Competitive pressures on power plants have seen them attempting to reduce their operating expenses for profitable operations. In India, the plants use wagons of the Indian Railways to transport coal from the mines (in case of domestic coal) or from the ports (in case of imported coal). Once...

Mathematical programming techniques were used in the steel industry as early as 1958, and many applications of optimization in steel production have been reported since then. In this survey, we summarize published applications in the largest steel plants by type, including national steel...

In this paper, we present a simulation model of a blast furnace. In a blast furnace the quality and productivity of the output (hot metal) depends on a large number of input variables and operating variables. The complex interactions of technological and financial variables have been simulated...

Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has been shown to be an efficient tool for non-parametric modeling of data in a variety of different contexts where the output is a non-linear function of the inputs. These include business forecasting, credit scoring, bond rating, business failure prediction,...

We describe how a generic multi-period optimization-based decision support system (DSS) can be used for strategic planning in process industries. Built on five fundamental elements – materials, facilities, activities, time periods and storage areas – this DSS requires little direct knowledge...

Asset - Liability management is one of the most critical tasks for any financial institution for determining its cushion against the risk and the net returns. The problem of asset liability management for an insurance company requires matching the cash inflows from premium collections and...

Insurance as a financial instrument has been used for a long time. The dramatic increase in competition within the insurance sector (in terms of providers coupled with awareness for the need for insurance) has concomitantly resulted in more policy options being available in the market. The...

With increasing liquidity of the Indian sovereign debt market from 1997, it has become possible to estimate the term structure in India. However, several frictions that cause individual securities to be priced differently from the "average" pricing in the market characterize the market. In such...

We introduce how a generic multi-period optimization based decision support system (DSS) can be used for strategic and operational planning in a company with five fundamental elements, namely Materials, Facilities, Activities, Times and Storage-Areas. This DSS which optimizes the company’s...