We consider two risk-neutral firms (A and B) that can procure raw materials via a forward contract and a volatile spot market. Both firms possess market power, and their trading behavior can influence the spot price of raw materials. They use these raw materials to produce seasonable products...

With the boom of e-commerce, express delivery has been increasingly regarded as a bottleneck and key factor for achieving success. Additionally, whether to include such express delivery service or not is an important yet outstandingly unsolved problem for online retailers. In this regard, this...

This paper investigates a decentralized assembly system that consists of one manufacturer and multiple suppliers who produce the complementary components. In a single selling season, the manufacturer initially sets a vendor inventory liability period (VILP) to control the suppliers' delivery...

Parallel machine structure is very common in modern production systems. Its performance sometimes has a decisive impact on the whole productivity. In this paper, we consider a parallel-machine scheduling problem where each machine is subject to periodic maintenance. Instead of assuming all the...

This study investigates how random component yields can influence pricing and production decisions under pull and push contracts. We consider a decentralized assembly system where a manufacturer procures complementary components from two suppliers with random yields. We first characterize the...

Job shop scheduling with a bank of machines in parallel is important from both theoretical and practical points of review. Here we focus on a flexible job shop scheduling problem of minimizing the makespan in a two-center job shop, where the first center consists of one machine and the second...

We investigate a manufacturer's information acquisition and subsidization strategies in a supply chain featuring two competing retailers who sell substitutable products and have private demand information. The manufacturer can decide whether to acquire demand information at a cost and further...

Flow shop scheduling is common in modern lean production systems. In practice, jobs in flow shops can arrive at irregular times. However, scheduling that considers such irregularity has not been adequately investigated in the literature. In this paper, we examine the scheduling of n-jobs in an...

This study investigates the strategic effect of return policies in a dual-channel supply chain, in which a manufacturer can sell products directly to end customers and indirectly via an independent retailer. The manufacturer decides whether to implement a return policy in either the direct or...