Operations Research articles from July 2001

Operations Research archives from July 2001

The analytical hierarchy process -- an exposition.
July 1, 2001... In memory of Carl M. Harris: Dear friend, colleague, OR theoretician and practitioner par excellance, dedicated editor whose encouragement and insight made this paper possible, and whose wisdom and friendship are greatly missed. 1. THE...

Stochastic inventory systems in a supply chain with asymmetric information: cycle stocks, safety stocks, and consignment stock.
July 1, 2001... 1. INTRODUCTION Traditionally, the multi-echelon inventory control literature has assumed the existence of a central planner for the entire supply chain, with perfect information about cost structure and demand patterns and with the power to...

Online searching.
July 1, 2001... 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. Motivation and Overview There are many situations in which present actions influence our "well being" in the future. The difficulty in these situations is that we have to make our decision based only on the past, and the...

Computing moments of the exit time distribution for Markov processes by linear programming.
July 1, 2001... The purpose of this paper is to provide a numerical method for computing the moments of the exit time distribution of Markov processes based on linear programming. This numerical approach has an advantage over other approaches because it provides...

Simultaneous assignment of locomotives and cars to passenger trains.
July 1, 2001... 1. INTRODUCTION Planning the assignment of locomotives and cars to trains is a complex task for most railways. In freight transportation, the problem is very often separated into distinct components: Freight routing policies first determine...

Improving the SIPP approach for staffing service systems that have cyclic demands.(stationary independent period by period)
July 1, 2001... 1. MODEL AND METHODOLOGY We study M(t)/M/s(t) queueing systems with [lambda](t), the arrival rate at time t given by [lambda](t) = [lambda] + A sin(2[pi]t/24), (1) where [lambda] is the average arrival rate over the period and A > 0...

Scheduling with opting out: improving upon random priority.
July 1, 2001... In a scheduling problem where agents can opt out, we show that the familiar random priority (RP) mechanism can be improved upon by another mechanism dubbed probabilistic serial (PS). Both mechanisms are nonmanipulable in a strong sense, but the...

Design for postponement: a comprehensive characterization of its benefits under unknown demand distributions.
July 1, 2001... Recent papers have developed analytical models to explain and quantify the benefits of delayed differentiation and quick response programs. These models assume that while demands in each period are random, they are independent across time and...

Multistage lot sizing problems via randomized rounding.
July 1, 2001... We study the classical multistage lot sizing problem that arises in distribution and inventory systems. A celebrated result in this area is the 94% and 98% approximation guarantee provided by power-of-two policies. In this paper, we propose a...

Parallel scheduling of multiclass M/M/m queues: approximate and heavy-traffic optimization of achievable performance.
July 1, 2001... We address the problem of scheduling a multiclass M/M/m queue with Bernoulli feedback on m parallel servers to minimize time-average linear holding costs. We analyze the performance of a heuristic priority-index rule, which extends Klimov's...