In an effort to control costs, airlines have begun to concentrate on their maintenance operations as a potential source for savings. Nevertheless, federal regulations and internal safety policies effectively limit cost savings to improvements in productivity and scheduling. The purpose of this...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate an one-supplier-one-retailer supply chain that experiences a disruption in demand during the planning horizon. While demand uncertainty has long been a central research issue in supply chain management, little attention has been given to disruptions...

The paper presents a heuristic for determining the path that maximizes the expected utility of a stochastic acyclic network. The focus is on shortest route problems where a general, nonlinear utility function is used to measure outcomes. For such problems, enumerating all feasible paths is the...

With the goal of fiscal self-sufficiency, the United States Postal Service (USPS) has embarked upon a 10-year program to modernize, and in some cases radically alter, the way it manages and processes the mail. At the heart of this effort is the goal of automating virtually all of the letter mail...

This paper addresses the problem commonly faced by R&D managers of funding redundant R&D tasks across several stages or components of a project. In the proposed methodology it is assumed that task outcomes are random, but that their distribution can be determined from engineering inputs. In...

Using differential game theory, a model is developed to analyze the dynamics accompanying buyer-supplier negotiations. Two cases are examined: the first supposes that the players bargain cooperatively and try to reach Pareto-optimal solutions; the second assumes a noncooperative atmosphere and...

When designing large-scale systems, managers and engineers must often balance the desire for optimality with the need for analytic tractability. When new technologies are involved the problem may be further complicated by the need to conduct local tradeoffs among risk, cost, and time factors. In...