Maintaining efficiency in despatching goods from a depot to geographically dispersed customers may require management at the depot to adjust its delivery routes daily if these customers’ demands fluctuate from day to day. One type of adjustment is to give drivers daily “skip lists”...

In the framework of the European Union, one of the economic sectors of most interest to politicians, academics and professionals has been the banking sector. The aim of this paper is to verify the existence of differences in the efficiency of the banking sectors and what variables determine...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a model‐based methodology for the repetitive testing of multiple products with limited capacity, when the testing process is imperfect. Design/methodology/approach – In a repetitive testing process, items that are classified as...

Purpose – The objective of the paper is to consider the problem of the strength of a manufactured item against stress, when the component follows Weibull failure law. Different cases of stress and strength with varying parameters are discussed for the Weibull‐Weibull stress‐strength model...

Analyses a split production system which has a single station in the first stage followed by two parallel stations in the second stage, in connection with the efficiency of the system. Develops a mathematical model using semi‐regenerative processes to study the transient behaviour of the...

Derives expressions for performance availability and performance reliability of fault tolerant systems operating under various levels of stress during a mission using stochastic reward models (SRM). Develops a mathematical model using semi‐regenerative reward model. Obtains a system of...

Considers manufacturing systems with a failure‐prone machine and a stochastic demand. The production is controlled by a kanban scheme. Although the kanban ‐control enjoys many applications, in a stochastic setting, the problem of defining the optimal number of circulating kanban s remains...

In stochastic inventory management, when calculating the safety stock necessary to ensure a service level, use of the partial expectation function, which is tabulated in the normal demand case, is popular. Using these values, it is possible to calculate the safety stock necessary for the average...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to investigate technical, scale, allocative and economic efficiencies by data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier methods to provide a decision‐making tool and managerial implications in the measurement of farm business performance and...

Purpose – Customer support assumes strategic importance in India for branded IT‐hardware products. An authorized service center and a stream of specialized service centers undertake field services and represent a sale‐territory's support network. “Time constrained” service men have to...