Commodity merchants use real option models to manage their operations. A central element of such a model is its underlying operating policy. We focus on network contracts for the transport capacity of natural gas pipelines, specific energy conversion assets. Practitioners commonly manage these...

Check processing institutions are being forced to downsize their workforce to cut cost and improve the efficiency of their operations as a result of continued growth of electronic payments, a consequence of the increasing popularity of debit/credit cards and use of online banking. For these...

Single capacitated production facilities where multiple products are produced pose particularly challenging scheduling problems. The traditional economic lot size calculation reflects the optimum production batch size in the light of the tradeoff between inventory carrying costs and order...