Article ID: | iaor20053043 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 134 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 183 |
End Page Number: | 199 |
Publication Date: | Feb 2005 |
Journal: | Annals of Operations Research |
Authors: | Shtub Avraham, Golany Boaz, Cohen Izack |
Keywords: | heuristics, simulation |
This paper addresses the problem of loading a finite capacity, stochastic (random) and dynamic multi-project system. The system is controlled by keeping a constant number of projects concurrently in the system. A new approach, based on the Cross-Entropy (CE) method, is proposed to determine optimal loading of the system. Through numerical experiments, we demonstrate the CE method performance and show new insights into its behavior in a noisy system. Particularly, we suggest a trade-off between the convergence time, the number of iterations and the noise level.