Go-shop provisions have changed the way in which private equity firms execute public-company buyouts. While there has been considerable practitioner commentary on go-shops in the three years since they first appeared, this paper presents the first systematic empirical evidence on this new dealmaking technology. Contrary to the claims of prior commentators, I find that: (1) goshops yield more se...

We consider the open shop scheduling problem with uncertain durations modelled as fuzzy numbers. We define the concepts of necessary and possible β-robustness of schedules and set as our goal to maximise them. Additionally, we propose to assess solution robustness by means of Monte Carlo simulations. Experimental results using a genetic algorithm illustrate the proposals.

The concurrent open shop problem is a relaxation of the well known open job shop problem, where the components of a job can be processed in parallel by dedicated, component specific machines. Recently, the problem has attracted the attention of a number of researchers. In particular, Leung et al. (2005) show, contrary to the assertion in Wagneur and Sriskandarajah (1993), that the problem of mi...

The two machine routing open shop being a generalization of the metric TSP and two machine open shop scheduling problem is considered. It is known to be NP-hard even for the simplest case when the transportation network consists of two nodes only. For that simplest case it is known that the optimal makespan for any instance belongs to interval [R̄, 6 5 R̄], there R̄ is the standard lower bound. We...

Buffers decouple fluctuations in the material flow. It is common wisdom in industry that a full buffer indicates a downstream bottleneck and an empty buffer indicates an upstream bottleneck. Numerous different bottleneck detection methods use this approach to detect the bottlenecks. However, so far this common wisdom on the shop floor has not yet been verified academically. The authors tested t...