Parallel machine structure is very common in modern production systems. Its performance sometimes has a decisive impact on the whole productivity. In this paper, we consider a parallel-machine scheduling problem where each machine is subject to periodic maintenance. Instead of assuming all the...

Job shop scheduling with a bank of machines in parallel is important from both theoretical and practical points of review. Here we focus on a flexible job shop scheduling problem of minimizing the makespan in a two-center job shop, where the first center consists of one machine and the second...

We investigate a manufacturer's information acquisition and subsidization strategies in a supply chain featuring two competing retailers who sell substitutable products and have private demand information. The manufacturer can decide whether to acquire demand information at a cost and further...

Flow shop scheduling is common in modern lean production systems. In practice, jobs in flow shops can arrive at irregular times. However, scheduling that considers such irregularity has not been adequately investigated in the literature. In this paper, we examine the scheduling of n-jobs in an...

Supply chains today routinely use third parties for many strategic activities, such as manufacturing, R&D, or software development. These activities often include relationship-specific investment on the part of the vendor, while final outcomes can be uncertain. Therefore, writing complete...

This paper considers an optimal control problem for the dynamics of the Nerlove-­Arrow advertising model, the optimal control being the rate of advertising expenditure required to maximize the present value of net profit streams (or, sales) over a finite horizon subject to a budget constraint....

Several nonlinear stochastic models are developed for a dynamic profit-maximizing firm with respect to its price and (possibly) advertising decisions under threat of entry. The optimal price ­advertising policies for these models are characterized by the use of the Maximum Principle. While the...

We consider a market consisting of two populations, termed rich and poor for convenience. If a product is priced such that it is very expensive for the poor, but affordable to the rich, it becomes a status symbol for the poor and this makes it more desirable for the poor. At a lower price the...

Miller and Modigliani (1961) consider valuation of infinite horizon firms that may not engage in purchasing their own shares. While their fundamental valuation approach applies also to firms that purchase their own shares, their stream of dividends approach does not. The latter approach is...

This paper proposes a new methodology to solve partially observed inventory problems. Generally, these problems have infinite dimensional states that are conditional distribution of the inventory level. Our methodology involves linearizing the state transitions via unnormalized probabilities. It...