Integrated capacity,demand, and production planning with subcontracting and overtime options

Models for integrated production and demand planning decisions can serve to improve a producer's ability to effectively match demand requirements with production capabilities. In contexts with price‐sensitive demands, economies of scale in production, and multiple capacity options, such integrated planning problems can quickly become complex. To address these complexities, this paper provides profit‐maximizing production planning models for determining optimal demand and internal production capacity levels under price‐sensitive deterministic demands, with subcontracting and overtime options. The models determine a producer's optimal price, production, inventory, subcontracting, overtime, and internal capacity levels, while accounting for production economies of scale and capacity costs through concave cost functions. We use polyhedral properties and dynamic programming techniques to provide polynomial‐time solution approaches for obtaining an optimal solution for this class of problems when the internal capacity level is time‐invariant. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

The effects of information on a queue with balking and phase‐type service times

This article generalizes the models in Guo and Zipkin, who focus on exponential service times, to systems with phase‐type service times. Each arriving customer decides whether to stay or balk based on his expected waiting cost, conditional on the information provided. We show how to compute the throughput and customers' average utility in each case. We then obtain some analytical and numerical results to assess the effect of more or less information. We also show that service‐time variability degrades the system's performance. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

A measure of effectiveness for sensors and strategies

This paper discusses a possible measure of effectiveness for information sensing equipment, such as radar or sonar, based on its ability to provide information. It is shown that such a measure is particularly appropriate for situations where a sequence of similar limited engagements may occur, as on antisubmarine patrol, for example. In this case the measure expresses the expected rate of gain per engagement of the relative resources of the participants. Rates are calculated for the optimal and certain simpler, but suboptimal, strategies. The measure is illustrated by an exact analysis of a gambling problem and a qualitative treatment of an anti-missile missile allocation problem.     

A comparison of several attribute sampling plans

The purpose of this research is to examine several types of procedures for attribute sampling inspection-the widely used Military Standard 105D plans [8], the lesser known Double Zero plans as developed by Ellis [4] and the Narrow Limit gaging plans of Ott and Mundel [9]. Each of the procedures is described with an effort made to illuminate their more subtle features. Then the plans are compared, whence it is revealed that (i) Narrow Limit gaging plans have a serious weakness in comparison to the others and (ii) Double Zero plans tend to be essentially conservative, but that sufficiently tight Military Standard 105D plans can be selected to achieve comparable performance in all ways.     

A note on values and multilinear extensions

An axiomatic formulation is given of a class of values for cooperative games. This class includes the Shapley value and the Banzhaf index, and is related to the multilinear extension of a game.     

Bounds on parallel-processing of queues with multiple-phase jobs

Currently, both the hardware and software designs of many large computing systems aim at improved system performance through exploitation of parallelism in multiprocessor systems. In studying these systems, mathematical modelling and analysis constitute an important step towards providing design tools that can be used in building such systems. With this view the present paper describes a queueing model of a multiprocessor system operating in a job-shop environment in which arriving jobs consist of a random number of segments (sub-jobs). Two service disciplines are considered: one assumes that the sub-jobs of a given job are capable of parallel operation on different processors while the other assumes that the same sub-jobs must be operated in a strictly serial sequ'snce. The results (in particular, the mean number in the system and waiting time in queue) obtained for these two disciplines are shown to be bounds for more general job structures.     

Toward a study of bidding processes part IV - games with unknown costs

This paper represents a continuation of three previous papers [1-.3] in the study of competitive bidding processes. It treats the case where a bidder's knowledge of his competitor's cost i s given by a probability distribution over a certain interval. The results obtained extend the work of Vickrey [4] to the case where the cost intervals a r e not necessarily symmetric.