Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) has been one of the fastest-growing areas of operations research during the last decades. The academic attention devoted to MCDA motivated the development of a great variety of approaches and methods within the field. These methods distinguish themselves...

As competition increases, Just-in-Time (JIT) manufacturing becomes an important issue in Portuguese industry. After a brief review of its history, elements, advantages and limitations, this paper presents the results of a postal questionnaire survey about JIT system sent to a sample of...

One important issue in firms’ governance is how to create incentives so that activity centres can become more efficient. In this paper, we first introduce an agency contract where the salary of the manager of an activity centre that produces an intermediate product is dependent of its...

Make-to-order companies, such as job shops, have been extensively studied. Some of those studies emphasise the importance of the workload control in order to improve manufacturing operations. In this paper a multiple decision-making scheme, with the purpose of planning and controlling operations...

Work flows in a job-shop are determined not only by the release load and the time between release factors, but also by the number of accepted orders. There has been extensive research on workload and input-output control aiming at improving the performance of manufacturing operations in...