Optimal service rates of a service facility with perishable inventory items

In this paper we optimally control service rates for an inventory system of service facilities with perishable products. We consider a finite capacity system where arrivals are Poisson‐distributed, lifetime of items have exponential distribution, and replenishment is instantaneous. We determine the service rates to be employed at each instant of time so that the long‐run expected cost rate is minimized for fixed maximum inventory level and capacity. The problem is modelled as a semi‐Markov decision problem. We establish the existence of a stationary optimal policy and we solve it by employing linear programming. Several numerical examples which provide insight to the behavior of the system are presented. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 49: 464–482, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/nav.10021     

Designing a screening experiment for highly reliable products

Within a reasonable life‐testing time, how to improve the reliability of highly reliable products is one of the great challenges to today's manufacturers. By using a resolution III experiment together with degradation test, Tseng, Hamada, and Chiao (1995) presented an interesting case study of improving the reliability of fluorescent lamps. However, in conducting such an experiment, they did not address the problem of how to choose the optimal settings of variables, such as sample size, inspection frequency, and termination time for each run, which are influential to the correct identification of significant factors and the experimental cost. Assuming that the product's degradation paths satisfy Wiener processes, this paper proposes a systematic approach to the aforementioned problem. First, an intuitively appealing identification rule is proposed. Next, under the constraints of a minimum probability of correct decision and a maximum probability of incorrect decision of the proposed identification rule, the optimum test plan (including the determinations of inspection frequency, sample size, and termination time for each run) can be obtained by minimizing the total experimental cost. An example is provided to illustrate the proposed method. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 49: 514–526, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/nav.10024     

Dominating sets for rectilinear center location problems with polyhedral barriers

In planar location problems with barriers one considers regions which are forbidden for the siting of new facilities as well as for trespassing. These problems are important since they model various actual applications. The resulting mathematical models have a nonconvex objective function and are therefore difficult to tackle using standard methods of location theory even in the case of simple barrier shapes and distance functions. For the case of center objectives with barrier distances obtained from the rectilinear or Manhattan metric, it is shown that the problem can be solved in polynomial time by identifying a dominating set. The resulting genuinely polynomial algorithm can be combined with bound computations which are derived from solving closely connected restricted location and network location problems. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 49: 647–665, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/nav.10038     

Minimizing weighted earliness and tardiness penalties in single‐machine scheduling with idle time permitted

In this paper, a single‐machine scheduling problem with weighted earliness and tardiness penalties is considered. Idle time between two adjacent jobs is permitted and due dates of jobs could be unequal. The dominance rules are utilized to develop a relationship matrix, which allows a branch‐and‐bound algorithm to eliminate a high percentage of infeasible solutions. After combining this matrix with a branching strategy, a procedure to solve the problem is proposed. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 49: 760–780, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/nav.10039     

Scheduling of depalletizing and truck loading operations in a food distribution system

This paper studies a scheduling problem arising in a beef distribution system where pallets of various types of beef products in the warehouse are first depalletized and then individual cases are loaded via conveyors to the trucks which deliver beef products to various customers. Given each customer's demand for each type of beef, the problem is to find a depalletizing and truck loading schedule that fills all the demands at a minimum total cost. We first show that the general problem where there are multiple trucks and each truck covers multiple customers is strongly NP‐hard. Then we propose polynomial‐time algorithms for the case where there are multiple trucks, each covering only one customer, and the case where there is only one truck covering multiple customers. We also develop an optimal dynamic programming algorithm and a heuristic for solving the general problem. By comparing to the optimal solutions generated by the dynamic programming algorithm, the heuristic is shown to be capable of generating near optimal solutions quickly. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2003     

On the exponentially weighted moving variance

MacGregor and Harris (J Quality Technol 25 (1993) 106–118) proposed the exponentially weighted mean squared deviation (EWMS) and the exponentially weighted moving variance (EWMV) charts as ways of monitoring process variability. These two charts are particularly useful for individual observations where no estimate of variability is available from replicates. However, the control charts derived by using the approximate distributions of the EWMS and EWMV statistics are difficult to interpret in terms of the average run length (ARL). Furthermore, both control charting schemes are biased procedures. In this article, we propose two new control charts by applying a normal approximation to the distributions of the logarithms of the weighted sum of chi squared random variables, which are respectively functions of the EWMS and EWMV statistics. These new control charts are easy to interpret in terms of the ARL. On the basis of the simulation studies, we demonstrate that the proposed charts are superior to the EWMS and EWMV charts and they both are nearly unbiased for the commonly used smoothing constants. We also compare the performance of the proposed charts with that of the change point (CP) CUSUM chart of Acosta‐Mejia (1995). The design of the proposed control charts is discussed. An example is also given to illustrate the applicability of the proposed control charts. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2009     

Sojourn times in G/M/1 fork‐join networks

We consider a processing network in which jobs arrive at a fork‐node according to a renewal process. Each job requires the completion of m tasks, which are instantaneously assigned by the fork‐node to m task‐processing nodes that operate like G/M/1 queueing stations. The job is completed when all of its m tasks are finished. The sojourn time (or response time) of a job in this G/M/1 fork‐join network is the total time it takes to complete the m tasks. Our main result is a closed‐form approximation of the sojourn‐time distribution of a job that arrives in equilibrium. This is obtained by the use of bounds, properties of D/M/1 and M/M/1 fork‐join networks, and exploratory simulations. Statistical tests show that our approximation distributions are good fits for the sojourn‐time distributions obtained from simulations. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

Bayesian enhanced decision making for deteriorating repairable systems with preventive maintenance

Since a system and its components usually deteriorate with age, preventive maintenance (PM) is often performed to restore or keep the function of a system in a good state. Furthermore, PM is capable of improving the health condition of the system and thus prolongs its effective age. There has been a vast amount of research to find optimal PM policies for deteriorating repairable systems. However, such decisions involve numerous uncertainties and the analyses are typically difficult to perform because of the scarcity of data. It is therefore important to make use of all information in an efficient way. In this article, a Bayesian decision model is developed to determine the optimal number of PM actions for systems which are maintained according to a periodic PM policy. A non‐homogeneous Poisson process with a power law failure intensity is used to describe the deteriorating behavior of the repairable system. It is assumed that the status of the system after a PM is somewhere between as good as new for a perfect repair and as good as old for a minimal repair, and for failures between two preventive maintenances, the system undergoes minimal repairs. Finally, a numerical example is given and the results of the proposed approach are discussed after performing sensitivity analysis. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2008     

Minimization of expected variance of completion times on single machine for stochastic jobs

This article deals with the problem of scheduling jobs with random processing times on single machine in order to minimize the expected variance of job completion times. Sufficient conditions for the existence of V-shaped optimal sequences are derived separately for general and ordered job processing times. It is shown that when coefficient of variation of random processing times are bounded by a certain value, an optimal sequence is V-shaped. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Retailer's rationale to refuse consumer returns in supply chains

While accepting consumer returns has long been proposed as a solution to resolve the consumer valuation uncertainty problem, there are still a sizable portion of retailers who insist on a “no return” policy. In this article, we offer an economic rationale for these seemingly unreasonable strategies in a supply chain context. We demonstrate when and why the retailer may benefit from refusing consumer returns, even though offering consumer returns allows the supply chain to implement the expostmarket segmentation. Granting the retailer the right to refuse consumer returns may sometimes improve supply chain efficiency: it eliminates the manufacturer's attempt to induce inefficient consumer returns and bring the equilibrium back to that in the vertically integrated benchmark. We also find that the refund and the retail price can move in the opposite directions when product reliability varies, and consumer returns have a nontrivial impact on the quality choice. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 62: 686–701, 2015