In an attempt to reduce cost while maintaining good customer service, some of the leading manufacturers in the computer industry are delaying product differentiation (by exploiting component commonality) while managing broader product lines. In an environment where demands are stochastic, it...

Supply chain management is likely to play an important role in the digital economy. In this paper, we first describe major issues in traditional supply chain management. Next, we focus our attention on the supply chain issues of visibility, supplier relationships, distribution and pricing,...

Kanban-controlled serial manufacturing systems have been popular in Japan for many years. The analytical intractibility of such systems makes simulation and heuristics essential in studying them. In this paper we develop some theoretical results---reversibility and dominance---that characterize...

Motivated by applications in the manufacturing and service industries, we consider two models for coordinating scheduling with lead-time quotation: a basic model with a single customer type, and an enhanced model where an additional second customer type expects immediate service or production....

We propose a new algorithm for solving integer programming (IP) problems that is based on ideas from algebraic geometry. The method provides a natural generalization of the Farkas lemma for IP, leads to a way of performing sensitivity analysis, offers a systematic enumeration of all feasible...

Effective management of inventories in large-scale production and distribution systems requires methods for bringing model solutions closer to the complexities of real systems. Motivated by this need, we develop simulation-based methods for estimating sensitivities of inventory costs with...

We show that if the analysis of the model of Lee and Tang used standard deviation rather than variance, some nonintuitive predictions of their analysis would be eliminated.

We incorporate information flow between a supplier and a retailer in a two-echelon model that captures the capacitated setting of a typical supply chain. We consider three situations: (1) a traditional model where there is no information to the supplier prior to a demand to him except for past...

To motivate buyers to increase their order quantity, suppliers often rely on a well-established and widely used approach--they offer quantity discounts. This practice is in large part driven to obtain improved economies in transportation through higher truckload utilization. Recently,...