In this paper the authors present an interpretive discussion of the scope for management scientists to make a more effective contribution to improving the performance of the Canadian economy, by active involvement in management and decision making in Canadian institutions, both private and...

A general mathematical model is formulated for the problem of scheduling production quantities for a group of products with seasonal stochastic demand through a common production facility. It is assumed that revised forecasts of total demand over the season for each product become available as...

Management Science is not unique to any particular country or set of countries. It is comprised of processes, techniques and tools that are potentially applicable to problems found in a wide range of social and economic systems. The scope and style of management science practices vary from...

In the American economy practically no penalty for fluctuations in placing orders is incurred by the ordering company, even though such fluctuations are costly to manufacturers and to the economy as a whole. In particular, dynamic pricing by suppliers, which would communicate information on...

This research focuses on the effect of setup time on lot sizing. The setting is the Capacitated Lot Sizing Problem (the single-machine lot sizing problem) with nonstationary costs, demands, and setup times. A Lagrangian relaxation of the capacity constraints of CLSP allows it to be decomposed...

This paper concerns the modeling of low inventory lines. Currently, most models assume that processing times are independent. We consider the differences in behavior of workers in low- and high-inventory production lines. Using a laboratory experiment we show that workers speed up when they are...

In practice, most multi-echelon inventory systems are managed using adaptations of single location methods. This paper shows that such methods can be dramatically inferior to methods designed to take advantage of a system's structure. This is especially true in repair parts inventory systems...

This paper investigates a multi-item, multi-level production scheduling problem with linear costs and production and inventory constraints at one key facility. Two multi-item problems---one in which the constraint was on shipping capability and one in which there was a final stage bottleneck...

This research addresses a system of flexible worker assignments in a setting where there are more workers than machines. When organized using this system, a production line balances itself by shifting the workloads continuously and automatically in response to changes in the state of the system....

The problem of determining both lot sizes and repeating sequences for N products on one facility is difficult due to the combinatorial and continuous nature of the problem. The work that has been done on the problem has made various assumptions ("zero-switch rule" or "equal lot size," for...