quality are not bought and sold in traditional markets. A simple price variable, for example, representing the costs of reducing runoff does not exist. Instead, economists have developed the notion of “shadow prices” that can be estimated from production and environmental data that give either the value of a non-marketable “good,” such as a unit of indigenous nitrogen in the soil, or the abatem...

Assembly lines are special kinds of production systems which are of great importance in the industrial production of high quantity commodities. In many practical manufacturing systems, configuration of assembly lines is fixed and designing a new line may be incurred huge amount of costs and thereby it is not desirable for practitioners. When some changes related to market demand occur, it is wo...