In any large organization, millions of dollars are spent on purchasing. Raw material cost accounts for 40-60% of production costs for most US manufacturers. In fact, for the automotive industry, the cost of components and parts from outside suppliers may exceed 50% of sales. It is vital to the...

The goal of product design is to obtain maximum functionality and aesthetic beauty at a minimum cost. Additionally consumers are attracted to designs that reflect their use, behaviors, and psychological responses more so than designs which simply alter the visual appearance of a product. When...

This dissertation aims at modelling uncertainty and deriving managerial implications in different areas. Due to uncertainty and limited information, a firm may encounter difficulties in decision making and sometimes make wrong decision. For this reason, I provide models to incorporate...

The airline industry is an area where fierce competition exists. Maximizing revenue is an important target for the airlines. This is known as revenue management or yield management. A lot of research has been done in this area to help the airlines achieve their goals.Recently, some of the...

The main focus of the thesis is to develop an optimal procurement policy for raw materials, that is, reorder points and optimal order quantities, for a multinational company. We develop a multiple period mixed integer programming model that takes into account the variation in demand that occurs...

ABSTRACTTaguchis quadratic loss function is used to capture the effect of nonconformance to target values of quality characteristics in monetary values. Despite the merits of its idea, there are major limitations of the quadratic loss function especially its use of a proportionality constant...

This study addresses the problem of analyzing the temporal dynamics of business organizations. In particular, we concentrate on inferring the related businesses, i.e., are there groups of companies that are highly correlated through some measurement (metric)?We argue that business relationships...

Historically, congestion pricing is considered as an efficient pricing mechanism to decrease total social cost by eliminating rush hour congestion. However, in order to eliminate rush hour congestion, deterministic settings are usually necessary. In recent research, even if some uncertain...

For the past several decades, advances in manufacturing and supply chain management have improved the business environment. Nonetheless, dynamics, such as various unexpected disruptions and uncertainties, in business operations have significant impact on decision-making efficiency. Adoption of...

In this thesis, we study the repair shop scheduling problem(repair-to-stock) and the production/inventory system pricing and production scheduling problem(make-to-stock). For both types of problems, we compare the performance of different scheduling policies. For the make-to-stock type problem,...