Merchandise planning is the process conducted by a retailer to ensure that the right product is available to the customer at the right place, time, quantity and price. This process involves selecting the products the retailer will carry and determining the purchase quantities of these products....

We present a framework to analyze the process location and product distribution problem with uncertain yields for a large multinational food processing company. This problem consists in selecting the location of processes, the assignment of products and the distribution of production quantities...

We model and analyze product reusability (executed through either refurbishing or remanufacturing), in the presence of supply disruptions. By assuming that consumers could exchange their used units for new ones and firms can attract consumers to do so through an exchange fee, we develop a...

We consider the problem of minimizing daily expected resource usage and overtime costs across multiple parallel resources such as anesthesiologists and operating rooms, which are used to conduct a variety of surgical procedures at large multi-specialty hospitals. To address this problem, we...

We consider a competitive version of the traditional aggregate production planning model with capacity constraints. In the general case, multiple products are produced by a group of competing producers with limited capacities. Production quantities, prices and consequently profits depend on...

We consider the anesthesiologist staff planning problem for operating services departments in large multi-specialty hospitals. In this problem, the planner makes monthly and daily decisions to minimize total costs. The monthly decisions include deciding how many anesthesiologists should be on...

We consider the problem of optimizing the location and size of buffers in semi-continuous manufacturing processes. This problem is formulated as a non-linear integer program that determines the optimal buffer size for individual stages and allocates tanks to those stages in order to minimize...

When suppliers (i.e., contract manufacturers) fail to comply with environmental or safety regulations, several non-governmental agencies and consumer activists put pressure on the buyers (customers) to take necessary actions to improve supplier compliance. Due to concerns over negative image and...

Eppen (1979) showed that inventory costs in a centralized system increase with the correlation between multivariate normal product demands. Using multivariate stochastic orders, we generalize this statement to arbitrary distributions. We then describe methods to construct models with arbitrary...

In this paper, we study the problem of managing limited retail shelf or storage space for basic products by considering two inventory management strategies: space dedication and space sharing. When space is dedicated to each product, there is more flexibility in planning as different products...