In a passenger railroad system, the service planning problem determines the train stopping strategy, taking into consideration multiple train classes and customer origin–destination (OD) demand, to maximize the short-term operational profit of a rail company or the satisfaction levels of the...

Customer requirements play a vital and important role in the design of products and services. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a popular, widely used method that helps translate customer requirements into design specifications. Thus, the foundation for a successful QFD implementation lies in...

In many customer-intensive services, the perceived quality of service decreases in the speed of service. Usually, an increase in service speed induces different marginal reductions in quality for heterogeneous customers. To bring insight into the managerial implications of this difference, we...

Effectiveness involves more than simple efficiency, which is limited to the production process assessment of peer operational units. Effectiveness incorporates variables that are both controllable (i.e. efficiency) and non-controllable (i.e. perceived quality) by the operational units. It is a...

In enterprise systems, making decisions is a complex task for agents at all levels of the organizational hierarchy. To calculate an optimal course of action, an agent has to include uncertainties and the anticipated decisions of other agents, recognizing that they also engage in a stochastic,...