Organizations are increasingly challenged by dynamism and turbulence that determine conditions of complexity in decision making. The aim of this paper is to highlight the need for a general frame of reference for management and marketing and to justify why adopting a systems approach is adequate...

We present a new approach to understanding credit relationships between commercial banks and quoted firms, and with this approach, examine the temporal change in the structure of the Japanese credit network from 1980 to 2005. At each year, the credit network is regarded as a weighted bipartite...

Minimum-cost spanning tree problems are well-known problems in the operations research literature. Some agents, located at different geographical places, want a service provided by a common supplier. Agents will be served through costly connections. Some part of the literature has focused,...

The car sequencing problem determines sequences of different car models launched down a mixed-model assembly line. To avoid work overloads of workforce, car sequencing restricts the maximum occurrence of labor-intensive options, e.g., a sunroof, by applying sequencing rules. We consider this...

This paper presents a sequential solution method to discover efficient trades in an electricity market model. The market model represents deregulated electricity market consisting of four types of participants: independent power producers, retailers, public utilities, and consumers. Our model is...

Network structure is one parameter that feeds into airline business models. We analyze the networks of 58 European airlines including full service carriers, low cost carriers, regional and charter airlines. Eight network metrics are calculated to describe the various aspects of network...

This paper revisits the classical issue of port-city relationships by applying for the first time network analytical methods to maritime flows connecting cities of the world, over the period 1950-1990. A global matrix of interurban vessel flows was elaborated for about 600 cities using data from...

Over 90 % of the world trade volumes is being carried by sea nowadays. This figure shows the massive importance of the maritime trade routes for the world economy. However, the evolution of their structure over time is a white spot in the modern literature. In this paper we characterise and...