A major problem in forecasting is estimating the time of some future event. Traditionally, forecasts are designed to minimize an error cost function that is evaluated once, possibly when the event occurs and forecast accuracy can be determined. However, in many applications forecast error costs...

This paper studies the problem of scheduling jobs on parallel machines with setup times. When a machine switches from processing one type of job to another type, setup times are incurred. The problem is to find a feasible schedule for each machine which maximizes the total reward. We study three...

Technological advances in both the manufacturing and office sectors have emphasized the need to link processors and communications equipment into Local Area Networks (LANs) to facilitate communication and promote resource sharing. Interviews with designers and users of LANs revealed that a...

This note establishes a class of best possible upper bounds for the Dynamic Plant Layout Problem (DPLP) examined by Rosenblatt (Rosenblatt, M. J. 1986. The dynamics of plant layout. Management Sci. 32 76--86.) in this journal. We use the notation of that paper.

Econometric and dynamic programming analysis is used to derive optimal operating rules for water resources used in electricity generation. The methodology is applied to an actual mixed power system with interconnected thermal and hydro plants. Results obtained are compared with the electricity...

The problem of plant layout has generally been treated as a static one. In this paper, we deal with the dynamic nature of this problem. Both optimal and heuristic procedures are developed for this problem and are based on a dynamic programming formulation. The use of one of these approaches...

We develop an optimization procedure for assisting decision-makers in the allocation of resources for cleaning up a specific oil spill. The objective function is to minimize a weighted combination of spill-specific response and damage costs. Inputs to this problem include information about the...