Tackling the steep increase in drug costs is an especially important issue among many health care providers and insurers. To entice the clinics to become more cost efficient, the U.S. federal government, as well as many HMOs, have developed various cost containment initiatives recently. However,...

This paper presents a model of a bottleneck facility that performs two distinct types of operations: "regular" and "rework." Each job is subjected to a test after completing the regular operation at the bottleneck. If the job passes the test, then it continues its process downstream. Otherwise,...

Many companies have embarked on initiatives that enable more demand information sharing between retailers and their upstream suppliers. While the literature on such initiatives in the business press is proliferating, it is not clear how one can quantify the benefits of these initiatives and how...

This paper presents a model of a bottleneck facility that performs two distinct types of operations: "regular" and "repair." Both switch-over time and cost are incurred when the facility switches from performing one type of operation to a different type. Upon the completion of a batch of jobs in...

This paper studies the problem of scheduling jobs on parallel machines with setup times. When a machine switches from processing one type of job to another type, setup times are incurred. The problem is to find a feasible schedule for each machine which maximizes the total reward. We study three...

This investigation considers certain issues regarding the optimal design of unpaced production lines with variable processing times. Under certain assumptions, including an equal allocation of buffer storage space between the respective pairs of stations, it is known that the optimal allocation...

Short delivery time and the efficient management of component inventories are two crucial elements that determine the competitiveness of many contract assembly manufacturers, especially in the electronics industry. In this paper, we develop and analyze an optimization model to determine the...

We consider a contract manufacturer who procures multiple components from independent suppliers to produce an assemble-to-order customized product for a client. The unit price of the product depends on the manufacturer's delivery lead time. We explore how the manufacturer can use a...

When a product's price fluctuates at a store, how should rational, cost-minimizing shoppers shop for it? Specifically, how frequently should they visit the store, and how much of the product should they buy when they get there? Would this rational shopping behavior differ across Every Day Low...

We propose a game-theoretical model of a retailer who sells a limited inventory of a product over a finite selling season by using one of two inventory display formats: display all (DA) and display one (DO). Under DA, the retailer displays all available units so that each arriving customer has...