Supply Chain Management (SCM) decisions can be considered at different levels of detail. At a strategic level they apply to the architecture in the supply chain, at the tactical level to transport fleet selection, selection of supply sources and distribution, and at the operational level, to the distribution of supplies and route selection. Many models of decision-making SCM have been developed...

Constraint programming (CP) is an emergent software technology for declarative description and effective solving of large, particularly combinatorial, problems especially in areas of planning and scheduling. It represents the most exciting developments in programming languages of the last decade and, not surprisingly, it has recently been identified by the ACM (Association for Computing Machine...

This paper is interested in exploring the competitive advantage of businesses. Current understanding of competitive advantage arises from the strategic management paradigm, but with the recognition that business environments are quite complex, this theory is not proving itself to be adequate. The early theory that underpins this comes from optimising economic theory, the inadequacy of which led...

We study a multiperiod portfolio selection problem in which a single period meanstandard-deviation criterion is used to construct a separable multiperiod selection criterion. Using this criterion, we obtain a closed form optimal strategy which depends on selection schemes of investor’s risk preference. As a consequence, we develop a multiperiod portfolio selection scheme. In doing so, we adapt ...

A strategy-tree provides a systematic approach to the evaluation of the effectiveness of deployed policy sets and a mechanism to dynamically alter policy sets (i.e., alter strategy) at run-time in response to feedback. This paper provides an overview of the strategy-tree concept and its application to a policy-based management system for a data center. Results are presented that show that the s...

The behaviour of firms on an oligopolistic market is usually modeled via the CournotNash equilibrium concept ([13, 18]). In fact, it is the classical Nash equilibrium, where each player (firm) maximizes its profit subject to production constraints. Assuming that one from the firms has a temporal advantage over the others, this firm can increase its profit by replacing a Cournot-Nash strategy by...

Each year the ACM hosts a truly international programming contest – the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Dating back to a contest held by Texas A&M University in 1970, this annual event, along with the associated regional contests, has grown to 5,606 teams from 1,733 universities in 84 countries (in the year 2006). Despite the maturity of the event, and the number of competi...

There are two different approaches in this study with different implications. The first approach and the main aim of this study is a methodological framework. There are different frameworks in solving game theory topics involving at least two Nash Equilibriums. This study presents a new framework for developing this part of game theory with MCDM framework. The authors believe that at least ther...

The dramatic impact of the current crisis on performance of businesses across sectors and economies have been headlining the business press for the past many months. Extant reconciliations of these patterns in the popular press rely on ad-hoc reasoning. Using historical data on currency crisis episodes across the world, we examine how consumers respond to a crisis and identify interesting patte...

A model is presented to investigate the optimal economic life cycle of grass leys with winter damage problems in northern Norway and to determine the threshold of winter damage before it is profitable to reseed. A two-level hierarchic Markov process has been constructed using the MLHMP software. The model takes uncertainty concerning yield potential, damage estimation and weather dependent rand...