Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Why It Is Difficult To Apply Revenue Management Techniques To The Car Rental Business And What Can Be Done About It, Robert F. Gordon Ph.D.

Faculty Works: MCS (1984-2023)

Revenue management systems are used by airlines, hotels, and cruise lines to manipulate prices and availability of inventory in real-time, in order to increase profit. We discuss the reasons that the revenue management problem is more complex when applied to the car rental business. We then show how to simplify the model formulation and provide the human-computer interaction, organization, and procedures to make the problem tractable for the car rental business.

Rule-Based Run Control And Evaluation For Simulation, Robert F. Gordon Ph.D., Kow C. Chang, Edward A. Macnair

Faculty Works: MCS (1984-2023)

RC 19494 (84719)

Modeling projects are often faced with a large parameter space that has to be explored in order to produce a set of performance measures representing the behavior of the systems under study. In this paper, we describe a software component that provides the analyst with the functionality to specify a design of experiments and execute a search algorithm over the resulting parameter space. The component invokes the associated simulation runs and compares the results to a goal to determine the solution. This component has been implemented as the run control mechanism in the RESearch Queueing Modeling Environment …

An Introduction To The Research Queueing Package For Modeling Computer Systems And Communication Networks, Robert F. Gordon Ph.D., Edward A. Macnair

Faculty Works: MCS (1984-2023)

A queueing network is an important tool for modeling systems where performance is principally affected by contention for resources. Such systems include computer systems, communication networks and manufacturing lines. In order to effectively use queuing networks as performance models, appropriate software is necessary for definition ofthe networks to be solved, for solution ofthe networks and for examination of the performance measures obtained. The RESearch Queueing Package (RESQ) and the RESearch Queueing Package Modeling Environment (RESQME) form a system for constructing, solving and analyzing extended queueing network models. We refer to the class of RESQ networks as "extended" because of characteristics …

Resqme And Stand-Alone Simulation On A Workstation, Robert F. Gordon Ph.D., Paul G. Loewner, G J. Burkland, J-C Chen, Edward A. Macnair

Faculty Works: MCS (1984-2023)

RC 16037 (#71232)

The Research Queueing Package Modeling Environment (RESQME) provides a graphical environment for constructing and solving extended queueing network models ofmanufacturing systems, for plotting graphs of results and for viewdng animations of models. The modeling environment can be run entirely on a workstation or optionally can execute large simulations on a host system using cooperative processing. In this paper we give a brief introduction to RESQME and to the RESQ modeling elements. We demonstrate how to use the package by constructing a simple model of part of a manufacturing line and solve this model to produce charts of …

Management Information Sources And Corporate Intelligence Systems, Robert F. Gordon Ph.D.

Faculty Works: MCS (1984-2023)

In this book the word “intelligence” is used in several different contexts. Intelligence can refer to the process of gathering data; it can refer to the data itself; and it can refer to the application of knowledge to product useful information from the data. We will see in this chapter how the computer can be used in business to further all three aspects of intelligence: capturing the data, storing the data in an accessible form, and adding value to the data by transforming it into useful information for decision making. This chapter is organized according to these three areas of …

Higher Level Modeling In Resqme, Robert F. Gordon Ph.D., Kurtiss J. Gordon

Faculty Works: MCS (1984-2023)

RC 13554 (#60544)

The RESearch Queueing Package Modeling Environment (RESQME) is a graphical workstation environment for iteratively constructing, running and analyzing models of resource contention systems. It is built on top of the RESearch Queueing Package (RESQ) which provides the functionality to evaluate extended queueing networks. In this paper we describe the high-level building component design for RESQME. The modeler is provided with tools to create his own icons and to associate them with submodels. He then uses ilicsc building blocks to construct his model. This capability extends the funtlaiiicnlal building blocks of RESQ and allows the user to create …

Sight - A Tool For Building Multi-Media Structured-Document Interactive Editing And Formatting Applications, Robert F. Gordon Ph.D., George B. Leeman Jr, Christian L. Cesar, Mark A. Martin

Faculty Works: MCS (1984-2023)

SIGHT is a tool for building applications that edit and format multi-media structured documents. The media supported include text, line graphics, handwriting, images and audio. These information media are maintained in a single integrated hierarchical database. The document architecture models documents as trees in which nodes can be shared, i.e., as directed acyclic graphs. For each document there is a logical (or abstract) represention tree and one or more physical (or layout) representation trees. A physical representation is the result of applying the formatter to a logical representation. Both trees are separate but share document content data. The physical representation …

Application Interface Development Environment, Robert F. Gordon Ph.D., Barry E. Willner

Faculty Works: MCS (1984-2023)

RC 11160 (#50246)

The user of interactive systems must learn a different interface for each system he uses. Furthermore the designer of such systems has limited guidelines to create good user interfaces. We describe an application interface development environment, AIDE, in which one can create and select multiple interfaces easily for a given application, and conversely one can create multiple applications with a given interface. This benefits the end-user by providing the possibility of familiar, even identical, interfaces among wide ranges of products, and this helps the designer by supporting Human Factors testing of interfaces. We formulate a model of …

Concepts And Implications Of Interactive Recovery, Robert F. Gordon Ph.D., George B. Leeman Jr, Clayton H. Lewis

Faculty Works: MCS (1984-2023)

RC 10562 (#47293)

When working interactively on the computer, it is valuable to be able to undo a series of commands in order to return to a previous state. We identify contradictions and limitations in the basic concepts of undo. We introduce three types of undo functions with which we examine the characteristics of undo, explain these limitations, and determine the minimum requirements for a recovery facility. Then we discuss the implications of undo for user interfaces and suggest au.xiliary functions to display and simplify the resulting history structure and to view and recover prior states.