One of the economists’ missions is to predict the behavioral responses of consumers or firms on the assumption that optimizing continues. Once this capability is developed, economists try to manage “today” to optimize future economic return of the inputs. Techniques to predict future...

Supply‐chain management (SCM) involves coordinating and managing all the activities from raw materials procurement to the delivery of the final product to the customer. A key ingredient for effective SCM is timely planning and information processing across the entire value‐added chain. This...

Addresses important logistical considerations in the distribution of a seasonal food product. While continued attempts have been made to maintain high levels of customer service within the food industry, the degree of uncertainty in the distribution channel itself often undermines management’s...

The Law of Industrial Dynamics ensures that if a production control system can amplify then it will surely find a way of doing so despite the best efforts of production schedulers to take corrective action. In fact, practical studies show that such human intervention frequently aggravates the...

Reviews the value of network concepts as a means of portraying complex logistics and distribution systems. Reports on research which focuses on the broader issues of model formulation and solution techniques rather than specific applications. Addresses the issues of designing networks with a...

The literature on the facilities location problem is quite extensive with a wide variety of solution methods for addressing these problems where the objective is cost minimization. Develops a branch and bound algorithm for solving the uncapacitated, multi‐period facility location problem where...

In this paper reliability models for fault tolerant N‐version programming and consensus recovery block (combination of N‐version programming and recovery block) with deadline mechanism are analysed. Explicit expressions for reliability of N‐version programming and consensus recovery block...

Presents two sequential preventive maintenance (PM) models. The first model can be viewed as an extension of Nakagawa’s model where the age reduction of the system is assumed to depend on the level of PM activities. Linear and nonlinear relationships between age reduction and PM level have...