Operations Research articles from November 2004

Operations Research archives from November 2004

A periodic inventory routing problem at a supermarket chain.(OR PRACTICE)
November 1, 2004... Albert Heijn, BV, a supermarket chain in the Netherlands, faces a vehicle routing and delivery scheduling problem once every three to six months. Given hourly demand forecasts for each store, travel times and distances, cost parameters, and...

Multiattribute preference analysis with performance targets.
November 1, 2004... This paper develops an approach based on performance targets to assess a preference function for a multiobjective decision under uncertainty. This approach yields preference functions that are strategically equivalent to conventional...

Scheduling flexible servers with convex delay costs: heavy-traffic optimality of the generalized c[mu]-rule.
November 1, 2004... We consider a queueing system with multitype customers and flexible (multiskilled) servers that work in parallel. If [Q.sub.i] is the queue length of type i customers, this queue incurs cost at the rate of [C.sub.i]([Q.sub.i]), where...

Spectral expansions for Asian (average price) options.
November 1, 2004... Arithmetic Asian or average price options deliver payoffs based on the average underlying price over a prespecified time period. Asian options are an important family of derivative contracts with a wide variety of applications in currency,...

A general equilibrium model for industries with price and service competition.
November 1, 2004... This paper develops a stochastic general equilibrium inventory model for an oligopoly, in which all inventory constraint parameters are endogenously determined. We propose several systems of demand processes whose distributions are functions of...

Coordinating inventory control and pricing strategies with random demand and fixed ordering cost: the finite horizon case.
November 1, 2004... We analyze a finite horizon, single product, periodic review model in which pricing and production/inventory decisions are made simultaneously. Demands in different periods are random variables that are independent of each other and their...

Design of zone tariff systems in public transportation.
November 1, 2004... Given a public transportation system represented by its stops and direct connections between stops, we present OR models for two problems dealing with the prices for the customers. In the first, the fare problem, subsets of stops are already...

On the stability of supply chains.
November 1, 2004... This paper examines the stability of decentralized, multistage supply chains under arbitrary demand conditions. It looks for intrinsic properties of the inventory replenishment policies that hold for all customer demand processes and for...

A diffusion approximation for the G/GI/n/m queue.
November 1, 2004... We develop a diffusion approximation for the queue-length stochastic process in the G/GI/n/m queueing model (having a general arrival process, independent and identically distributed service times with a general distribution, n servers, and m...

Cutting planes for low-rank-like concave minimization problems.
November 1, 2004... Concavity cuts play an important role in several algorithms for concave minimization, such as pure cutting plane algorithms, conical algorithms, and branch-and-bound algorithms. For concave quadratic minimization problems Konno et al. (1998)...

Optimal investment strategies for flexible resources, considering pricing and correlated demands.
November 1, 2004... We study the optimal resource investment decision faced by a two-product, price-setting firm that operates in a monopolistic setting and employs a postponed pricing scheme. The firm has the option to invest in dedicated resources as well as a...

Optimal cyclic multi-hoist scheduling: a mixed integer programming approach.
November 1, 2004... In the manufacture of circuit boards, panels are immersed sequentially in a series of tanks, with upper and lower bounds on the processing time within each tank. The panels are mounted on carriers that are lowered into and raised from the...

Scenario-based planning for partially dynamic vehicle routing with stochastic customers.
November 1, 2004... The multiple vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is a hard and extensively studied combinatorial optimization problem. This paper considers a dynamic VRPTW with stochastic customers, where the goal is to maximize the number of...

Inventory control with limited capacity and advance demand information.
November 1, 2004... Manufacturers make production decisions and carry inventory to satisfy uncertain demand. When holding and shortage costs are high, carrying inventory could be even more expensive for a capacitated production system. Recent developments in...

All-or-nothing ordering under a capacity constraint.(TECHNICAL NOTE)
November 1, 2004... We consider a special case of the single-item, periodic-review inventory control problem with fixed plus linear ordering costs and an upper bound on production capacity. We assume that the fixed cost is large relative to the variable cost and...