Operations Research articles from November 2006

Operations Research archives from November 2006

A combinatorial heuristic approach for solving real-size machinery location and road design problems in forestry planning.
November 1, 2006... The location and operation of harvest machinery, along with the design and construction of access roads, are important problems faced by forestry planners, making up about 55% of total production costs. One of the main challenges consists of...

Efficient supply chain management at the U.S. Coast Guard using part-age dependent supply replenishment policies.(OR PRACTICE)
November 1, 2006... The United States Coast Guard (USCG), now part of the Department of Homeland Security, has the mission to secure the U.S. coastline using a combination of air and sea capabilities. This paper focuses on an application of operations research...

Online low-price guarantees--a real options analysis.
November 1, 2006... A common practice among large retailers is the low-price guarantee, rebating consumers if they find an identical product cheaper elsewhere. This provides consumers with some level of comfort in their purchase decision. A similar low-price...

Robust one-period option hedging.
November 1, 2006... We consider robust optimization to cope with uncertainty about the stock return process in one-period option hedging problems. The robust approach relates portfolio choice to uncertainty, making more cautious hedges when uncertainty is high. We...

On the effects of dimension reduction techniques on some high-dimensional problems in finance.
November 1, 2006... Many problems in finance can be formulated as high-dimensional integrals, which are often attacked by quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) algorithms. To enhance QMC algorithms, dimension reduction techniques, such as the Brownian bridge (BB) and principal...

Inventory planning with forecast updates: approximate solutions and cost error bounds.
November 1, 2006... We consider a finite-horizon, periodic-review inventory model with demand forecasting updates following the martingale model of forecast evolution (MMFE). The optimal policy is a state-dependent base-stock policy, which, however, is...

A monopolistic and oligopolistic stochastic flow revenue management model.
November 1, 2006... This paper studies a one-shot inventory replenishment problem with dynamic pricing. The customer arrival rate is assumed to follow a geometric Brownian motion. Homogeneous customers have an isoelastic demand function and do not behave...

Joint pricing-production decisions in supply chains of complementary products with uncertain demand.
November 1, 2006... Consider n manufacturers, each producing a different product and selling it to a market, either directly or through a common retailer. The n products are perfectly complementary in the sense that they are always sold and consumed jointly or in...

Expected value of distribution information for the newsvendor problem.
November 1, 2006... This paper extends previous work on the distribution-free newsvendor problem, where only partial information about the demand distribution is available. More specifically, the analysis assumes that the demand distribution f belongs to a class...

Inventory and production decisions for an assemble-to-order system with uncertain demand and limited assembly capacity.
November 1, 2006... This paper considers an inventory and production-planning problem for a contract manufacturer who anticipates an order of a single product, but with uncertain quantity. To meet the challenges of long component procurement lead times and limited...

An analytical model for traffic delays and the dynamic user equilibrium problem.
November 1, 2006... In urban transportation planning, it has become critical (1) to determine the travel time of a traveler and how it is affected by congestion, and (2) to understand how traffic distributes in a transportation network. In the first part of this...

A branch-and-price algorithm for the multilevel generalized assignment problem.
November 1, 2006... The multilevel generalized assignment problem (MGAP) is a variation of the generalized assignment problem, in which agents can execute tasks at different efficiency levels with different costs. We present a branch-and-price algorithm that is...

DNA sequencing by hybridization via genetic search.
November 1, 2006... An innovative approach to DNA sequencing by hybridization utilizes isothermic oligonucleotide libraries. In this paper, we demonstrate the utility of a genetic algorithm for the combinatorial portion of this new approach by incorporating...

Piled-slab searches.(search for military targets)
November 1, 2006... This paper deals with the conflict between simplicity and optimality in searching for a stationary target whose location is distributed in two dimensions, thus continuing an analysis that was begun in World War II. The search is assumed to be...