This paper presents a decision-theoretic model of the bond scheduling problem faced by a multi-subsidiary holding company such as AT&T or GTE. The objective is to minimize the total cost of bond flotations across all subsidiaries, where total cost is the sum of the yield paid to investors, the...

A simple algorithm is developed for the problem of assigning days off to full-time staff given a cyclic seven-day demand pattern. The formulation assumes that employees are entitled to two consecutive days off each week and that the objective is to find a minimum staff size capable of meeting...

Recent research studies of job shop scheduling have begun to examine the interaction between sequencing priorities and the method of assigning due-dates. This paper surveys the tactical aspects of this interaction, focusing primarily on average tardiness as a measure of scheduling effectiveness....

We consider the situation of a single item having a deterministic, time-varying demand pattern. Production lot sizes, so as to minimize the total of setup and carrying costs, are to be determined subject to production capacity restrictions that can vary with time. Two important theorems...

We develop and test an optimization model for maximizing response rates for online marketing research survey panels. The model consists of (1) a decision tree predictive model that classifies panelists into "states" and forecasts the response rate for panelists in each state and (2) a linear...

We examine the problem of scheduling days off in continuous (seven-day-a-week) operations under a variety of day-off policies, when demand for manpower is N on weekdays and n on weekend days. We consider a number of policies governing employee work assignments and in each case we give a formula...

We investigate the stochastic flow shop problem with m machines and general distributions for processing times. No analytic method exists for solving this problem, so we looked instead at heuristic methods. We devised three constructive procedures with modest computational requirements, each...