Strategic inventory plays a vital role in a manufacturer-retailer dynamic contract. By holding inventories in a period, the retailer curtails the manufacturer’s pricing power in the next period and alleviates double marginalization, significantly increasing the manufacturer’s and...

We consider the appointment scheduling problem, which determines the job allowance over the planning horizon. In particular, we study a simple but effective scheduling policy -- the so-called plateau policy, which allocates a constant job allowance for each appointment. Prior studies on...

Motivated by a practical problem arising from the home health care industry, we consider an integrated routing and appointment scheduling problem with random service durations. Given a set of patients with known locations and service duration distributions, the health care team is required to...

Problem definition: Multi-stage service is common in healthcare. One widely adopted approach to manage patient visits in multi-stage service is to provide patients with visit itineraries, which specify individualized appointment time for each patient at each service stage. We study how to design...

We consider several two-agent scheduling problems with controllable job processing times, where agents A and B have to share either a single machine or two identical machines in parallel while processing their jobs. The processing times of the jobs of agent A are compressible at additional cost....