9602939 Fernandez This U.S-Mexico award will support Prof. Emmanuel Fernandez of the University of Arizona in a research collaboration with Prof. Rolando Cavazos Cadena of the Universidad Autonoma Agraria in Saltillo, Mexico. The investigators intend to develop a collaborative program that integrates innovative research activities and algorithmic software development in stochastic control. In particular, the collaborators intend to pursue optimal decision and control problems for controlled Markov models. Discrete event stochastic dynamic systems (DESDS) constitute a broad and interdisciplinary area of research at the intersection of systems and control, operations research, and knowledge-based systems. The focus of DESDS research are the complex, man-made systems that form the core of our technological society, for example, telecommunications and computer networks; production and manufacturing systems; and military and service industry logistics. A common feature of many of the problems in the field attempts to obtain rules for operating a system, which optimize an appropriate performance measure, and which explicitly take into account the stochastic and discrete event-driven nature of the problems. The proposed collaboration will bring together experienced researchers with complementary skills: the Mexican investigator is an expert on the mathematical and probabilistic theory of stochastic control and the U.S. investigator will contribute his skills in the engineering and management applications of stochastic control models and techniques, and in software development. ***
