We study three problems on supply chain location and inventory under uncertainty. In Chapter 2, we study the inventory purchasing and allocation problem in a movie rental chain under demand uncertainty. We formulate this problem as a newsvendor-like problem with multiple rental opportunities. We...

Pricing and capacity allocation are two important decisions that a service provider needs to make to maximize service quality and profit. This thesis attempts to address the pricing and capacity planning problems in operations management from the following three aspects.We first study a capacity...

Problem definition: Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are predicted to enter the consumer market in less than a decade. There is currently no consensus on whether their presence will have a positive impact on users and society. The skeptics of automation foresee increased congestion, whereas the...

Problem definition: The configuration of an emergency vehicle fleet (EVF) is critical to ensure that responders have the resources necessary to serve emergencies quickly and help prevent loss of life and property damage. Determining the fleet’s optimal design involves decisions regarding the...

This paper studies a Markovian two-station tandem queueing network with impatient customers. Queueing networks with abandonment are common in many industries, e.g., call centers and healthcare. Therefore, their management has received much attention. The resulting model is a level-dependent...

In the classic revenue management (RM) problem of selling a fixed quantity of perishable inventories to price-sensitive non-strategic consumers over a finite horizon, the optimal pricing decision at any time depends on two important factors: consumer valuation and bid price. The former is...

Many individuals infected with the novel Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) suffer from intestinal infection as well as respiratory infection. These COVID-19-suffering individuals shed virus in their stool, resulting in municipal sewage systems carrying the virus and its genetic remnants. These viral...

Last-mile deliveries contribute to a drastic 28% of the total cost of shipping. Recent technological advancements enable recipients to participate in these deliveries, relieving the cost of this final leg of the supply chain. We present a stylized model to analyze recipient-dependent routing...

In the last two decades, terrorism has become a major issue around the world. We analyze a conflict between a terrorist (Terrorist) and a passive defender (Defender) using a simple game theoretical model. Defender is passive as her actions can only influence the costs (damages) when Terrorist...