The attainment and enforcement of air quality standards is a complicated process. A crucial element in this process is the measurement of ambient air quality. The selection of locations for a limited number of monitors and their sampling frequencies is an important problem in the design of a...

This paper examines issues in building decision support models for budgeting nursing workforce requirements in a hospital. We determine regular-time, overtime, and agency workforce levels for various skill classes in a budget cycle. We introduce a family of eight models ranging from a...

This paper examines an important scheduling problem resulting from a new process for continuously casting steel. A master slab caster produces slabs which are wider than customer needs, and therefore, these must be ripped longitudinally at least once before they can be processed to a...

This paper reports a real-life application of linear programming to corporate policy making. The model used in the study was designed to analyze the company's marketing and production policies. The model structure is unique, incorporating features of product mix, sequencing and blending models....

In this study we formulate a multi-regional single time period linear goal programming model for agricultural planning in a developing economy. In addition to specifying different levels of input and output for each activity, we describe explicit crop interdependencies which account for...

Average variable costs are not directly defined for multiple products produced in complex production settings. An activity analysis model can be used for basic cost measurement and for building a linear programming model of manufacturing operations. The model can then be used not only to compute...

The efficient operation of a beef cattle feedlot is governed by the purchase and selling weights and prices of the animals and by the feeding system used. The optimal feeding system will involve feeding least cost rations to animals at every stage in the production process. A method is described...

This paper describes the development of an operations management model and its implementation in a simulation mode in order to study the effects of alternative organizational designs and person/work assignment criteria on the utilization of the technological and human resources of a firm. The...

Work force scheduling research over the last few years has concentrated on the shift scheduling problem in service oriented firms (telephone operators, postal employees, bank encoders, etc.). In all cases, the authors were primarily interested in the evaluating procedures (optimal and heuristic)...

In recent years, labour negotiations for seven-day-week organizations such as hospitals, mining companies and chemical industries have seen an increased emphasis on improving shift schedules. This paper gives an exact lower bound on the number of workers required to satisfy such primary...