Due to lack of detention capacity (the U.S. government measures capacity by the number of detention beds), tens of thousands of apprehended illegal aliens are released into the U.S. interior each year, instead of being removed from the country. This vulnerability can be exploited by terrorist...

We develop a dynamic model in which Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) servicemembers incur a random amount of combat stress during each month of deployment, develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) if their cumulative stress exceeds a servicemember-specific threshold, and then develop symptoms...

To aid in understanding how best to respond to a bioterror anthrax attack, we analyze a system of differential equations that includes an atmospheric release model, a spatial array of biosensors, a dose-response model, a disease progression model, and a set of spatially distributed tandem queues...

We address the problem of designing multi-item procurement auctions for a monopsonistic buyer in capacity-constrained environments. Using insights from classical auction theory, we construct an optimization-based auction mechanism (Üsmart marketÝ) relying on the dynamic resolution of a linear...

We consider a production stage that produces a single item in a make-to-stock manner. Demand for finished goods is stationary. In each time period, an updated vector of demand forecasts over the forecast horizon becomes available for use in production decisions. We model the sequence of forecast...

Several stages of tests are typically performed in circuit board assembly, and each test consists of one or more noisy measurements. We consider the problem of jointly optimizing the allocation of inspection and the testing policy in a system with a predefined inspection configuration; that is,...

We consider a manufacturer who uses a reverse, or procurement, auction to determine which supplier will be awarded a contract. Each bid consists of a price and a set of nonprice attributes (e.g., quality, lead time). The manufacturer is assumed to know the parametric form of the suppliers' cost...

We define a job-shop scheduling problem with three dynamic decisions: assigning due-dates to exogenously arriving jobs, releasing jobs from a backlog to the shop floor, and sequencing jobs at each of two workstations in the shop. The job-shop is modeled as a multiclass queueing network and the...

The problem of simultaneous due-date setting and priority sequencing is analyzed in the setting of a multiclass M/G/1 queueing system. The objective is to minimize the weighted average due-date lead time (due-date minus arrival date) of jobs subject to a constraint on either the fraction of...

The goal of this paper is to determine if the results for dynamic job-shop scheduling problems are affected by the assumptions made with regard to the processing time distributions and the scheduler's knowledge of the processing times. Three dynamic job-shop scheduling problems (including a...