Process improvement plays a significant role in reducing production costs over the life cycle of a product. We consider the role of process improvement in a decentralized assembly system in which a buyer purchases components from several first-tier suppliers. These components are assembled into a finished product, which is sold to the downstream market. The assembler faces a deterministic deman...

This paper discusses the fixed-hub single allocation problem. In the model hubs are fixed and fully connected; and each terminal node is connected to a single hub which routes all its traffic. The goal is to minimize the cost of routing the traffic in the network. This paper presents linear programming-based algorithms that deliver both high quality solutions and a theoretical worst case bound....

Problems of allocating joint costs in a reasonable way arise in many practical situations where people decide to work together to save costs. Cost allocation methods based on game theoretical concepts take into account the strategic aspects of cost allocation situations. We give a survey of cost allocation methods based on the nucleolus and the Shapley value, and introduce also a new one, the s...

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