A formulation is presented for obtaining the optimal kit of parts and tools for on-site equipment repairs, based on the fraction of jobs which can be completed from the contents of the kit. This formulation generalizes previous approaches in that part demands need not be independent and various...

We consider a capital budgeting problem in which each potential project requires the performance of a known set of activities. In general, these sets of activities are not mutually exclusive. However, when a particular activity is common to the requirements of multiple projects, a single...

This paper proposes a detailed model of the costs and benefits to producers and consumers of product warranty. Three common types of product warranty contract are considered. In addition, we explicitly allow for randomness in consumer repurchase behavior and for the possibility of an independent...

Faced with the decision of whether or not to adopt a new technology whose economic value cannot be gauged with certainty, the manager of the firm may elect to decrease the uncertainty by sequentially gathering information (at a unit cost of c 0), updating his prior beliefs in a Bayesian manner....

We propose and test a new pricing procedure for solving large-scale structured linear programs. The procedure interactively solves a relaxed subproblem to identify potential entering basic columns. The subproblem is chosen to exploit special structure, rendering it easy to solve. The effect of...

In this paper, we consider multi-item inventory systems that contain repair kits of spare parts and tools and may include an inventory of spare machines as well. Demands occur in the form of field repair jobs, each requiring some collection of parts and tools for completion. If any required part...

In this paper we study a model that minimizes the sum of production, employment smoothing, and inventory costs subject to a schedule of known demand requirements over a finite time horizon. The three instrumental variables are work force producing at regular-time, work force producing on...

We consider a deterministic, single product, discrete review, finite time horizon inventory problem, called the multiple set-up cost problem. The holding cost in each period is a nondecreasing (and sometimes concave) function. The distinguishing feature of our model is the ordering cost function...

Using the technique employed by the author in an earlier paper, the existence of an optimal stationary policy that can be obtained from the usual functional equation is again established in the presence of a bound (not necessarily polynomial) on the one-period reward of a semi-Markov decision...

In the standard search problem there is an infinite pool of items whose distribution of values is known. A decision maker draws an item from the pool, observes its value, and decides whether to keep it or to draw another item. He can keep only one item, and he seeks the item with the largest...