Manufacturers and their distributors must cope with an increased flow of returned products from their customers. The value of commercial product returns, which we define as products returned for any reason within 90 days of sale, now exceeds $100 billion annually in the United States. Although...

The most natural and popular dispatching rule for double-track segments is to dedicate one track for trains traveling in one direction. However, sometimes passenger trains have to share some portions of the railway with freight trains and passenger trains are traveling faster and faster...

Process reengineering advocates making radical changes in how processing systems are structured, such as moving away from systems that use the principles of division of labor and division of management. Using formal system models from queueing theory, this paper explores the conditions under...

The authors examine the effect of a hospital's objective (i.e., non-profit versus for-profit) in hospital markets for elective care. Using game-theoretic analysis and queueing models to capture the operational performance of hospitals, they compare the equilibrium behavior of three market...

We focus on architectures with limited flexibility for multi-skill call centers. The context is that of call centers with asymmetric parameters: unbalanced workload, different service requirements, a predominant customer type, unbalanced abandonments and high costs of cross-training. The most...

Results from classic queueing theory are shown to be useful for capacity planning of largescale multi-server systems. In the field of mainframe systems on-line monitoring and dynamic workload management care for the fulfilment of short-term performance goals with respect to service class...

This paper describes the staffing and scheduling of IT help desk operators for a large petrochemical company. The objective is to reduce the labour cost by determining the best staffing level and employee weekly tour schedules required to meet the workload that varies over a 24-hr operating...