to planners to solve for optimal policies in problem domains. However, finding optimal solutions for Dec-POMDPs is NEXP-Complete, so an empirical algorithm was also developed as an improvement to the method already in use on the simulator, and the methods were compared in identical scenarios to determine which is more effective. The empirical method is of course not optimal - rather, it attempts to simply account for some of the most important factors to achieve an acceptable level of effectiveness while still retaining a reasonable level of computational complexity for online solving.
ContributorsWhite, Christopher (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Gupta, Sandeep (Committee member) / Varsamopoulos, Georgios (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Today's competitive markets force companies to constantly engage in the complex task of managing their demand. In make-to-order manufacturing or service systems, the demand of a product is shaped by price and lead times, where high price and lead time quotes ensure profitability for supplier, but discourage the customers from placing orders. Low price and lead times, on the other hand, generally result in high demand, but do not necessarily ensure profitability. The price and lead time quotation problem considers the trade-off between offering high and low prices and lead times. The recent practices in make-to- order manufacturing companies reveal the importance of dynamic quotation strategies, under which the prices and lead time quotes flexibly change depending on the status of the system. In this dissertation, the objective is to model a make-to-order manufacturing system and explore various aspects of dynamic quotation strategies such as the behavior of optimal price and lead time decisions, the impact of customer preferences on optimal decisions, the benefits of employing dynamic quotation in comparison to simpler quotation strategies, and the benefits of coordinating price and lead time decisions. I first consider a manufacturer that receives demand from spot purchasers (who are quoted dynamic price and lead times), as well as from contract customers who have agree- ments with the manufacturer with fixed price and lead time terms. I analyze how customer preferences affect the optimal price and lead time decisions, the benefits of dynamic quo- tation, and the optimal mix of spot purchaser and contract customers. These analyses necessitate the computation of expected tardiness of customer orders at the moment cus- tomer enters the system. Hence, in the second part of the dissertation, I develop method- ologies to compute the expected tardiness in multi-class priority queues. For the trivial single class case, a closed formulation is obtained. For the more complex multi-class case, numerical inverse Laplace transformation algorithms are developed. In the last part of the dissertation, I model a decentralized system with two components. Marketing department determines the price quotes with the objective of maximizing revenues, and manufacturing department determines the lead time quotes to minimize lateness costs. I discuss the ben- efits of coordinating price and lead time decisions, and develop an incentivization scheme to reduce the negative impacts of lack of coordination.
ContributorsHafizoglu, Ahmet Baykal (Author) / Gel, Esma S (Thesis advisor) / Villalobos, Jesus R (Committee member) / Mirchandani, Pitu (Committee member) / Keskinocak, Pinar (Committee member) / Runger, George C. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
The seminal work of Lasry and Lion showed the existence of Nash equilibria in thecontinuum limit of agents who try to optimize their own utility functions. However,
a lot of work in this region is predicated on strong assumptions on the asymptotic
independence of the agents and their homogeneity. This work explores the existence
of Equilibria under the limit for Markov Decision Processes for density dependent
continuous time Markov chains. Under suitable conditions it is possible to show
that the empirical measure of the agents converges in finite time to a time invariant
distribution which makes the solution of the MDP tractable. This key step allows
one to show not only the existence of equilibria for these MDPs without asymptotic
independence but also a tractable means to find said equilibria. Finally, this work
shows that a fixed point does exist in the in finite state limit. However, to show that
such a limit is indeed a Nash equilibrium remains an open problem.
ContributorsNarasimha, Dheeraj (Author) / Ying, Lei (Thesis advisor) / Dasarathy, Gautam (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Yongmin (Committee member) / Shakkottai, Srinivas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021