Business Commons^™

Two Essays On Distribution, Fulfillment And Pricing Decisions For Retailers With E-Commerce Channel, Khosro Pichka

Theses and Dissertations

E-commerce has grown rapidly in the past decade. In 2015, e-commerce was accounted for 7.2 percent of all retail sales in the U.S., which is massively higher than 0.2 percent in 1998 (U.S. Department of Commerce 2017). Worldwide e-commerce sales also show the same trend and reached $2.356 trillion in 2018 and are expected to grow steadily (Statista 2017). This trend has impacted major areas of operations management including supply chain management and revenue management. Today, e-commerce companies cannot satisfy their customers’ demand using traditional distribution systems. Therefore, retailers with e-commerce channels (e-tailers), cooperate with third party logistic service providers …

A Study In Three Practical Management Science Problems, John S.F. Lyons

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study of practical problems in Management Science (MS) describes novel mathematical models for three different decision settings. It addresses questions of: (a) what optimal route should be taken through a time-windows and topographically complex network; (b) what optimal sequencing of scheduled surgeries best coordinates flow of patients through central recovery; and (c) what prices should be charged and what stock amounts should be produced for two markets or channels to maximize profit explicitly, given various capacity and uncertainty conditions.

The first problem is in a sport analytics context, using a novel Integer Programming and big data from Whistler-Blackcomb ski …

Strategic Location And Dispatch Management Of Assets In A Military Medical Evacuation Enterprise, Phillip R. Jenkins

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation considers the importance of optimizing deployed military medical evacuation (MEDEVAC) systems and utilizes operations research techniques to develop models that allow military medical planners to analyze different strategies regarding the management of MEDEVAC assets in a deployed environment. For optimization models relating to selected subproblems of the MEDEVAC enterprise, the work herein leverages integer programming, multi-objective optimization, Markov decision processes, approximate dynamic programming, and machine learning, as appropriate, to identify relevant insights for aerial MEDEVAC operations.

A Multi-Skilled Approach To Property Maintenance Considering Temporal, Spatial And Resource Constraints, Anthony G. Vatterott

Dissertations

With the continued increase in age of the United States housing and building stock, as well as the continued need to maintain properties across the U.S., the need for timely, cost-optimal maintenance is ever more critical. This paper proposes the application of a mathematical model to aid in the scheduling and assignment of construction and maintenance tasks, considering the multi-skilled workforce. The benefit of this approach is to take advantage of the economies of scale that can be developed using cross-functional skilled workers with varying levels of competence and efficiency. This approach schedules and assigns tasks using data from maintenance …

Integrated Intermodal Network Design With Nonlinear Inter-Hub Movement Costs, Mohammad Ghane-Ezabadi, Hector A. Vergara

15th IMHRC Proceedings (Savannah, Georgia. USA – 2018)

In this research, transportation mode and load route selection problems are integrated with the hub location problem in a single mathematical formulation to find the optimal design of intermodal transportation networks. Economies of scale are modeled utilizing a stepwise function that relates the per container transportation cost to the amount of flow between two nodes. A heuristic method combining a genetic algorithm and the shortest path algorithm was developed to solve this integrated planning problem. Computational experiments were completed to evaluate the performance of the proposed heuristic for different problem instances. At the end, conclusions are presented and future research …

Enabling Greater Access To Home Meal Delivery, Maciek Nowak, Leo Gala, Mike Hewitt

Information Systems and Operations Management: Faculty Publications & Other Works

Non-profit organizations like the Meals on Wheels (MOW) association of America prepare and deliver meals, typically daily, to approximately one million homebound citizens in the United States alone. However, many MOW agencies are facing a steadily increasing number of clients requesting meal service without an increase in resources (either financial or human). One strategy for accommodating these requests is to deliver multiple (frozen) meals at a time and thus make fewer delivers. However, many of the stakeholders (funders, volunteers, meal recipients) value the relationships that are developed by having a client receive daily deliveries from the same volunteer. Further, meal …

Composite Ordinal Forecasting In Horse Racing - An Optimization Approach, Alan Tse, Chan-Ieong Chan

UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal

Using horse racing data in Hong Kong as an example, this paper looks into the properties of an optimization model for making composite ordinal forecasts based on minimization of the absolute error of the joint distribution of the errors of twelve forecasters of race outcomes. It was found that the optimization model is not only sound theoretically, but it is also robust, and can handle situations when data are sparse.

A Comprehensive Location-Allocation Method For Specialized Healthcare Services, Siddhartha S. Syam, Murray J. Côté

Management Faculty Research and Publications

This paper focuses on the development, solution, and application of a location-allocation model for specialized health care services such as the treatment and rehabilitation necessary for strokes or traumatic brain injuries. The model is based on our experience with the Department of Veterans Affairs’ integrated service networks. The model minimizes the total cost borne by the health system and its patients and incorporates admission acuity levels, service proportion requirements, and admission retention rates. A common resource constraint is introduced at the facility level since treatment of multiple acuity levels involves the pooling of common resources. Realistic instances of the model …

Combining Equity And Utilitarianism In A Mathematical Programming Model, John Hooker, H Williams

John Hooker

We discuss the problem of combining the conflicting objectives of equity and utilitarianism, for social policy making, in a single mathematical programming model. The definition of equity we use is the Rawlsian one of maximizing the minimum utility over individuals or classes of individuals. However, when the disparity of utility becomes too great, the objective becomes progressively utilitarian. Such a model is particularly applicable not only to health provision but to other areas as well. Building a mixed-integer/linear programming (MILP) formulation of the problem raises technical issues, because the objective function is nonconvex and the hypograph is not MILP representable …

Intelligent Procedures For Intra-Day Updating Of Call Center Agent Schedules, Vijay Mehrotra, O. Ozluk, R. Saltzman

Business Analytics and Information Systems

For nearly all call centers, agent schedules are typically created several days or weeks prior to the time that agents report to work. After schedules are created, call center resource managers receive additional information that can affect forecasted workload and resource availability. In particular, there is significant evidence, both among practitioners and in the research literature, suggesting that actual call arrival volumes early in a scheduling period (typically an individual day or week) can provide valuable information about the call arrival pattern later in the same scheduling period. In this paper, we develop a flexible and powerful heuristic framework for …

Maximizing Correlation In The Presence Of Missing Data, Xinfang Wang

Department of Logistics & Supply Chain Management Faculty Publications

In this paper we address the problem of maximizing the correlation between two vectors of time series data, when one of the vectors has missing data and the timing of the missing data is unknown. The motivation for this work comes from environmental monitoring where because of monitoring malfunction, some data are lost. We study the use of integer programming and a genetic algorithm (GA) for this problem.

Exact And Heuristic Solution Approaches For The Mixed Integer Setup Knapsack Problem, Nezih Altay, Powell Robinson, Kurt Bretthauer

Nezih Altay

We consider a class of knapsack problems that include setup costs for families of items. An individual item can be loaded into the knapsack only if a setup cost is incurred for the family to which it belongs. A mixed integer programming formulation for the problem is provided along with exact and heuristic solution methods. The exact algorithm uses cross decomposition. The proposed heuristic gives fast and tight bounds. In addition, a Benders decomposition algorithm is presented to solve the continuous relaxation of the problem. This method for solving the continuous relaxation can be used to improve the performance of …

Production And Inventory Management Under Multiple Resource Constraints, Kurt M. Bretthauer, Bala Shetty, Siddhartha Syam, Robert J. Vokurka

Management Faculty Research and Publications

In this paper we present a model and solution methodology for production and inventory management problems that involve multiple resource constraints. The model formulation is quite general, allowing organizations to handle a variety of multi-item decisions such as determining order quantities, production batch sizes, number of production runs, or cycle times. Resource constraints become necessary to handle interaction among the multiple items. Common types of resource constraints include limits on raw materials, machine capacity, workforce capacity, inventory investment, storage space, or the total number of orders placed. For example, in a production environment, there may be limited workforce capacity and …

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.

Integer Approximation Of Real Valued Preference Curves, Richard M. Antoine

Theses and Dissertations

A primary challenge of the AFIT Mission Resource Value Assessment Tool is to approximate a given preference curve with integer valued mission ready resources. This thesis evaluated four candidate methods of accomplishing this approximation. The thesis evaluated the implementation of the integer estimation approximation from a purely mathematical perspective. The models were measured against six quality and error measurement standards: convergence on an endpoint, convergence on any interior integer points, characterization of the overall error between the sequence of integer coordinates and the real valued linear function and characterization of the error in each individual dimension of the problem space. …

Warehouse Allocation In The Egyptian Petroleum Industry - An Application Of Integer Programming, Aly Abulleil

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.