Operations Research articles from November 2003

Operations Research archives from November 2003

Coordinating strategic capacity planning in the semiconductor industry.(OR Practice)
November 1, 2003... We study strategic capacity planning in the semiconductor industry. Working with a major US semiconductor manufacturer on the configuration of their worldwide production facilities, we identify two unique characteristics of this problem as...

The linear programming approach to approximate dynamic programming.
November 1, 2003... The curse of dimensionality gives rise to prohibitive computational requirements that render infeasible the exact solution of large-scale stochastic control problems. We study an efficient method based on linear programming for approximating...

Diffusion of innovations under supply constraints.
November 1, 2003... In this paper we present a canonical setting that illustrates the need for explicitly modeling interactions between manufacturing and marketing/sales decisions in a firm. We consider a firm that sells an innovative product with a given market...

Commitment of electric power generators under stochastic market prices.
November 1, 2003... A formulation for the commitment of electric power generators under a deregulated electricity market is proposed. The problem is expressed as a stochastic optimization problem in which expected profits are maximized while meeting demand and...

Genetically engineered decision trees: population diversity produces smarter trees.
November 1, 2003... When considering a decision tree for the purpose of classification, accuracy is usually the sole performance measure used in the construction process. In this paper, we introduce the idea of combining a decision tree's expected value and...

Resource allocation among simulation time steps.
November 1, 2003... Motivated by the problem of efficient estimation of expected cumulative rewards or cashflows, this paper proposes and analyzes a variance reduction technique for estimating the expectation of the sum of sequentially simulated random variables....

A branch-and-price algorithm for the multiperiod single-sourcing problem.
November 1, 2003... In this paper, we propose a multiperiod single-sourcing problem (MPSSP), which takes both transportation and inventory into consideration, suitable for evaluating the performance of a logistics distribution network in a dynamic environment. We...

A branch-and-cut algorithm for the undirected traveling purchaser problem.
November 1, 2003... The purpose of this paper is to present a branch-and-cut algorithm for the undirected Traveling Purchaser Problem which consists of determining a minimum-cost route through a subset of markets, where the cost is the sum of travel and purchase...

Dynamic server allocation for queueing networks with flexible servers.
November 1, 2003... This paper is concerned with the design of dynamic server assignment policies that maximize the capacity of queueing networks with flexible servers. Flexibility here means that each server may be capable of performing service at several...

Optimal policies and approximations for a serial multiechelon inventory system with time-correlated demand.
November 1, 2003... Since Clark and Scarf's pioneering work, most advances in multiechelon inventory systems have been based on demand processes that are time independent. This paper revisits the serial multiechelon inventory system of Clark and Scarf and develops...

Decompositions, network flows, and a precedence constrained single-machine scheduling problem.
November 1, 2003... We present an in-depth theoretical, algorithmic, and computational study of a linear programming (LP) relaxation to the precedence constrained single-machine scheduling problem 1 [absolute value of prec] [[SIGMA].sub.j][w.sub.j][C.sub.j] to...

Optimal policies for inventory systems with priority demand classes.
November 1, 2003... We consider a periodic review inventory system with two priority demand classes, one deterministic and the other stochastic. The deterministic demand must be met immediately in each period. However, the units of stochastic demand that are not...