A two-stage stochastic program is developed for scheduling and allocating crosstrained workers in a multi-department service environment with random demands. The first stage corresponds to scheduling days-off over a time horizon such as a week or month. The second stage is the recourse action that deals with allocating available workers at the beginning of a day to accommodate realized demands....

In this paper, we study the newsvendor game with supply uncertainty, where multiple retailers form a coalition to cooperate to place orders to minimize the cost and share risk facing uncertain supplies and demands. After the orders are delivered and the demands are realized, the actual arrival quantities are allocated among the retailers to minimize the total cost. We compute the cost functions...

The present paper studies repeated oligopoly where the firms compete with price in multiple markets. The markets are subject to independent, stochastic fluctuations in demands. The literature points out that while the demand fluctuations generally hinder collusion, the multimarket contact sometimes facilitates it. We show that on an intermediate range of discount factors where only partial coll...

We develop methods to estimate and exactly calculate the expected cost of a priori policies for the multi-compartment vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands, an extension of the classical vehicle routing problem where customer demands are uncertain and products must be transported in separate partitions. We incorporate our estimation procedure into a cyclic-orderbased simulated anneali...

This paper proposes a new location problem of competitive facilities, e.g. shops and stores, with uncertain demands in the plain. By representing the demands for facilities as random variables, the location problem is formulated to a stochastic programming problem, and it is reformulated to three deterministic programming problems: expectation maximizing problem, probability maximizing problem,...

This paper proposes a new location problem of competitive facilities, e.g. shops and stores, with uncertain demands in the plane. By representing the demands for facilities as random variables, the location problem is formulated to a stochastic programming problem, and for finding its solution, three deterministic programming problems: expectation maximizing problem, probability maximizing prob...

The vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands consists in designing transportation routes of minimal expected cost to satisfy a set of customers with random demands of known probability distribution. This paper proposes a novel heuristic approach that uses randomized heuristics for the traveling salesman problem, a tour partitioning procedure, and a set-partitioning formulation to sample ...

The present paper studies repeated Bertrand oligopoly with multiple markets. The markets are subject to independent, stochastic fluctuations in demands. According to the literature, the demand fluctuations generally hinder collusion, while the multimarket contact sometimes facilitates it. We show that when only partial collusion is sustainable under a single market, the per-market expected prof...

We consider the problem of distributing goods from one or more plants through a set of warehouses in anticipation of forecasted customer demands. Two results are provided in this paper. First, we present a methodology for approximating stochastic distribution problems that are computationally tractable for problems of realistic size. Comparisons are made to standard deterministic formulations a...

Abstract Manufacturing systems flexibility is critical to meet the challenges arising from the uncertain demands. In this paper, a framework is proposed to evaluate the effect of utilizing flexibility in manufacturing systems which have the capability of producing multiple products at multiple plants. After transformation, a nonlinear polynomial programming model was proposed to describe the pr...