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Full-Text Articles in Business Administration, Management, and Operations

Bucket Brigades On In-Tree Assembly Networks, John J. Bartholdi, Iii, Donald D. Eisenstein, Yun Fong Lim Sep 2006

Bucket Brigades On In-Tree Assembly Networks, John J. Bartholdi, Iii, Donald D. Eisenstein, Yun Fong Lim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In a of subassembly lines, balance becomes more difficult to achieve as it requires that all subassembly lines be synchronized to produce at the same rate. We show how to adapt the ‘‘bucket brigade’’ protocol of work-sharing so that balance emerges spontaneously.


Mabs: Spreadsheet– Based Decision Support For Precision Marketing, Bert De Reyck, Zeger Degraeve Jun 2006

Mabs: Spreadsheet– Based Decision Support For Precision Marketing, Bert De Reyck, Zeger Degraeve

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this paper, we describe a decision support system developed for automatically scheduling and optimising broadcasts of advertisements to mobile phones via SMS (Short Message Service) text messaging. The system, MABS or “Mobile Advertising Broadcast Scheduler”, is developed in Microsoft Excel with a link to Lingo, a modelling language and IP solver. It was developed for a London-based company specialized in location-sensitive precision marketing via mobile phones. The system significantly reduced the time required to schedule the broadcasts, and resulted both in increased customer response and revenues.


A Hybrid Scatter Search/Electromagnetism Meta-Heuristic For Project Scheduling, Dieter Debels, Bert De Reyck, Roel Leus, Mario Vanhoucke Mar 2006

A Hybrid Scatter Search/Electromagnetism Meta-Heuristic For Project Scheduling, Dieter Debels, Bert De Reyck, Roel Leus, Mario Vanhoucke

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In the last few decades, several effective algorithms for solving the resource-constrained project scheduling problem have been proposed. However, the challenging nature of this problem, summarised in its strongly NP-hard status, restricts the effectiveness of exact optimisation to relatively small instances. In this paper, we present a new meta-heuristic for this problem, able to provide near-optimal heuristic solutions for relatively large instances. The procedure combines elements from scatter search, a generic population-based evolutionary search method, and from a recently introduced heuristic method for the optimisation of unconstrained continuous functions based on an analogy with electromagnetism theory. We present computational …


Dynamic Pricing Through Discounts For Optimizing Multiple Class Demand Fulfillment, Qing Ding, Panos Kouvelis, Joseph M. Milner Jan 2006

Dynamic Pricing Through Discounts For Optimizing Multiple Class Demand Fulfillment, Qing Ding, Panos Kouvelis, Joseph M. Milner

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In a multiple-customer-class model of demand fulfillment for a single item, we consider the use of dynamic price discounts to encourage backlogging of demand for customer classes denied immediate service. Customers are assumed to arrive over several stages in a period, and customer classes are distinguished by their contractual price and sensitivity to discounts. Through dynamic programming we determine the optimal discounts to offer, assuming a linear model for the sensitivity of customers to such inducements. We show that customers are served in class order, and allocation of inventory to demand is determined by considering the current number of customers …


Hybridizing Discrete- And Continuous-Time Models For Batch Sizing And Scheduling Problems, Siqun Wang, Monique Guignard Jan 2006

Hybridizing Discrete- And Continuous-Time Models For Batch Sizing And Scheduling Problems, Siqun Wang, Monique Guignard

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper proposes a new hybrid technique called partial parameter uniformization (hereafter PPU). The technique simplifies problems by ignoring the different values that certain problem parameters can take, which may facilitate the solution of some hard combinatorial optimization problems. PPU is applied to complex batch sizing and scheduling problems. Some information can be obtained from a discrete-time model in which job durations have been made uniform. This information is then exploited by a more detailed continuous-time model to generate feasible solutions and further improve these solutions. Good, or optimal solutions to the Westenberger and Kallrath Benchmark problems have been obtained …