Operations Research articles from January 2006

Operations Research archives from January 2006

In this issue.(patient satisfaction)
January 1, 2006... Using Expensive Hospital Imaging Equipment More Efficiently As health care costs continue to grow and patient satisfaction becomes a more critical factor in an increasingly competitive environment, hospitals, which account for over 30% of...

From the editor.
January 1, 2006... The introduction of a new editorial board is a unique opportunity to evaluate the reputation, stature, and health of the journal. It is also an opportunity to examine its mission, scope, and coverage areas, the types of papers submitted and...

Computing and Information Technologies.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2006... The area of Computing and Information Technologies represents a repositioning and broadening of the Computing and Decision Technology area that has long served as the journal's interface with the computer science community. Recognizing that...

Decision Analysis.
January 1, 2006... The Decision Analysis area will publish papers that extend, unify, or creatively apply the concepts of decision analysis to enrich our understanding of how to make better decisions. Such papers may include new contributions to the fundamental...

Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources.
January 1, 2006... The focus of the Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources area is upon the planning and control of systems involving the production, transformation or use of energy, land, mineral, water, and air resources. Problems arising in these domains...

Financial Engineering.
January 1, 2006... Financial engineering employs quantitative techniques to further our understanding and use of financial markets, instruments, and strategies. The past three decades have witnessed an explosive growth in this area, spurred by advances in...

Manufacturing, Service, and Supply Chain Operations.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2006... The Manufacturing, Service, and Supply Chain Operations area encompasses research on the design, planning, control, and improvement of manufacturing, service, and distribution operations. Within manufacturing, topics include the planning of...

Marketing science.
January 1, 2006... The marketing science department at Operations Research will publish papers that use applied operations research methods to address marketing topics. The range of relevant topics available is very large. They include strategic issues related to...

Military and Homeland Security (M & HLS).
January 1, 2006... The Military area has been expanded to include papers on homeland security and related problems. Accordingly, the name of this area has been changed to Military and Homeland Security (M & HLS). The area seeks papers that present original and...

Optimization.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2006... Since the early days of OR, optimization has been one of the foundations of this discipline. Over the years, optimization models and methods have grown in their ability to handle a wide variety of OR problems. Operations Research is committed...

OR Forum.(operations research)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2006... The OR Forum area invites work that challenges the reader to consider and evaluate the status of past, present, or future prospects and challenges within the field of operations research. Possible submissions include critical reviews of...

OR Practice.(operations research)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2006... The OR Practice area publishes papers that report on outstanding applications of operations research to real problems. The intent of the area is to attract and highlight innovative examples of applied operations research that are of interest to...

Policy Modeling and Public Sector OR.(operations research)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2006... The Policy Modeling and Public Sector OR area seeks papers that creatively apply operations research methods to important policy problems in the public sector. Especially welcomed are manuscripts that utilize data to develop original models...

Revenue Management.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2006... The Revenue Management area encompasses all work related to operational pricing and demand management, broadly defined. This includes traditional problems in the field such as capacity allocation, overbooking, and dynamic pricing, as well as...

Simulation.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2006... Simulation has evolved into a mature discipline that is now one of the most widely used techniques in operations research. The Simulation area supports the field's continuing growth by publishing significant work in simulation modeling,...

Stochastic Models.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2006... The Stochastic Models area is concerned with systems where stochastic variability plays a central role. The area strives to publish papers that propose models, perform analysis, or develop analytical, computational, or statistical methods for...

Telecommunications and Networking.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2006... The planning and decision challenges facing the telecommunications industry have long provided fertile ground for operations researchers, resulting in many seminal contributions to both theory and practice. Today, as economies and societies...

Transportation.
January 1, 2006... The Transportation area of Operations Research seeks papers that take a scientific approach to the analysis of transportation systems. All modes of transportation are of interest as are all aspects of transportation analysis including design,...

Managing patient service in a diagnostic medical facility.
January 1, 2006... Hospital diagnostic facilities, such as magnetic resonance imaging centers, typically provide service to several diverse patient groups: outpatients, who are scheduled in advance; inpatients, whose demands are generated randomly during the day;...

Increasing risk and increasing informativeness: equivalence theorems.
January 1, 2006... When considering problems of sequential decision making under uncertainty, two of the most interesting questions are: How does the value of the optimal decision variable change with an increase in risk? How does the value of the optimal...

Fluid models for multiserver queues with abandonments.
January 1, 2006... Deterministic fluid models are developed to provide simple first-order performance descriptions for multiserver queues with abandonment under heavy loads. Motivated by telephone call centers, the focus is on multiserver queues with a large...

A stochastic programming approach to power portfolio optimization.
January 1, 2006... We consider a power portfolio optimization model that is intended as a decision aid for scheduling and hedging (DASH) in the wholesale power market. Our multiscale model integrates the unit commitment model with financial decision making by...

Approximation algorithms for problems combining facility location and network design.
January 1, 2006... We present approximation algorithms for integrated logistics problems that combine elements of facility location and transport network design. We first study the problem where opening facilities incurs opening costs and transportation from the...

A nonparametric approach to multiproduct pricing.
January 1, 2006... Developed by General Motors (GM), the Auto Choice Advisor website (http://www.autochoiceadvisor.com) recommends vehicles to consumers based on their requirements and budget constraints. Through the website, GM has access to large quantities of...

Fine-tuning of algorithms using fractional experimental designs and local search.
January 1, 2006... Researchers and practitioners frequently spend more time fine-tuning algorithms than designing and implementing them. This is particularly true when developing heuristics and metaheuristics, where the "right" choice of values for search...

Discrete optimization via simulation using COMPASS.
January 1, 2006... We propose an optimization-via-simulation algorithm, called COMPASS, for use when the performance measure is estimated via a stochastic, discrete-event simulation, and the decision variables are integer ordered. We prove that COMPASS converges...

A branch-and-cut algorithm for the multiple depot vehicle scheduling problem.
January 1, 2006... We consider the multiple depot vehicle scheduling problem (MDVSP) and propose a branch-and-bound algorithm for solving it that combines column generation, variable fixing, and cutting planes. We show that the solutions of the linear relaxation...

A robust optimization approach to inventory theory.
January 1, 2006... We propose a general methodology based on robust optimization to address the problem of optimally controlling a supply chain subject to stochastic demand in discrete time. This problem has been studied in the past using dynamic programming,...

Dynamic pricing through discounts for optimizing multiple-class demand fulfillment.
January 1, 2006... In a multiple-customer-class model of demand fulfillment for a single item, we consider the use of dynamic price discounts to encourage backlogging of demand for customer classes denied immediate service. Customers are assumed to arrive over...

Solving large-scale linear multicommodity flow problems with an active set strategy and Proximal-ACCPM.
January 1, 2006... In this paper, we propose to solve the linear multicommodity flow problem using a partial Lagrangian relaxation. The relaxation is restricted to the set of arcs that are likely to be saturated at the optimum. This set is itself approximated by...