Container shipping and its related service sectors help accelerate globalization of the world economy. This industry has been experiencing rapid growth, prompting container terminal operators to increase their handling capacity in response. Providing container terminal services requires...

We consider the problem of inventory management of perishable products, typical examples of which include food, beverage, and pharmaceuticals. Retailers increasingly use RFID-supported time–temperature-indicator-based automatic devices (TTI-based ADs) to keep track of the age and quality of...

Agent-based technology provides a natural way to design and implement enterprise collaboration. We model the integrated manufacturing enterprise as a directed graph and reduce the problem of enhancing the efficiency of mobile agents to the problem of finding resource-constrained extremal paths...

We study the order acceptance and scheduling problem in a two-machine flowshop. The firm receives a pool of orders before a planning period, each of which is characterized by revenue, processing times on machines 1 and 2, a due date, and a tardiness penalty. The firm seeks to decide on the...

Despite the existence of a substantial body of implementation guidelines and literature on employee rights, many organizations still adopt irresponsible employee practices such as child labor and appalling workplace conditions. The implementation of such irresponsible employee practices in some...

We consider a make-to-stock system served by an unreliable machine that produces one type of product, which is sold to customers at one of two possible prices depending on the inventory level at the time when a customer arrives (i.e., the decision point). The system manager must determine the...

Many firms often face quality problems, even though quality improvement has long been a competitive imperative for performance enhancement. When suppliers are the sources of quality problems, prior literature has focused on sustaining a buyer’s competitiveness given the suppliers’ quality...

Companies, especially those in e-business, are increasingly offering free shipping to buyers whose order sizes exceed the free shipping quantity. In this paper, given that the supplier offers free shipping, we determine the retailer’s optimal order lot size and the optimal retail price. We...

Motivated by the observations that the direct sales channel is increasingly used for customized products and that retailers wield leadership, we develop in this paper a retailer-Stackelberg pricing model to investigate the product variety and channel structure strategies of manufacturer in a...