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Full-Text Articles in Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering

A Dynamic Programming Approach To Achieving An Optimal End State Along A Serial Production Line, Shih-Fen Cheng, Blake Nicholson, Marina A. Epelman, Daniel Reaume, Robert L. Smith Dec 2012

A Dynamic Programming Approach To Achieving An Optimal End State Along A Serial Production Line, Shih-Fen Cheng, Blake Nicholson, Marina A. Epelman, Daniel Reaume, Robert L. Smith

Shih-Fen CHENG

In modern production systems, it is critical to perform maintenance, calibration, installation, and upgrade tasks during planned downtime. Otherwise, the systems become unreliable and new product introductions are delayed. For reasons of safety, testing, and access, task performance often requires the vicinity of impacted equipment to be left in a specific “end state” when production halts. Therefore, planning the shutdown of a production system to balance production goals against enabling non-production tasks yields a challenging optimization problem. In this paper, we propose a mathematical formulation of this problem and a dynamic programming approach that efficiently finds optimal shutdown policies for …


A Service Choice Model For Optimizing Taxi Service Delivery, Shih-Fen Cheng, Xin Qu Sep 2009

A Service Choice Model For Optimizing Taxi Service Delivery, Shih-Fen Cheng, Xin Qu

Shih-Fen CHENG

Taxi service has undergone radical revamp in recent years. In particular, significant investments in communication system and GPS devices have improved quality of taxi services through better dispatches. In this paper, we propose to leverage on such infrastructure and build a service choice model that helps individual drivers in deciding whether to serve a specific taxi stand or not. We demonstrate the value of our model by applying it to a real-world scenario. We also highlight interesting new potential approaches that could significantly improve the quality of taxi services.