Operations Research articles from September 2001

Operations Research archives from September 2001

Melt scheduling to trade off material waste and shipping performance.(melt process research at Bethlehem Steel Corp)
September 1, 2001... The ingot formation or "melt" process is the first step in many steel-making operations. This process involves melting steel and alloys in the desired chemical composition, then pouring it into a variety of ingot molds. Complex technological...

Inventory competition under dynamic consumer choice.(model of inventory competition)
September 1, 2001... We analyze a model of inventory competition among n firms that provide competing, substitutable goods. Each firm chooses initial inventory levels for their good in a single period (newsboy-like) inventory model. Customers choose dynamically...

Stock wars: inventory competition in a two-echelon supply chain with multiple retailers.(application of the Nash equilibrium)
September 1, 2001... This paper studies the competitive and cooperative selection of inventory policies in a two-echelon supply chain with one supplier and N retailers. Stochastic demand is monitored continuously. Retailers incur inventory holding and backorder...

Real options in leasing: the effect of idle time.(pricing options for short-term capital equipment leasing)
September 1, 2001... We study options on short-term leases for capital-intensive equipment performing specific functions and services, such as leases for semi-submersible drilling figs, marine seismic services, corporate real estate leasing, retail space leasing,...

An economic model for evaluating mining and manufacturing ventures with output yield uncertainty.(an operational risk management model)
September 1, 2001... This paper develops an operational risk management model for evaluating production efforts in manufacturing and mining industries where the resource to be exploited is nonhomogenous. Using a contingent claims methodology now commonly...

On mutually interfering parallel servers subject to external disturbances.
September 1, 2001... This paper considers a continuous-time non-Markovian parallel queueing system subject to external disturbances. The servers are mutually interfering in that their service rates are nonlinearly interdependent functions of the controls applied by...

Performance of bucket brigades when work is stochastic.
September 1, 2001... "Bucket brigades" are a way of sharing work on a flow line that results in the spontaneous emergence of balance and consequent high throughput. All this happens without a work-content model or traditional assembly line balancing technology....

Dynamic control of a queue with adjustable service rate.
September 1, 2001... We consider a single-server queue with Poisson arrivals, where holding costs are continuously incurred as a nondecreasing function of the queue length. The queue length evolves as a birth-and-death process with constant arrival rate A = 1 and...

New two-stage and sequential procedures for selecting the best simulated system.
September 1, 2001... Standard "indifference-zone" procedures that allocate computer resources to infer the best of a finite set of simulated systems are designed with a statistically conservative, least favorable configuration assumption consider the probability of...

Input distribution selection for simulation experiments: accounting for input uncertainty.(probability distributions in simulation practice)
September 1, 2001... A number of authors have identified problematic issues with techniques used in current simulation practice for selecting probability distributions and their parameters for input to stochastic simulations. A major goal of this paper is to...

Effective sequencing rules for closed manufacturing networks.
September 1, 2001... A number of authors have identified problematic issues with techniques used in current simulation practice for selecting probability distributions and their parameters for input to stochastic simulations. A major goal of this paper is to...

Inverse optimization.
September 1, 2001... In this paper, we study inverse optimization problems defined as follows. Let S denote the set of feasible solutions of an optimization problem P, let e be a specified cost vector, and [x.sup.0] be a given feasible solution. The solution...

A fast scaling algorithm for minimizing separable convex functions subject to chain constraints.
September 1, 2001... We consider the problem of minimizing [[summation of].sub.j[member of]N][C.sub.j]([x.sub.j]), subject to the following chain constraints [x.sub.1] [less than or equal to] [x.sub.2] [less than or equal to] [x.sub.3] [less than or equal to]......

Computing the optimal replenishment policy for inventory systems with random discount opportunities.
September 1, 2001... The paper considers the optimal control of a single-item continuous-review inventory system with random demand and discount opportunities. Items can always be purchased with the regular order setup and variable costs. However, when a discount...

A rollout policy for the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands.
September 1, 2001... The paper considers the single vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands. While most of the literature has studied the a priori solution approach, this work focuses on computing a reoptimization-type routing policy. This is obtained by...