For a given planning horizon, workforce composition and set of labor requirements, personnel scheduling often reduces to solving three problems. The first is concerned with the assignment of days off; the second involves assigning workers to shifts during the day; and the third involves the...

This paper presents an algorithm for minimizing the monthly cost of telecommunications networks characterized by multichannel queues with forced balking and hierarchical routing plans. The problem is of major interest to resellers of long distance services and corporate network managers who...

This paper addresses the problem commonly faced by R&D managers of funding redundant R&D tasks across several stages or components of a project. In the proposed methodology it is assumed that task outcomes are random, but that their distribution can be determined from engineering inputs. In...

Using differential game theory, a model is developed to analyze the dynamics accompanying buyer-supplier negotiations. Two cases are examined: the first supposes that the players bargain cooperatively and try to reach Pareto-optimal solutions; the second assumes a noncooperative atmosphere and...

When designing large-scale systems, managers and engineers must often balance the desire for optimality with the need for analytic tractability. When new technologies are involved the problem may be further complicated by the need to conduct local tradeoffs among risk, cost, and time factors. In...

This paper presents an algorithm for efficiently sequencing the cutting operations associated with the manufacture of discrete parts on a CNC machine. The problem is first modeled as an integer program but recast via Lagrangian relaxation as a min-cut problem on a bipartite network. Tight lower...

In an effort to control costs, airlines have begun to concentrate on their maintenance operations as a potential source for savings. Nevertheless, federal regulations and internal safety policies effectively limit cost savings to improvements in productivity and scheduling. The purpose of this...

The paper presents a heuristic for determining the path that maximizes the expected utility of a stochastic acyclic network. The focus is on shortest route problems where a general, nonlinear utility function is used to measure outcomes. For such problems, enumerating all feasible paths is the...

With the goal of fiscal self-sufficiency, the United States Postal Service (USPS) has embarked upon a 10-year program to modernize, and in some cases radically alter, the way it manages and processes the mail. At the heart of this effort is the goal of automating virtually all of the letter mail...