Operations Research articles from September 2006

Operations Research archives from September 2006

In this issue.
September 1, 2006... Evaluating Academic Programs Public media such as Business Week and The Wall Street Journal periodically produce rankings of many types of academic programs. These rankings are widely distributed and perceived to influence the quality of...

Evaluating academic programs: with Applications to U.S. Graduate Decision Science Programs.(OR CHRONICLE)
September 1, 2006... This paper describes a decision analysis methodology to evaluate academic programs. It avoids the shortcomings of the well-known evaluations of universities and academic programs produced by the public media. In addition to evaluating...

Optimizing chemotherapy scheduling using local search heuristics.
September 1, 2006... We develop a method for computing efficient patient-specific drug protocols. Using this method, we identify two general categories of anticancer drug protocols, depending on the temporal cycle parameters of the host and cancer cells: a onetime...

A branch-and-cut algorithm without binary variables for nonconvex piecewise linear optimization.
September 1, 2006... We give a branch-and-cut algorithm for solving linear programs (LPs) with continuous separable piecewise-linear cost functions (PLFs). Models for PLFs use continuous variables in special-ordered sets of type 2 (SOS2). Traditionally, SOS2...

Revenue management of a make-to-stock queue.
September 1, 2006... Motivated by recent electronic marketplaces, we consider a single-product make-to-stock manufacturing system that uses two alternative selling channels: long-term contracts and a spot market of electronic orders. At time 0, the risk-averse...

Dynamic control of a multiclass queue with thin arrival streams.
September 1, 2006... As a model of make-to-order production, we consider an admission control problem for a multiclass, single-server queue. The production system serves multiple demand streams, each having a rigid due-date lead time. To meet the due-date...

Revenue management through dynamic cross selling in e-commerce retailing.
September 1, 2006... We consider the problem of dynamically cross-selling products (e.g., books) or services (e.g., travel reservations) in the e-commerce setting. In particular, we look at a company that faces a stream of stochastic customer arrivals and may offer...

Revenue management for a multiclass single-server queue via a fluid model analysis.
September 1, 2006... Motivated by the recent adoption of tactical pricing strategies in manufacturing settings, this paper studies a problem of dynamic pricing for a multiproduct make-to-order system. Specifically, for a multiclass [M.sub.n]/M/1 queue with...

A continuum model for a re-entrant factory.
September 1, 2006... High-volume, multistage continuous production flow through a re-entrant factory is modeled through a conservation law for a continuous-density variable on a continuous-production line augmented by a state equation for the speed of the...

Capacitated multi-item lot-sizing problems with time windows.
September 1, 2006... This research concerns a new family of capacitated multi-item lot-sizing problems, namely, lot-sizing problems with time windows. Two classes of the problem are analyzed and solved using different Lagrangian heuristics. Capacity constraints and...

Models of the spiral-down effect in revenue management.
September 1, 2006... The spiral-down effect occurs when incorrect assumptions about customer behavior cause high-fare ticket sales, protection levels, and revenues to systematically decrease over time. If an airline decides how many seats to protect for sale at a...

Controlling inventories in divergent supply chains with advance-order information.
September 1, 2006... This paper considers a generic one-warehouse multiple-retailer inventory system under continuous review, where customers provide perfect advance-order information. More specifically, each customer order entails a due date specifying when the...