Multi-period pricing for perishable products : uncertainty and competition

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Computation for Design and Optimization Program, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 107-109).The pricing problem in a multi-period setting is a challenging problem and has attracted much attention in recent years. In this thesis, we consider a monopoly and an oligopoly pricing problem. In the latter, several sellers simultaneously seek an optimal pricing policy for their products. The products are assumed to be differentiated and substitutable. Each seller has the option to set prices for her products at each time period, and her goal is to find a pricing policy that will yield the maximum overall profit. Each seller has a fixed initial inventory of each product to be allocated over the entire time horizon and does not have the option to produce additional inventory between periods. There are no holding costs or back-order costs. In addition, the products are perishable and have no salvage costs. This means that at the end of the entire time horizon, any remaining products will be worthless. The demand function each seller faces for each product is uncertain and is affected by both the prices at the current period and past pricing history for her and her competitors. In this thesis, we address both the uncertain and the competitive aspect of the problem. First, we study the uncertain aspect of the problem in a simplified setting, where there is only one seller and two periods in the model.(cont.) We use ideas of robust optimization, adjustable robust optimization, dynamic programming and stochastic optimization to find adaptable closed loop pricing policies. Theoretical and numerical results show how the budget of uncertainty, the presence of a reference price, delayed resource allocation, and feedback control affect the quality of the pricing policies. Second, we extend the model to a multi-period setting, where the computation becomes a major issue. We use a delayed constraint generation method to significantly increase the size of the problem that our models can handle. Finally, we consider the pricing problem in an oligopoly setting. We show the existence of solution for both the best response subproblem and the market equilibrium problem for all of the models we discuss in the thesis. We also consider an iterative learning algorithm and illustrate through simulations that an equilibrium pricing policy can be computed for all of our models.by Lei Zhang.S.M

Very-high-frequency low-voltage power delivery

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 217-223).Power conversion for the myriad low-voltage electronic circuits in use today, including portable electronic devices, digital electronics, sensors and communication circuits, is becoming increasingly challenging due to the desire for lower voltages, higher conversion ratios and higher bandwidth. Future computation systems also pose a major challenge in energy delivery that is difficult to meet with existing devices and design strategies. To reduce interconnect bottlenecks and enable more flexible energy utilization, it is desired to deliver power across interconnects at high voltage and low current with on- or over-die transformation to low voltage and high current, while providing localized voltage regulation in numerous zones. This thesis introduces elements for hybrid GaN-Si dc-de power converters operating at very high frequencies (VHF, 30-300 MHz) for low-voltage applications. Contributions include development of a new VHF frequency multiplier inverter suitable for step-down power conversion, and a Si CMOS switched-capacitor step-down rectifier. These are applied to develop a prototype GaN-Si hybrid dc-dc converter operating at 50 MHz. Additionally, this thesis exploits these elements to propose an ac power delivery architecture for low-voltage electronics in which power is delivered across the interconnect to the load at VHF ac, with local on-die transformation and rectification to dc. With the proposed technologies and emerging passives, it is predicted that the ac power delivery system can achieve over 90 % efficiency with greater than 1 W/mm² power density and 5:1 voltage conversion ratio. A prototype system has been designed and fabricated using a TSMC 0.25 [mu]m CMOS process to validate the concept. It operates at 50 MHz with output power of 4 W. The prototype converter has 8:1 voltage conversion ratio with input voltage of 20 V and output voltage of 2.5 V. To the author's best knowledge, this is the first ac power delivery architecture for low-voltage electronics ever built and tested.by Wei Li.Ph.D

A boundary element method with surface conductive absorbers for 3-D analysis of nanophotonics

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 127-132).Fast surface integral equation (SIE) solvers seem to be ideal approaches for simulating 3-D nanophotonic devices, as these devices generate fields both in an interior channel and in the infinite exterior domain. However, many devices of interest, such as optical couplers, have channels that cannot be terminated without generating reflections. Generating absorbers for these channels is a new problem for SIE methods, as the methods were initially developed for problems with finite surfaces. In this thesis, we show that the obvious approach for eliminating reflections, making the channel mildly conductive outside the domain of interest, is inaccurate. We propose a new method in which the absorber has gradually increasing surface conductivity; such an absorber can be easily incorporated in fast integral equation solvers. We present two types of PMCHW-based formulations to incorporate the surface conductivity into the SIE method. The accuracy of the two-type formulations are examined and discussed using an example of the scattering of a Mie sphere with surface conductivities. Moreover, we implement two different FFT-accelerated algorithms for the periodic non-absorbing region and the non-periodic absorbing region. In addition, we use perturbation theory and Poynting's theorem, respectively, to calculate the field decay rate due to the surface conductivity. We show a saturation phenomenon when the electrical surface conductivity is large. However, we show that the saturation is not a problem for the surface absorber since the absorber typically operates in a small surface conductivity regime. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the surface conductive absorber by truncating a rectangular waveguide channel. Numerical results show that this new method is orders of magnitude more effective than a volume absorber. We also show that the transition reflection decreases in a power law with increasing the absorber length. We further apply the surface conductive absorber to terminate a waveguide with period-a sinusoidally corrugated sidewalls. We show that a surface absorber that can perform well when the periodic waveguide system is excited with a large group-velocity mode may fail when excited with a smaller group-velocity mode, and give an asymptotic relation between the surface absorber length, transition reflections and group velocity. Numerical results are given to validate the asymptotic prediction.by Lei Zhang.Ph.D

Digital assistance design for analog systems : digital baseband for outphasing power amplifiers

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-150).Digital assistance is among many aspects that can be leveraged to help analog/mixed-signal designers keep up with the technology scaling. It usually takes the form of predistorter or compensator in an analog/mixed-signal system and helps compensate the nonidealities in the system. Digital assistance takes advantage of the process scaling with faster speed and a higher level of integration. When a digital system is co-optimized with system modeling techniques, digital assistance usually becomes a key enabling block for the high performance of the overall system. This thesis presents the design of digital assistances through the digital baseband design for outphasing power amplifiers. In the digital baseband design, this thesis conveys two major points: the importance of the use of the reduced-complexity system modeling techniques, and the communications between hardware design and system modeling. These points greatly help the success in the design of the energy-efficient baseband. The first part of the baseband design is to realize the nonlinear signal processing unit required by the modulation scheme. Conventional approaches of implementing this functionality do not scale well to meet the throughput, area and energy-efficiency targets. We propose a novel fixed-point piece-wise linear approximation technique for the nonlinear function computations involved in the signal processing unit. The new technique allows us to achieve an energy and area-efficient design with a throughput of 3.4Gsamples/s. Compared to the projected previous designs, our design shows 2x improvement in energy-efficiency and 25x in area-efficiency. The second part of the baseband design devotes to the nonlinear compensator design, aiming to improve the linearity performance of the outphasing power amplifier. We first explore the feasibility of a working compensator by use of an off-line iterative solving scheme. With the confirmation that a compensator does exist, we analyze the structure of the nonlinear baseband-equivalent PA system and create a dynamical real-time compensator model. The resulting compensator provides the overall PA system with around 10dB improvement in ACPR and up to 2.5% in EVM.by Yan Li.Ph.D

Feedback message passing for inference in Gaussian graphical models

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2010.Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-92).For Gaussian graphical models with cycles, loopy belief propagation often performs reasonably well, but its convergence is not guaranteed and the computation of variances is generally incorrect. In this paper, we identify a set of special vertices called a feedback vertex set whose removal results in a cycle-free graph. We propose a feedback message passing algorithm in which non-feedback nodes send out one set of messages while the feedback nodes use a different message update scheme. Exact inference results can be obtained in O(k²n), where k is the number of feedback nodes and n is the total number of nodes. For graphs with large feedback vertex sets, we describe a tractable approximate feedback message passing algorithm. Experimental results show that this procedure converges more often, faster, and provides better results than loopy belief propagation.by Ying Liu.S.M

Design and optimization of automotive power electronics utilizing FITMOS MOSFET technology

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 178-179).Power electronics are essential to many automotive applications, and their importance continues to grow as more vehicle functions incorporate electronic controls. MOSFETs are key elements in automotive power electronic circuits and MOSFET characteristics can strongly affect circuit size, cost and performance. Advances in MOSFET technology are thus of great importance to the advancement of automotive electronics. The new Floating Island and Thick Bottom Oxide Trench Gate MOSFET (FITMOS) developed at Toyota has tremendous potential for automobile applications due to its reduced on-resistance, improved temperature coefficient of resistance and reduced gate charge and input capacitance. In this research, we investigated the detailed characteristics of FITMOS devices, developed the SPICE model for simulation and explored their applications in the design of automotive power electronics. Specifically, we identified how to best utilize the FITMOS characteristics to benefit power circuit design and on quantifying the gains that can be achieved through their use. We also expose a previously unrecognized phenomenon in the FITMOS MOSFET. In particular, we show that the on-state resistance of the device depends on both frequency and on peak di/dt at a given frequency. This dynamic on resistance variation can have a significant application impact.by Wei Li.S.M

Antibiotics induce polarization of pleural macrophages to M2-like phenotype in patients with tuberculous pleuritis

Pleural macrophages play critical roles in pathogenesis of tuberculous pleuritis, but very little is known about their response to anti-tuberculosis antibiotics treatment. Here, we examined whether and how pleural macrophages change in phenotype, transcription and function following antibiotics treatment in patients with tuberculous pleuritis. Results show pro-inflammatory cytokines were down-regulated significantly post antibiotic treatment in the pleural effusions and pleural macrophages up-regulated markers characteristic of M2 macrophages such as CD163 and CD206. Differential expression analysis of transcriptomes from four paired samples before and after treatment identified 230 treatment-specific responsive genes in pleural macrophages. Functional analysis identified interferon-related pathway to be the most responsive genes and further confirmed macrophage polarization to M2-like phenotype. We further demonstrate that expression of a significant fraction of responsive genes was modulated directly by antibiotics in pleural macrophages in vitro. Our results conclude that pleural macrophages polarize from M1-like to M2-like phenotype within a mean of 3.5 days post antibiotics treatment, which is dependent on both pleural cytokine environment and direct modulatory effects of antibiotics. The treatment-specific genes could be used to study the roles of pleural macrophages in the pathogenesis of tuberculous pleuritis and to monitor the response to antibiotics treatment

Neural network fusion strategies for identifying breast masses

In this work, we introduce the perceptron average neural network fusion strategy and implemented a number of other fusion strategies to identify breast masses in mammograms as malignant or benign with both balanced and imbalanced input features. We numerically compare various fixed and trained fusion rules, i.e., the majority vote, simple average, weighted average, and perceptron average, when applying them to a binary statistical pattern recognition problem. To judge from the experimental results, the weighted average approach outperforms the other fusion strategies with balanced input features, while the perceptron average is superior and achieves the goals with lowest standard deviation with imbalanced ensembles. We concretely analyze the results of above fusion strategies, state the advantages of fusing the component networks, and provide our particular broad sense perspective about information fusion in neural networks

Terahertz laser frequency combs : devices and applications

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2019Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 153-162).In recent years, there has been growing interest in chip-scale frequency combs, such as micro-resonator combs and semiconductor mode-locked sources. From the mid-infrared to the terahertz regime, it has been shown that quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) are capable of forming a frequency comb state where dispersed cavity modes of the Fabry-Perot cavity are synchronized by third order nonlinearity. With proper dispersion engineering, we have shown that it is possible to create QCL frequency combs at terahertz wavelengths, which possess broadband coverage in a compact package. These QCL combs are particularly attractive as sources for high-sensitivity laser spectroscopy: by using a dual-comb technique, it is possible to perform broadband spectroscopy only using chip-scale components, making it an intriguing candidate for spectroscopic applications in the open field.Moreover, due to the semi-continuous nature of the temporal output from such combs, tracking the instantaneous phase and timing signals of the dual-comb waveform in the time domain becomes feasible. This enables a computational coherent averaging scheme of the dual-comb signal even without external reference. The first part of this thesis describes the development for better THz laser frequency combs. To realize all expectations in the spectroscopy applications using such devices, three main aspects of improvement are highly desired. First, the laser device should have a robust comb state that ideally can operate from device's threshold current, I[subscript th], to its maximum current, I[subscript m]. In addition, the comb states should have a broad spectral coverage: its bandwidth should cover at least an octave span to stabilize its carrier offset.Furthermore, the comb state should have a flexible tunability that allows tuning across the entire free spectral range for gapless sensing. All listed aspects are investigated during the course of this thesis and as a result, a THz QCL device featuring comb state performance over the entire lasing bias range has been demonstrated. Meanwhile, we show that, by compensating cavity dispersion up to higher orders, the comb bandwidth from the full dispersion compensated devices can reach 80 % of its gain bandwidth. One common method to achieve very broadband coverage relies on using the heterogeneous gain media. This comes at the cost of reduced peak gain and hampered temperature performance. Also, engineering the dispersion of such a broadband gain medium becomes extremely challenging, which might not lead to a broader comb coverage albeit its broader gain. However, a unique feature of the metal-metal waveguide is that it is completely agnostic about its bonded gain media.Therefore, it is possible to bond multiple gain media together onto the same chip. The lateral heterogeneous integration scheme is investigated as an alternative method to expand the comb's spectral coverage. We show that using this strategy we can couple the output of combs at vastly different wavelengths without the trade-off with its temperature performance, yet maintain a compact package. Dual-comb spectroscopy allows for high-resolution spectra to be measured over broad bandwidth, but in order to achieve high resolution and acquire low-uncertainty spectroscopic information, the capability for coherent averaging is of the most importance. An essential requirement for coherent averaging is the availability of a phase reference. Usually, this means that the combs' phase and timing errors must be measured and either minimized by stabilization or removed by correction.These hardware-based solutions often require extra electronic or optical components, thus complicates the overall system and further limits the technique's applicability. We demonstrate that it is possible to extract the phase and timing signals of a multiheterodyne spectrum in a completely computational fashion without any extra measurements, which can potentially simplify any dual-comb system. Other works in this thesis include the first proof-of-principle demonstration of THz dual-comb spectroscopy using laser frequency combs, THz hyper-spectral imaging for pharmaceutical compound identification, and the exploratory work on the development of the germanium-on-gallium arsenide platform, a passive on-chip platform showing potential to bridge the THz and mid-infrared regime.by Yang Yang.Ph. D.Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Scienc