This article is motivated by the case of a company manufacturing industrial equipment that faces two types of demand: on the one hand there are the so-called regular orders for installations or refurbishing of existing facilities, these orders have a relatively long lead time; on the other hand...

Independent firms may be interested in collaborative alliances in order to reduce their costs and risks, among others benefits. Particularly in operations, different firms can gain from economies of scale by pooling their production resources. Even though there may be a significant reduction of...

In this paper, we present a bounding methodology that allows to compute a tight lower bound on the cycle time of fork--join queueing networks with blocking and with general service time distributions. The methodology relies on two ideas. First, probability masses fitting (PMF) discretizes the...

A new alternative in the analysis of manufacturing systems with finite buffers is presented. We propose and study a new approach in order to build tractable phase-type distributions, which are required by state-of-the-art analytical models. Called "probability masses fitting" (PMF), the approach...

We consider the problem of designing a 2-stations Automated GuidedVehicle System (AGVS). The AGV System consists of a pool of vehicles that transports products from one station to the other station through an unidirectional guidepath. We seek a model to estimate the minimal number of vehicles...

This paper demonstrates the potential of a decision-support system developed for Belgium by a consortium of universities and a private firm, in the framework of a public call by the Ministry of the Interior. The system is designed to provide the Belgian emergency management administration with a...

This paper introduces a novel way to measure the variability of order flows in supply chains, the peakedness. The peakedness can be used to measure the variability assuming the order flow is a general point pro- cess. We show basic properties of the peakedness, and demonstrate its computation...

In a stochastic environment pooling naturally leads to economies of scale, but heterogeneity can also create variability. In this article, we investigate this trade-off in the case of a manufacturing environment. Pooling for queueing systems has been widely investigated while much less attention...

Among the recent innovative strategies for coping with product variety and market risk some firms have partnered to leverage economies of scale and risk pooling by sharing manufacturing capacity. In this paper we study how to structure such a joint venture to achieve full efficiency at low...

In this paper, we present a bounding methodology that allows to compute a tight lower boundon the cycle time of fork--join queueing networks with blocking and with general service timedistributions. The methodology relies on two ideas. First, probability masses fitting (PMF)discretizes the...