There are over 20 'components' in an international door-to-door transportation, ranging from warehousing and distribution, to forwarding, documentation, transportation, customs clearance, etc.. As tariffs in ocean transportation tend to converge due to competition and service homogenization,...

In business and in macroeconomics it is common practice to use econo- metric models to generate forecasts. These models can take any degree of sophistication. Sometimes it is felt by an expert that the model-based fore- cast needs adjustment. This paper makes a plea for a formal approach to such...

We consider the Nelder and Mead Simplex Method for the optimization of stochastic simulation models. Existing and new adaptive extensions of the Nelder and Mead simplex method designed to improve the accuracy and consistency of the observed best point are studied. We compare the performance of...

The subject of measuring the performance of registries has been a topic of policy discussions in recent years on the regional level due to the recast of the European Union (EU) port state control (PSC) directive which introduces incentives for flags which perform better. Since the current method...

This paper derives results for the temporal aggregation of multivariate GARCH processes in the general vector specification. It is shown that the class of weak multivariate GARCH processes is closed under temporal aggregation. Fourth moment characteristics turn out to be crucial for the low...

This paper illustrates that salient features of a panel of time series of annual citations can be captured by a Bass type diffusion model. We put forward an extended version of this diffusion model, where we consider the relation between key characteristics of the diffusion process and features...

The Dutch national road network has been developed over several decades. In the past, roads were constructed according to the then current spatial and transportation planning philosophies. Because the existing road network is a result of a long process of successive developments, the question...

A maintenance activity carried out on a technical system often involves a system-dependent set-up cost that is the same for all maintenance activities carried out on that system. Grouping activities thus saves costs since execution of a group of activities requires only one set-up. By now, there...

In this paper we define and compare Reverse Logistics definitions. We start by giving an understanding framework of Reverse Logistics: the why-what-how. By this means, we put in context the driving forces for Reverse Logistics, a typology of return reasons, a classification of products,...

There is substantial evidence that several economic time series variables experience occasional structural breaks. At the same time, for some of these variables there is evidence of long memory. In particular, it seems that inflation rates have both features. One cause for this finding may be...