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,...

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...

We study the effect that consumer returns have on the coordination of a two-echelon supply chain with a single manufacturer and a single retailer that faces stochastic demand and a certain proportion of consumer returns for a single product. Returned goods command a full refund and result in...