Operations Research articles from March 2004

Operations Research archives from March 2004

Bioinformatics and management science: some common tools and techniques.(Invited Paper)
March 1, 2004... In April of 2003, Science (2003) and Nature (2003) published special issues marking two significant achievements in the history of science: the 50th anniversary of discovering the double helical structure of the DNA, and the completion of the...

A strategic flow model of traffic assignment in static capacitated networks.
March 1, 2004... This work pleads for the use of the concept of strategies, and their network-theoretic representation as hyperpaths, for modeling network assignment problems. While this concept describes adequately the behavior of users in transit systems, we...

Optimal leadtime differentiation via diffusion approximations.
March 1, 2004... This study illustrates how a manufacturer can use leadtime differentiation--selling the same product to different customers at different prices based on delivery leadtime--to simultaneously increase revenue and reduce capacity requirements. The...

Scheduling problems with two competing agents.
March 1, 2004... We consider the scheduling problems arising when two agents, each with a set of nonpreemptive jobs, compete to perform their respective jobs on a common processing resource. Each agent wants to minimize a certain objective function, which...

Dynamic scheduling of a multiclass queue in the Halfin-Whitt heavy traffic regime.
March 1, 2004... We consider a Markovian model of a multiclass queueing system in which a single large pool of servers attends to the various customer classes. Customers waiting to be served may abandon the queue, and there is a cost penalty associated with...

Pricing American options: a Duality Approach.
March 1, 2004... We develop a new method for pricing American options. The main practical contribution of this paper is a general algorithm for constructing upper and lower bounds on the true price of the option using any approximation to the option price. We...

On customer contact centers with a call-back option: customer decisions, routing rules, and system design.
March 1, 2004... Organizations worldwide use contact centers as an important channel of communication and transaction with their customers. This paper describes a contact center with two channels, one for real-time telephone service, and another for a postponed...

Production control in the face of storable raw material, random supply, and an outside market.
March 1, 2004... We study a periodic-review production/inventory control problem where both the supply of raw material and demand for the finished product are exogenous and random, the raw material can be stored for future use, can be purchased from or sold to...

The optimality of hedging point policies for stochastic two-product flexible manufacturing systems.
March 1, 2004... This paper studies the stochastic two-item, periodic review, single facility, flexible manufacturing systems, where stochasticity comes from random demands or/and unreliable production process. Based on a notion called [mu]-difference monotone...

Imprecise DEA via standard linear DEA models with a revisit to a Korean mobile telecommunication company.(Data Envelopment Analysis)
March 1, 2004... Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) requires that the data for all inputs and outputs are known exactly. When some outputs and inputs are unknown decision variables, such as bounded and ordinal data, the DEA model becomes a nonlinear programming...

Rendezvous search on the labeled line.
March 1, 2004... The rendezvous search problem is the problem of finding optimal search strategies for two people who are placed randomly on a known search region and want to meet each other in minimal expected time. We focus on initial location distributions...