Operations Research articles from July 2007

Operations Research archives from July 2007

Building efficient product portfolios at John Deere and Company.(OR PRACTICE)
July 1, 2007... John Deere & Company (Deere), one of the world's leading producers of machinery, manufactures products composed of various features, within which a customer may select one of a number of possible options. On any given Deere product line, there...

Incentives and commonality in a decentralized multiproduct assembly system.
July 1, 2007... In this paper, we explore the impact of decentralized decision making on the behavior of multiproduct assembly systems. Specifically, we consider a system where three components (two product specific and one common) are used to produce two end...

Dynamic bid prices in revenue management.
July 1, 2007... We formally derive the standard deterministic linear program (LP) for bid-price control by making an affine functional approximation to the optimal dynamic programming value function. This affine functional approximation gives rise to a new LP...

Two-stage robust network flow and design under demand uncertainty.
July 1, 2007... We describe a two-stage robust optimization approach for solving network flow and design problems with uncertain demand. In two-stage network optimization, one defers a subset of the flow decisions until after the realization of the uncertain...

Optimal control of serial inventory systems with fixed replenishment intervals.
July 1, 2007... We consider a single-item, periodic-review, serial inventory/production system, with linear inventory-holding and penalty costs. To facilitate shipment consolidation and capacity planning, we assume that the system has implemented fixed...

Forecast horizons for a class of dynamic lot-size problems under discrete future demand.
July 1, 2007... We present structural and computational investigations of a new class of weak forecast horizons--minimal forecast horizons under the assumption that future demands are integer multiples of a given positive real number--for a specific class of...

Performance prediction and preselection for optimization and heuristic solution procedures.
July 1, 2007... The operations research literature contains numerous studies on the design and application of optimization and heuristic solution procedures. These studies identify a particular optimization problem, suggest a general solution procedure, and...

A decentralized approach to discrete optimization via simulation: application to network flow.
July 1, 2007... We study a new class of decentralized algorithms for discrete optimization via simulation, which is inspired by the fictitious play algorithm applied to games with identical interests. In this approach, each component of the solution vector of...

A case study of joint online truck scheduling and inventory management for multiple warehouses.(Case study)
July 1, 2007... For a real-world problem--transporting pallets between warehouses to guarantee sufficient supply for known and additional stochastic demand--we propose a solution approach via convex relaxation of an integer programming formulation, suitable...

Compensating for failures with flexible servers.
July 1, 2007... We consider the problem of maximizing capacity in a queueing network with flexible servers, where the classes and servers are subject to failure. We assume that the interarrival and service times are independent and identically distributed,...

Index policies for shooting problems.
July 1, 2007... We consider a scenario in which a single Red wishes to shoot at a collection of Blue targets, one at a time, to maximise some measure of return obtained from Blues killed before Red's own (possible) demise. Such a situation arises in various...

Locating a circle on a sphere.
July 1, 2007... We consider the problem of locating a spherical circle with respect to existing facilities on a sphere, such that the sum of distances between the circle and the facilities is minimized or such that the maximum distance is minimized. The...

A screening technique for joint chance-constrained programming for air-quality management.(TECHNICAL NOTE)
July 1, 2007... This technical note presents a screening technique for using chance-constrained programming to achieve overall system (i.e., joint) reliability when there is statistical dependence between constraints representing an ambient air-quality...