This book examines the heritage of Victor Shklovsky in a variety of disciplines. To achieve this end, Slav N. Gratchev and Howard Mancing draw upon colleagues from eight different countries across the world—the United States, Canada, Russia, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Norway, and China—in order to bring the widest variety of points of view on the subject. Viktor Shklovsky’s Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy is more than just another collection of essays of literary crit...

This book provides a comprehensive examination of the structure of approximate optimal policies in Markov decision processes (MDPs) with finite state spaces, as well as approximate optimal solutions for deterministic discrete-time optimal control problems. At its core, the monograph delves into the turnpike property, a concept introduced by P. Samuelson, which suggests that optimal solutions are largely determined by the objective function, independent of interval length or endpoint condit...

This book considers a class of ergodic finite controllable Markov's chains. The main idea behind the method, described in this book, is to develop the original discrete optimization problems (or game models) in the space of randomized formulations, where the variables stand in for the distributions (mixed strategies or preferences) of the original discrete (pure) strategies in the use. The following suppositions are made: a finite state space, a limited action space, continuity of the prob...

Markov Random Flights is the first systematic presentation of the theory of Markov random flights in the Euclidean spaces of different dimensions. Markov random flights is a stochastic dynamic system subject to the control of an external Poisson process and represented by the stochastic motion of a particle that moves at constant finite speed and changes its direction at random Poisson time instants. The initial (and each new) direction is taken at random according to some...

Probabilistic models are widely used for description and an analysis of various processes in system reliability, risk, queuing, data communication, logistic and storage systems. The book contains various applications of the theory of continuous-time Markov-modulated processes in operation research. All analytical results are illustrated by numerical computations. Used algorithms allow overcoming computation difficulties successfully. For example, a calculation of transient probabilities of...