An application of control theory to a problem in educational planning

The paper treats an example arising from a problem in educational planning. The provision of places in a sector of education to satisfy an unknown social demand is treated as a "dual-control" process. Dynamic programming is used to determine the sequence of decisions which extremizes a performance criterion. Results are obtained for different forms of a priori distributions of the unknown demand. Because answers can be obtained analytically without approximation, the optimum policy can be compared with the nonoptimum policy of optimizing stage by stage. The paper also discusses the effect of the decision maker's a priori knowledge upon the infinite stage process.