Return to: U of M Home

Mechanical Engineering Home > Seminars > Fall 2003

Fall 2003

Applications of Markov Decision Processes to Queueing Control

by

Mark E. Lewis
Assistant Professor,
Industrial and Operations Engineering Department,
University of Michigan

Wednesday, September 24, 2003
3:30-5:00 p.m.
Room 1130 ME
Coffee and cookies will be available at 3:15 p.m. before the seminar

Time permitting, we will discuss three problems in queueing control. The first two consider pricing and admission control as congestion control mechanisms in a non-stationary queueing system. For each fixed time, optimal pricing and admission control strategies are shown to be non-decreasing in the number of customers in the system. This extends well-known stationary results to the non-stationary setting. The third problem is one of dynamic load balancing in a parallel processing system. After insights are drawn from the two-server case, we discuss how these results can be used to develop heuristics for the n-server case.

Professor Mark Lewis received his Ph.D. in 1998 from the Georgia Institute of Technology after being co-advised by Professors Hayriye Ayhan and Robert (Bob) Foley. He then spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Universiy of British Columbia and worked with Professor Martin L. Puterman. Among his awards are an honorable mention for the INFORMS Dantzig Dissertation Award, the Georgia Tech FACES award, and the National Science Foundation's Career Award. His research interests include applications of Markov decision processes. In particular, Professor Lewis has done research on non-stationary queues, parallel processing, inventory/production control, and transportation networks.

Informal Faculty Luncheon: Wednesday,September 24, 2003, 12:00 noon. Meet in 1100 ME and walk to lunch with other faculty. Dr. Lewis will be able to attend.