Emerging collaborative consumption business models have shown promise in terms of both generating business opportunities and enhancing the efficient use of resources. In the transportation domain, car sharing models are being adopted on a mass scale in major metropolitan areas worldwide. This...

Delivery of products and services relies on well-managed operations. In designing large-scaled supply chain and service systems, locations of key facilities are a critical decision, as these facilities form the backbone of operations of these systems. For example, a key to effective supply chain...

The benefits of inventory risk pooling are well known and documented. Eppen (1979) and Corbett and Rajaram (2006) prove that the expected costs of a centralized system are increasing in the degree of (positive) dependence of demand in an idealized newsvendor setting. Using the supermodular...

Key to the mass adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is the establishment of successful business models based on sound understanding of consumer behavior in adopting this new technology. In this paper, we study the impact of two major barriers to mass adoption of EVs: (i) range anxiety, the...

In this paper, we develop distribution-free models that solve the appointment sequencing and scheduling problems by assuming only moments information of job durations. We show that our min-max appointment scheduling models, which minimize the worst-case expected waiting and overtime costs out of...

Managing appointments for service systems with random job durations is a challenging task. We consider a class of appointment planning problems that involve two sets of decisions: job sequencing, i.e., determining the order in which a list of jobs should be performed by the server, and...

In this paper, we study the optimal location decision for a network of alternative fuel stations (AFS) servicing a new market where the demand rate for the refueling service can be learned over time. In the presence of demand learning, the firm needs to make a decision, whether to actively learn...