Optimally Controlled Ccd Shift Registers (Optimal Interception On a Recurrent Trajectory)

The question of optimally controlling the shift rate of a CCD-type shift register, when used as a secondary memory device has been treated a few times in the literature. the usual procedure has been to postulate the functional form of the optimal control action, and then evaluate the optimizing parameter under some assumption about the request arrival process. We present a control-theoretic treatment of the problem, derive the form of the optimal policy (which indeed turns out to be nearly identical to the one postulated before) and compute the optimizing parameter for a variety of cases.