This paper presents a decision-theoretic model of the bond scheduling problem faced by a multi-subsidiary holding company such as AT&T or GTE. The objective is to minimize the total cost of bond flotations across all subsidiaries, where total cost is the sum of the yield paid to investors, the...

A simple algorithm is developed for the problem of assigning days off to full-time staff given a cyclic seven-day demand pattern. The formulation assumes that employees are entitled to two consecutive days off each week and that the objective is to find a minimum staff size capable of meeting...

Recent research studies of job shop scheduling have begun to examine the interaction between sequencing priorities and the method of assigning due-dates. This paper surveys the tactical aspects of this interaction, focusing primarily on average tardiness as a measure of scheduling effectiveness....

We consider the situation of a single item having a deterministic, time-varying demand pattern. Production lot sizes, so as to minimize the total of setup and carrying costs, are to be determined subject to production capacity restrictions that can vary with time. Two important theorems...

We develop and test an optimization model for maximizing response rates for online marketing research survey panels. The model consists of (1) a decision tree predictive model that classifies panelists into "states" and forecasts the response rate for panelists in each state and (2) a linear...

We examine the problem of scheduling days off in continuous (seven-day-a-week) operations under a variety of day-off policies, when demand for manpower is N on weekdays and n on weekend days. We consider a number of policies governing employee work assignments and in each case we give a formula...

A rolling schedule is formed by solving a multi-period problem and implementing only the first period's decisions; one period later the multi-period model is updated and the process repeated. In this paper, we provide a general framework for analyzing rolling schedules, and we examine...

We examine the effects of component commonality on optimal safety stock levels in a two-product, two-level inventory model. The criterion is to minimize system safety stock subject to a service level constraint. Although our model is specialized, its analysis provides insights not available in...

The deterministic multi-product single-machine production and inventory problem is one of the simplest models in which production and inventory factors interact. There is at present no algorithm available which solves the problem optimally, and several different types of approaches have been...

We investigate how to allocate work in stochastic assembly systems so as to maximize throughput. We use Markov models for systems with exponential processing times and simulation-based methods for other probability distributions. We find that assembly systems should be unbalanced in the...