The Editors have taken the occasion of Professor John A. Buzacott's retirement as a motivating event to develop this volume. The objectives of Stochastic Modeling And Optimization Of Manufacturing Systems And Supply Chains is to both honor John Buzacott's achievements and to publish a set of...

In the foreword to Supply Chain Structures, Professor Paul Zipkin notes three global changes that have enabled the recent vast developments in the field of supply chains. Moreover, these changes may be only the beginning and more change is likely in the fast-moving field of supply chain...

We study a manufacturing process that is quite common in semiconductor wafer fabrication. In generic terms, the job to be processed consists of J units. To process the job, a "setup" is required, followed by routine processing and testing. In principle, the entirety of the job can be set up and...

Consider a closed queueing network (Gordon and Newell [Gordon, W. J., G. F. Newell. 1967. Closed queueing networks with exponential servers. Oper. Res. 15 252--267.]) with a set of stations. The service rate at each station is an increasing concave function of the number of jobs at that station....

Unlike stochastic ordering ([greater-or-equal, slanted]st), which is preserved under convolution (i.e., summation of independent random variables), so far it is only known that likelihood ratio ordering ([greater-or-equal, slanted]lr) is preserved under convolution of log-concave (PF2) random...