To mitigate the threat that terrorists smuggle weapons of mass destruction into the United States through maritime containers, the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) inspects containers upon entry to domestic ports. Inspection-driven congestion is costly, and CBP provides...

A U.S. law mandating nonintrusive imaging and radiation detection for 100% of U.S.-bound containers at international ports has provoked widespread concern that the resulting congestion would hinder trade significantly. Using detailed data on container movements, gathered from two large...

This discussion demonstrates the application of discrete optimal control theory to production planning problems. In particular we show that most of the previous models which have appeared in the literature on production planning (scheduling, smoothing and work force balancing) can be...

This paper develops a methodology for showing how forecast horizons for stochastic planning problems relate to the planning procedures and the information system within the organization. To illustrate the approach we have chosen a relatively straightforward production problem where the firm can...

This paper analyzes the optimal procurement, processing, and production decisions of a meat-processing company (hereafter, a "packer") in a beef supply chain. The packer processes fed cattle to produce two beef products, program (premium) boxed beef and commodity boxed beef, in fixed...

This paper presents a model of an (s, S) inventory system in which there are two priority classes of customers. The model treats excess demands as lost sales and can accommodate an arbitrary deterministic lead time. After considering the associated Markov-chain model, an approximate,...

This paper surveys the underlying theory and practice in the use of options in support of emerging business-to-business (B2B) markets. Such options, on both capacity and output, play an important role in integrating long- and short-term contracting between multiple buyers and sellers in such...

In this paper we study the Common Cycle Scheduling Problem (CCSP). This classic production problem is concerned with determining optimal production lot sizes for a given set of products using a common facility. CCSP is based on scheduling all products using a common (base) cycle time, so that...

This paper develops a framework for analyzing business-to-business (B2B) transactions and supply chain management based on integrating contract procurement markets with spot markets using capacity options and forwards. The framework is motivated by the emergence of B2B exchanges in several...