In this paper, we develop distribution-free models that solve the appointment sequencing and scheduling problems by assuming only moments information of job durations. We show that our min-max appointment scheduling models, which minimize the worst-case expected waiting and overtime costs out of...

Managing appointments for service systems with random job durations is a challenging task. We consider a class of appointment planning problems that involve two sets of decisions: job sequencing, i.e., determining the order in which a list of jobs should be performed by the server, and...

We consider the infinite-horizon multiple retailer joint replenishment problem with first order interaction. In this model, the joint setup cost incurred by a group of retailers placing an order simultaneously consists of a group-independent major setup cost and retailer-specific minor setup...

We consider a class of online resource allocation problems in which there are n types of resources with limited initial inventory and n demand classes. The resources are flexible in that each type of resources can serve more than one demand class. In this paper, we focus on a special class of...

Process flexibility has been widely adopted as an effective strategy to improve responsiveness to demand uncertainty. Many algorithms for constructing sparse flexibility designs with good theoretical guarantees have been developed for balanced and symmetrical production systems, which assume...

Resource pooling is a fundamental concept that has many applications in Operations Management for reducing and hedging uncertainty. An important problem in resource pooling is to decide (1) the capacity level of pooled resources in anticipation of random demand of multiple customers and (2) how...

The theoretical investigation of the effectiveness of limited flexibility has mainly focused on the performance metric that is based on the maximum sales in units. However, this could lead to substantial profit losses when the maximum sales metric is used to guide flexibility designs whereas the...