Although selecting the form of an optimal estimator is critical to solving this problem, the real difficulty lies in determining an optimal strategy for sampling from the two populations. The problem of optimal estimation reduces, therefore, to a problem of optimal allocation which can be solved exactly using dynamic programming. We utilize similar programming techniques to evaluate exactly some of the other strategies that have been proposed for this problem. (The term exact is used repeatedly here to stress the fact that none of the computational results depend on simulation studies.)

Keywords: sequential allocation, nonlinear estimation, dynamic programming, reliability, myopic allocation, fixed allocation