Commodity prices often fluctuate significantly from one purchasing opportunity to the next. These fluctuations allow firms to benefit from forward buying (buying for future demand in addition to current demand) when prices are low. We propose a combined heuristic to determine the optimal number...

Product variety is one of the most important advantages in highly competitive markets. However, excessive product proliferation's reducing the profit margin has caused increased focus on developing a management method for maximal profit. In a closed-loop supply chain, product proliferation...

This paper addresses a nonpreemptive single machine scheduling problem where all jobs have a common due date and have zero ready time. The scheduling objective is to minimize mean squared deviation (MSD) of job completion times about the due date. This nonregular measure of performance is...