Kim Wheeler and his colleagues discuss how specific project initiatives have been designed and implemented to provide education on HIV/AIDS to Imams in Urumqi city. They argue that these initiatives have built Imams' capacity to provide counselling and pastoral support to individuals affected by...

Using China's 2000 census data, this paper conducts population projection under different fertility scenarios to gauge the likely trends in China's future population change. The range of fertility assumptions captures the uncertainty of current fertility estimates as well as the likely trends...

...

In solving certain optimization problems, the corresponding Lagrangian dual problem is often solved simply because in these problems the dual problem is easier to solve than the original primal problem. Another reason for their solution is the implication of the weak duality theorem which...

We study periodic-review inventory replenishment problems with fixed ordering costs, and show the optimality of (s, S) inventory replenishment policies. Inventory replenishment is instantaneous, i.e., the lead time is zero. We consider several sales mechanisms, e.g., auction mechanisms,...

We consider multiunit Vickrey auctions for procurement in supply chain settings. This is the first paper that incorporates transportation costs into auctions in a complex supply network. We first introduce an auction mechanism that makes simultaneous production and transportation decisions so...

We study a single-product single-location inventory system under periodic review, where excess demand is lost and the replenishment lead time is positive. The performance measure of interest is the long-run average holding cost and lost sales penalty cost. For a large class of demand...

The effective local reuse of physical cash by depository institutions (DIs) is the primary goal of the new cash recirculation policy of the Federal Reserve System (Fed) of the United States. These guidelines, implemented since July 2007, encourage the reuse of cash by (i) penalizing a DI for the...

We consider the problem of scheduling operations in bufferless robotic cells that produce identical parts. The objective is to find a cyclic sequence of robot moves that minimizes the long-run average time to produce a part or, equivalently, maximizes the throughput rate. The robot can be moved...