Can there be side effects of improved forecast accuracy? In this study of the Belgian food retailer Colruyt Group, we show how adding explanatory variables (such as promotions, weather forecasts, national events, etc.) increases forecast accuracy compared to methods using only historical sales...

By digitizing operations, companies may replace manual work with increased automation, but they may also augment human work through smarter execution. The authors present a conceptual framework that distinguishes the different levels of digitization, automation, and intelligence. This framework...

We investigate how volume flexibility, defined by a sourcing cost premium beyond a base capacity, at a local responsive supplier impacts the decision to reshore supply. The buyer also has access to a remote supplier that is cheaper with no restrictions on volume flexibility. We show that with...

We propose a new policy architecture to apply deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with a continuous action representation. This contrasts most current DRL implementations that make use of a discrete action space. The latter are not scalable to large problems. To obtain feasible discrete actions,...

The literature is reviewed on buffer stock allocation strategies in serial production lines. A number of experiments are conducted to analyse the behaviour of work‐in‐process inventory given that the objective is to maximise throughput. Both balanced and unbalanced lines are examined. The...

We present a model for assigning server time slots to different classes of patients. The objective is to minimize the total expected weighted waiting time of a patient (where different patient classes may be assigned different weights). A bulk service queueing model is used to obtain the...