The problem of setting production lead times in manufacturing is well known and many firms set the value as an average of past operations, frequently resorting to inventory, overtime and other unplanned activities to match supply with demand. In this paper, we use Bayesian belief networks to model a common production process with probabilistic manufacturing lead time based on more realistic ass...

Electricity cannot be conviently stored. Thus there should be sucient production at all times to meet the demand for electric power. If a low-cost generating unit fails this will lead to its substitution by a higher cost unit. The cost of producing electric power is a random variable because it depends upon two uncertain quantities, demand and the availability of the generating units. Analytic...

achieving optimal production cycle time for improving manufacturing processes is one of the common problems in production planning. during recent years, different approaches have been developed for solving this problem, but most of them assume that mean quality characteristic is constant over production run length and sets it on customer’s target value. however, the process mean may drift from ...

Using data from the U.S. bicycle industry, we examine the relation among product variety, supply chain structure, and firm performance. Variety imposes two types of costs on a supply chain: production costs and market mediation costs. Production costs include, among other costs, the incremental fixed investments associated with providing additional product variants. Market mediation costs arise...

Longer patents to small inventors may accelerate genetic research with distant payoffs by assuaging their fears that a large, low-cost rival would quickly appropriate profits. [JEL H41, D45]

Herbivore-induced plant volatiles have been shown to serve as indirect defence signals that attract natural enemies of herbivores. Parasitoids and predators exploit these plant-provided cues to locate their victims and several herbivores are repelled by the volatiles. Recently, benefits, in terms of plant fitness, from the action of the parasitoids were shown for a few systems. However, the cos...

Building actors need accurate estimates in order to efficiently undertake the construction of buildings. The knowledge of real expected costs of construction works is a necessary condition for contractors to submit competitive tenders and for developers to be aware of the magnitude of their investment. In this paper, an innovative process-based model is presented, the POP model. This model aims...

We study the lot-sizing problem with piecewise concave production costs and concave holding costs. This problem is a generalization of the lot-sizing problem with quantity discounts, minimum order quantities, capacities, overloading, subcontracting or a combination of these. We develop a dynamic programming (DP) algorithm to solve this problem and answer an open question in the literature: we s...

this paper considers the economic lot scheduling problem, that is, the problem of scheduling several products on a single facility so as to minimize holding and setup costs. combination of frequency and timing as well as production quantity make this problem np-hard. a heuristic is developed to obtain a good solution to elsp. the proposed heuristic makes use of the simulated annealing technique...