Allocation of construction risks between clients and their contractors has a significant impact on the total construction costs. This paper presents a system dynamics (SD)-based approach for quantitative risk allocation. Using the proposed SD based approach, all the factors affecting the risk allocation process are modeled. The contractor’s defensive strategies against the one-sided risk alloca...

Background and Objectives: One of the key issues in determining location for blood supply center is the design of blood supply chain. To minimize the cost of blood supply, the donors should be reached easily with appropriate distribution of blood and blood products to the hospital. The aim of this study was calculating of the optimal number and location of different various t...

For firms remanufacturing their products, the total life-cycle costs and revenues from new and remanufactured products determine their profitability. In many firms, manufacturing/sales and remanufacturing/remarketing operations are carried out in different divisions. Each division is responsible for only part of the product’s life cycle. Practices regarding transfer pricing across divisions var...

The regulator of a natural monopoly that sets a two-part tariff and whose marginal cost is stochastic will generally want the price to vary less than marginal cost when the lump-sum charge in the tariff is fixed. A trade-off exists between efficient pricing and an optimal allocation of risk. Pricing at marginal cost is only optimal when the consumer’s marginal utility is independent of the pric...

This paper discusses the core of the game corresponding to the standard fixed tree problem. We introduce the concept of a weighted constrained egalitarian solution. The core of the standard fixed tree game equals the set of all weighted constrained egalitarian solutions. The notion of home-down allocation is developed to create further insight in the local behavior of the weighted constrained e...

We consider inventory systems with several distinct items. Demands occur at constant, item specific rates. The items are interdependent because of jointly incurred fixed procurement costs: The joint cost structure reflects general economies of scale, merely assuming a monotonicity and concavity (submodularity) property. Under a power-of-two policy each item is replenished with constant reorder ...

In this technical report, we study the multiple-sink fixed-charge transportation problem (MSFCTP), which arises frequently in application areas of scheduling and cost control, such as facility planning, capital budgeting, resource allocation, buffer allocation, pollution control, etc. The MSFCTP problem involves the distribution from a set of supply centers (sources) to a set of demand centers ...

This paper examines the cost-reduction effect of “postponed” routing decisions in a two-echelon supply chain. When a delivery vehicle leaves the warehouse with system replenishment quantities, it sequentially makes routing decisions to choose the next retailer to visit. To measure this effect this paper studies combined vehicle routing and inventoryallocation policies designed to minimize total...

This paper investigates a capacitated planar location-allocation problem with facility fixed cost. A zonebased fixed cost which consists of production and installation costs is considered. A nonlinear and mixed integer formulation is first presented. A powerful three stage Cross Entropy meta-heuristic with novel density functions is proposed. In the first stage a covering location problem provi...