A design is robust if the design values for selected performance characteristics (i.e. responses) are chosen to be invariant to the variations the product will experience. For a design to be acceptable, it must conform to the design specifications. However, due to the existence of variation,...

Burn‐in is an effective means of screening out the infant mortality components of a system. Most related studies investigated burn‐in by curve fitting for a failure model and cost for an optimal burn‐in time model and environmental stress model. However, those investigations did not...

The advantages of Goal Programming (GP) over linear programming (LP) are discussed in the context of the healthcare industry. Decision makers must give considerable attention to the formulation of a GP model. However, long‐ and short‐term solutions must not be confused. Solutions also...

This article considers the effect of freight discounts and disposals on the inventory policies of a profit‐maximising firm with price‐elastic demand and with price as a mark‐up on the acquisition cost. In addition, the cost of placing an order is in part dependent upon a freight‐cost...

The p ‐median problem involves the locating of a fixed umber of facilities to serve a set of customers such that the aggregate distance travelled is minimized. Considers the p ‐median problem with and without distance constraints. Solves the two versions of the p ‐median problems utilizing...

In certain manufacturing categories the type of plant layout to adopt is determined by the type of production process. However, within multi‐product mid‐volume environments the type of plant layout to select is not as obvious, with recent trends indicating that the more traditional...

Presents a model that minimizes an aggregate measure of waiting times and queue lengths for a collection of workstations. Shows that the naïve allocation of arrivals among workstations in proportion to their processing times does not result in an optimized system. Uses the Lagrange multiplier...

In this article, a PC‐based spreadsheet support system (SSS) for controlling inventory and service level for the newsboy problem is developed utilising Lotus 1‐2‐3 spreadsheet capabilities. The technical aspects of the SSS are presented and discussed within the context of a umerical...