This paper deals with automated guided vehicles (AGVs) which transport containers between the quai and the stack on automated container terminals. The focus is on the assigment of transportation jobs to AGVs within a terminal control system operating in real time. First, we describe a rather...

In manual order picking systems, order pickers walk or drive through a distribution warehouse in order to collect items which are requested by (internal or external) customers. In order to perform these operations efficiently, it is usually required that customer orders are combined into (more...

The sales territory alignment problem deals with the question of how to align a number of sales coverage units (usually zip-codes or political districts) to sales territories. These sales territories are usually aligned in a way that they are almost balanced relative to one or several attributes...

Fixed transaction costs and delivery lags are important costs of international trade. These costs lead firms to import infrequently and hold substantially larger inventories of imported goods than domestic goods. Using multiple sources of data, we document these facts. We then show that a...

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model that integrates inventory and labor decisions We extend a model of inventory behavior to include a detailed specification of the role of labor input in the production process and of the costs associated with it In particular we distinguish between...

The most recent optimization algorithm for (s, S) order policies with continuous demand was developed byFedergruen and Zipkin (1985). This was also the first efficient algorithm, which uses policy iteration instead ofdiscretization. Zheng and Federgruen (1991) developed an even more efficient...

This paper extends a fundamental result about single-item inventory systems. This approachallows more general performance measures, demand processes and order policies, and leads toeasier analysis and implementation, than prior research. We obtain closed form expressions forthe Laplace...

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model that integrates inventory and labor decisions. We extend a model of inventory behavior to include a detailed specification of the role of labor input in the production process and of the costs associated with it. In particular, we distinguish...

Real rigidities that limit the responsiveness of real marginal cost to output are a key ingredient of sticky price models necessary to account for the dynamics of output and inflation. We argue here, in the spirit of Bils and Kahn (2000), that the behavior of marginal cost over the cycle is...

Multiple delivery specifications exist on nearly all commodity futures contracts. Sellers are typically allowed to choose among several grades of the underlying commodity. On the delivery day, the futures price converges to the spot price of the cheapest-to-deliver grade rather than to that of...