Explosive growth in the number of users on various social media platforms has transformed the way firms strategize their marketing activities. To take advantage of the vast size of social networks, firms have now turned their attention to influencer marketing wherein they employ independent...

The online movie rental industry in the United States has been growing at a rapid pace during the past decade. Netflix and Blockbuster are two prime examples of companies that operate in this arena, each with a large base of subscribers. Two standard methods for movie delivery are employed by...

We study a supply planning problem in a manufacturing system with two stages. The first stage is a remanufacturer that supplies two closely-related components to the second (manufacturing) stage, which uses each component as the basis for its respective product. The used products are recovered...

The performance of a retail store depends on its ability to attract customer traffic, match labor with incoming traffic, and convert the incoming traffic into sales. Retailers make significant investments in marketing activities (such as advertising to bring customers into their stores) and in...

Flexible robotic cells combine the capabilities of robotic flow shops with those of flexible manufacturing systems. In an m-machine flexible cell, each part visits each machine in the same order. However, the m operations can be performed in any order, and each machine can be configured to...

By transforming how transactions are recorded, verified, and arranged, while eliminating the need for intermediaries, blockchain is generating a shift in focus away from centralized structures (e.g., exchanges, trading platforms, energy companies) towards decentralized systems (e.g., end...

We consider the scheduling problem of cyclic production in a bufferless dual-gripper robot cell processing a family of identical parts. The objective is to find an optimal sequence of robot moves so as to maximize the long-run average throughput rate of the cell. While there has been a...

We study the problem of minimizing makespan in a two-machine job shop with unit processing time operations. An efficient algorithm with respect to a succinct encoding of the problem instances is proposed. The algorithm is an improvement of earlier algorithms proposed for the problem by Brucker [...

The Healthcare Information Exchanges (HIEs) facilitate the electronic transfer of health information among healthcare organizations. Several studies have shown that the HIEs have potential of saving billions of dollars per year and significantly improving healthcare delivery. In spite of that,...