scholarly journals Development of a Shipment Policy for Collection Centers

Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 1385
Author(s):  
Irais Mora-Ochomogo ◽  
Marco Serrato ◽  
Jaime Mora-Vargas ◽  
Raha Akhavan-Tabatabaei

Natural disasters represent a latent threat for every country in the world. Due to climate change and other factors, statistics show that they continue to be on the rise. This situation presents a challenge for the communities and the humanitarian organizations to be better prepared and react faster to natural disasters. In some countries, in-kind donations represent a high percentage of the supply for the operations, which presents additional challenges. This research proposes a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model to resemble operations in collection centers, where in-kind donations are received, sorted, packed, and sent to the affected areas. The decision addressed is when to send a shipment considering the uncertainty of the donations’ supply and the demand, as well as the logistics costs and the penalty of unsatisfied demand. As a result of the MDP a Monotone Optimal Non-Decreasing Policy (MONDP) is proposed, which provides valuable insights for decision-makers within this field. Moreover, the necessary conditions to prove the existence of such MONDP are presented.

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yayun Fan ◽  
Cheng Li ◽  
Yan Hu

Customer is the source of business income, a stable customer base is the guarantee of enterprise survival and development of enterprises by using Markov decision process, decision-makers in the new decision point in time, to the latest state of observation system and adopt an original decision, decided in a well-posed option set an action sequence, and then choose to create value and total revenue in this sequence the most significant behavior, obtain the best marketing strategy, formulate relevant enterprise actual customer, dynamic programming model.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 190
Author(s):  
Wu Ouyang ◽  
Zhigang Chen ◽  
Jia Wu ◽  
Genghua Yu ◽  
Heng Zhang

As transportation becomes more convenient and efficient, users move faster and faster. When a user leaves the service range of the original edge server, the original edge server needs to migrate the tasks offloaded by the user to other edge servers. An effective task migration strategy needs to fully consider the location of users, the load status of edge servers, and energy consumption, which make designing an effective task migration strategy a challenge. In this paper, we innovatively proposed a mobile edge computing (MEC) system architecture consisting of multiple smart mobile devices (SMDs), multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), and a base station (BS). Moreover, we establish the model of the Markov decision process with unknown rewards (MDPUR) based on the traditional Markov decision process (MDP), which comprehensively considers the three aspects of the migration distance, the residual energy status of the UAVs, and the load status of the UAVs. Based on the MDPUR model, we propose a advantage-based value iteration (ABVI) algorithm to obtain the effective task migration strategy, which can help the UAV group to achieve load balancing and reduce the total energy consumption of the UAV group under the premise of ensuring user service quality. Finally, the results of simulation experiments show that the ABVI algorithm is effective. In particular, the ABVI algorithm has better performance than the traditional value iterative algorithm. And in a dynamic environment, the ABVI algorithm is also very robust.


Author(s):  
Mali‘o Kodis ◽  
Marci Bortman ◽  
Sarah Newkirk

AbstractAs climate change accelerates the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, damage to public and private property is also increasing, putting exorbitant strain on governments and communities. Societies across the world are working to adapt to climate change, but climate adaptation is currently inadequate to meet the needs of the people left increasingly vulnerable and the places that risk being irreversibly changed or destroyed. One tactic of climate adaptation is strategic retreat, sometimes referred to as managed retreat. Strategic retreat is the process by which the government or another entity purchases (buys out) developed properties that are at risk of destruction or have been destroyed by natural disasters. The structure is most often demolished, and the land is placed under a permanent easement to prevent future development. What happens next is dependent on the entities involved in the buyouts, and can range from derelict, vacant lots to full restoration of ecosystems and their abilities to mitigate flood damage. Sometimes recreational amenities, such as trails or park infrastructure, are prioritized and funded as well. Conservation organizations can leverage their expertise in conservation planning, land acquisition and restoration, policy advocacy, and partnership development to improve the implementation of strategic retreat so that nature and people can thrive in the long term. In this policy paper, we review ways that conservation organizations have and can continue to engage in buyout processes to ensure positive outcomes for communities and nature. Conservation organizations must also evolve their approaches to climate adaptation to integrate equity and redress historical injustices in land use, and contribute towards improving strategic retreat for a more just and resilient future across disaster-prone communities. This work focuses on the context of disasters and climate adaptation in the USA, though many of the principles presented are applicable around the world.


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