This article addresses the appointment scheduling of outpatient surgeries in a multistage operating room (OR) department with stochastic service times serving multiple patient types. We discuss many challenges, such as the limited availability of multiple resources (e.g., staff, operating rooms,...

Author's abstract. Motivated by many applications such as typical blockbuster product launches, we address in this paper, an inventory/production rollover process between an old and a new product, with a random availability/admissibility date for the new product. The optimization problem...

Of the various media vehicles available for advertising, the internet is the latest and the most rapidly growing, emerging as the ideal medium to promote products and services in the global market. In this article, the authors propose an internet media planning model whose main objective is to...

Transportation is a main component of supply chain competitiveness since it plays a major role in the inbound, inter-facility, and outbound logistics. In this context, assigning and scheduling vehicle routing is a crucial management problem. Despite numerous publications dealing with efficient...

In this study we develop a method that optimally selects online media vehicles and determines the number of advertising impressions that should be purchased and then served from each chosen website. As a starting point, we apply Danaher's [Danaher, P. J. 2007. Modeling page views across multiple...

We focus on architectures with limited flexibility for multi-skill call centers. The context is that of call centers with asymmetric parameters: unbalanced workload, different service requirements, a predominant customer type, unbalanced abandonments and high costs of cross-training. The most...

We consider ordinary and conditional first passage times in a general birth–death process. Under existence conditions, we derive closed-form expressions for the kth order moment of the defined random variables, k ≥ 1. We also give an explicit condition for a birth–death process to be...

In this paper, we analyze a call center with impatient customers. We study how informing customers about their anticipated delays affects performance. Customers react by balking upon hearing the delay announcement and may subsequently renege, particularly if the realized waiting time exceeds the...