The value chain for energy and other commodities entails physical conversions through refineries, power plants, storage facilities, and transportation and other capital-intensive infrastructure. When the operation of such commodity conversion assets occurs alongside liquid markets for the input...

Energy plays a fundamental role in both manufacturing and services, and natural gas is rapidly becoming a key energy source worldwide. Facilitating this emergence is an expanding network of ocean-going vessels that enable the matching of natural gas supply and demand on a global scale. This is...

This paper considers the so-called warehouse problem with both space and injection/withdrawal capacity limits. This is a foundational problem in the merchant management of assets for the storage of commodities, such as energy sources and natural resources. When the commodity spot price evolves...

Pipelines play a critical role in matching the supply and demand of natural gas. The pricing of their capacity is an important problem in practice for pipeline companies and the users of this capacity, which include shippers such as natural gas merchants, producers, and local distribution...

While inventory- and revenue-management problems can be represented as Markov decision process (MDP) models, in some cases the well-known dynamic-programming curse of dimensionality makes it computationally prohibitive to solve them exactly. An alternative solution, called here the...

Check processing institutions are being forced to downsize their workforce to cut cost and improve the efficiency of their operations as a result of continued growth of electronic payments, a consequence of the increasing popularity of debit/credit cards and use of online banking. For these...

Commodity merchants use real option models to manage their operations. A central element of such a model is its underlying operating policy. We focus on network contracts for the transport capacity of natural gas pipelines, specific energy conversion assets. Practitioners commonly manage these...

This paper contributes to an emerging literature that brings the constant elasticity of substitution (CES) specification of the production function into the analysis of business cycle fluctuations. Using US data, we estimate by Bayesian methods a medium-sized DSGE model with a CES rather than...

This paper develops a practical miniature and portable vapor compression refrigerator. The dimensions of the refrigerator are 190mm×190mm×100mm and its weight is 2.75kg. It integrates a miniature variable speed rotary compressor with a miniature electronic expansion valve (EXV) operating in...