Urban district heating and cooling (DHC) systems operate large freezers, heat exchangers, and boilers to stably and economically supply hot and cold water, steam etc., based on customers demand. We formulate an operation-planning problem as a nonlinear integer programming problem for an actual DHC plant. To reflect actual decision making appropriately, we incorporate contract-violation penaltie...

Beginning with SOAP, Web Services (WS) have now been around for about five years. They have reached the point where mainstream customers are beginning to use them or at least seriously consider doing so. Based on my own experience, most successful WS applications reside inside the enterprise, where they help integrate disparate systems. Typically, these integrations are based on fairly simple u...

Abstract On the Internet, you can find millions of service reviews. This information be useful to support decision-making for both potential customers and managing a business It is especially important consider emotional tone such reviews, because emotions attract or repel customers. The article discusses actual task automatic processing customer reviews identifying emotionally colored in it. I...

Opinion leaders play a major role in shaping potential customers’ minds in word-of-mouth communities. Prior research on opinion leaders in word-of-mouth communities has focused mostly on structural characteristics of social networks of the leaders, ignoring the predictive potential of the actual text that they write. We argue that textual characteristics of reviews, along with reviewer characte...

Recent operations management papers model customers as solving multi-armed bandit problems, positing that consumers use a particular heuristic when choosing among suppliers. These papers then analyze the resulting competition among suppliers and mathematically characterize the equilibrium actions. There remains a question, however, as to whether the original customer models upon which the analy...

Dynamic pricing is typically implemented via algorithms that react to varying levels of supply and demand. Some companies, such as Uber, also vary prices for different offers, standard cars or limousines a ride. However, companies usually do not proceed the next logical step delegate authority their employees. This astonishing service employees often in quality, possess unique business knowledg...

This study considered the information presentation method to help the customers make a concept-articulation type of purchase. When customers follow the concept-articulation type of thinking, they only have vague requirements, and try to make a gradual clarification of what they want through the interaction with salesclerks and so forth. We constructed a system called S-Conart (Concept Articulat...

A process for prototyping whole services rather than individual parts in isolation is needed. Prototyping services is different from prototyping physical products, yet many designers still use traditional approaches to prototype services, focussing on specific parts rather than whole services. This is especially surprising considering the descriptions of service design as a holistic approach in...

In this paper, the problem of optimal dynamic pricing for retail electricity with an unknown demand model is considered. Under the day-ahead dynamic pricing (a.k.a. real time pricing) mechanism, a retailer obtains electricity in a twosettlement wholesale market and serves its customers in real time. Without knowledge on the aggregated demand function of its customers, the retailer aims to maxim...