Collaborative planning deals with aligning the production plans of legally separated companies. This thesis provides an approach for aligning detailed schedules in a scenario where several suppliers are delivering intermediate goods to one manufacturer. For producing the goods in a...

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. October 2010. Major: Conservation Biology. Advisor: Kristen C. Nelson, PhD. 1 computer file (PDF); x, 182 pages, appendices 1-3.

This dissertation studies models for locating facilities in time varying demandenvironments. We describe the characteristics of the time varying demand that motivatethe analysis of our location models in terms of total demand and the changein value and location of the demand of each customer....

This dissertation consists of three independent sections: In the first part, focusing on the auto industry we look at the challenges and solution strategies of employing build-to-order (BTO) with global supply. We consider some familiar tools for managing domestic supply and exploit them for...

Prediction in financial domains is notoriously difficult for a number ofreasons. First, theories tend to be weak or non-existent, which makesproblem formulation open ended by forcing us to consider a large numberof independent variables and thereby increasing the dimensionality ofthe search...

Stock markets are affected by many interrelated factors such as economics and politics at both national and international levels. Predicting stock indices and determining the set of relevant factors for making accurate predictions are complicated tasks. Neural networks are one of the popular...

Some aspects of economic systems (eg, nonlinearity, qualitative variables) are intractable when incorporated into models. The widespread practice of excluding them (or greatly limiting their role) produces deviations of unknown size and form between the resulting models and the reality they...

A major cause of deforestation in Lao PDR is associated with commercial timber harvesting. While there exists a legal timber industry, timber harvesting in Laos is often illegal. Little information is available regarding the illegal Lao timber industry. However, it would appear that both illegal...

Incremental learning has been widely addressed in the machine learning literature to cope with learning tasks where the learning environment is ever changing or training samples become available over time. However, most research work explores incremental learning with statistical algorithms or...

Incremental learning has been widely addressed in the machine learning literature to cope with learning tasks where the learning environment is ever changing or training samples become available over time. However, most research work explores incremental learning with statistical algorithms or...