Managers of agricultural firms that process specialty crops into consumer products operate in a unique environment that affords little control over uncertainties, making the discovery of optimal sourcing decisions especially complex. These complexities make the explicit incorporation of...

In recent decades, warranties have become more important in deciding the overall product quality. In this thesis, we use warranty as the planning tool to improve product quality during the customer phase. We develop an analytical framework that consists of systematic planning methods to reduce...

All organizations are interested in meeting or exceeding organization performance metrics. Resource allocation, risk management, and process improvement techniques (i.e. Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing, etc.) are common approaches to improve organization performance. Although the operations aspect...

Since the beginning of deregulation, natural gas markets have been opened up to competition, with the creation of open access to pipeline transportation and storage and unbundling of sales from pipeline transportation. However, although there is strong evidence that replacing regulation with...

This dissertation aims to achieve two goals. The first is to model the strategic interactions of firms that own cascaded reservoir-hydro plants in oligopolistic and mixed oligopolistic hydrothermal electricity generation markets. Although competition in thermal generation has been extensively...

In this research, we study a general multi-period inventory model for a buyer and his supplier. We propose an adjustment contract to allow the buyer to adjust his inventory levels upwards or downwards. Thus, the buyer has more flexibility in inventory control so as to reduce his inventory risk....

Supply chain management is very critical in today's global business environment. With the development of modern communication methods the costs of communication have gone down considerably and have opened new horizons for improvement in the domain of supply chain management. The direct/indirect...

In a typical decentralized supply chain, i.e., one with multiple loci of control, the dependencies between the entities are formalized through contracts. The parameters over which contracts are observed in a typical buyer-seller system include price, periodicity of ordering, quantity...

The acceptance of the nodal pricing system as a mechanism to organize wholesale power markets has exposed both generators and consumers to unprecedented volatile prices. Most of the volatility follows from the method for valuing congestion on the network. Generators and wholesale consumers pay...

Energy plays a vital role in the world today, driving industry and allowing for technologies ingrained throughout the routines of daily life. The complex interactions, evolution, long time scales of change, and critical nature of the energy system makes modeling and analysis crucial to...