IE-Opim Seminar

IE-OPIM Seminar, Wednesday Oct 1, 13.40-14.30 FENS G032

Speaker: Bora Çekyay 

Abstract:

The uniformization technique is a widely used method in establishing
 the existence of optimal policies with certain monotonicity
properties. This technique converts a continuous Markov decision
process (MDP) into an equivalent discrete-time Markov decision
process by defining some bogus jumps. In this study, a new device,
called customization, is proposed, which can be used to convert a
given continuous Markov decision process into an equivalent one
which is more suitable to show the existence of certain monotonicity
 properties of optimal policies. The customization technique uses
the  bogus jump idea to establish the equivalence just like the
uniformization technique. However, it gives a greater flexibility in
 choosing the transition rates of the new Markov decision process.
This flexibility can be very useful in proving some results where
the uniformization is not so helpful. A complex replacement problem
is analyzed to demonstrate the superiority of the customization
technique. This replacement problem considers the maintenance of a
mission-based system that is designed to perform missions consisting
 of a random sequence of phases or stages with random durations. A
finite state Markov process describes the mission process. The age
or deterioration process of the system is described by another
finite state Markov process whose generator depends on the phases of
 the mission.

Bio:

Bora Çekyay was born in İstanbul, Turkey, on April 25, 1978. He received his
BS, and MS degrees in industrial engineering from İstanbul Technical University
in 2003, and 2005 respectively; and a Ph.D. degree in industrial engineering
and operations management from Koç University in 2009. He has been working
as an Assistant Professor of industrial engineering at Doğuş University since
2011. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Desautels Faculty
of Management, McGill University, Canada. His current research interests include
system reliability analysis of complex systems, maintenance planning and
optimization, and transportation of dangerous goods. He has published articles
in journals, including European Journal of Operational Research, IIE
 Transactions, IEEE Transactions on Reliability, and Annals of
Operations Research.