ABSTRACT
In many real-world problems, decisions have to be made sequentially at different points in time or at different levels of components, subsystems, or major end items. The army’s acquisition process is an example of a real-world sequential decision process. Since these decisions are made at a number of stages, they are often referred to as multistage decision problems. Dynamic programming (DP) is a mathematical technique that is well suited for this class of problems. This technique was developed by Richard Bellman in the early 1950s. Thus, this methodology is relatively new in the world of mathematics.
