Many retailers find it useful to partition customers into multiple classes based on certain characteristics. We consider the case in which customers are primarily distinguished by whether they are willing to wait for backordered demand. A firm that faces demand from customers that are...

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...

For the past several years, competing resource demands within BPA have forced the Agency to stretch Operations, Maintenance and Replacement (OM R) resources. There is a large accumulation of tasks that were not accomplished when scheduled. Maintenance and replacements and outages, due to...

Search and optimization in the context of blackbox objective function evaluation subject to blackbox constraints satisfaction is the thesis of this work. The SEARCH (Search Envisioned As Relation and Class Hierarchizing) framework introduced by Kargupta (1995) offered an alternate perspective of...

The SEARCH (Search Envisioned As Relation and Class Hierarchizing) framework developed elsewhere (Kargupta, 1995; Kargupta and Goldberg, 1995) offered an alternate perspective toward blackbox optimization -- optimization in presence of little domain knowledge. The SEARCH framework investigates the...

The development of an expert system for instrumentation and control operations is sometimes particularly difficult because (a) the expert system must implement the consensus opinion of a group of several human experts in all circumstances, (b) there may be 20 or more complex, dynamic,...

This dissertation addresses the impact of strategic consumer behavior on different pricing strategies. Generally speaking, consumers are strategic in that they correctly anticipate a firms' actions and the behavior of other consumers when they make purchasing decisions. In the context of this...

Probabilistic choice models are used by economists, psychologists, and marketing scientists in the analysis of choice behavior involving discrete, or quantal choice alternatives. The most widely-used of these is the multinomial logit model, which is a special case of the Luce model. These models...

Strategic planning can be a critical business process for today’s organizations, especially for IT organizations that are facing continually changes in technology. This research was designed to investigate IT organizations’ use of strategic planning and determine if the organization uses...

In this dissertation, I developed a unified framework for the modeling, analysis, and computation of solutions to both international financial problems with intermediation as well as to global supply chains through the medium of networks. The framework that I developed can handle as many...