This paper presents a profit-oriented shift scheduling approach for inbound contact centers. The focus is on systems in which multiple agent classes with different qualifications serve multiple customer classes with different needs. We assume that customers are impatient, abandon if they have to...

In this paper we study a continuous time, optimal stochastic investment problem under limited resources in a market with N firms. The investment processes are subject to a time-dependent stochastic constraint. Rather than using a dynamic programming approach, we exploit the concavity of the...

We consider the classical duality operators for convex objects suchas the polar of a convex set containing the origin, the dual norm,the Fenchel-transform of a convex function and the conjugate of aconvex cone. We give a new, sharper, unified treatment of the theoryof these operators, deriving...

Contemporary financial stochastic programs typically involve a trade-offbetween return and (downside)-risk. Using stochastic programming we characterize analytically (rather than numerically) the optimal decisions that follow from characteristic single-stage and multi-stage versions of such...

We address a stochastic multi-period facility location problem with two customer segments, each having distinct service requirements. While customers in one segment receive preferred service, customers in the other segment accept delayed deliveries as long as lateness does not exceed a...

This paper presents a linear programming approach to analyze and optimize flow lines with limited buffer capacities and stochastic processing times. The basic idea is to solve a huge but simple linear program that models an entire simulation run of a multi-stage production process in discrete...

This paper introduces a method for solving numerical dynamic stochastic optimization problems that avoids rootfinding operations. The idea is applicable to many microeconomic and macroeconomic problems, including life cycle, buffer-stock, and stochastic growth problems. Software is provided.

In the presented paper we introduce an approach to assess particular economic effects which may arise with bringing mobile technologies into the field of sales and distribution. The research problem posed here comprises quite a special case where sales operations of a company are carried by its...

Threshold Accepting (TA) is a powerful optimization heuristic from the class of stochastic local search algorithms. It has been applied successfully to different optimization problems in statistics and econometrics, including the uniform design problem. Using the latter application as example,...