bicycle riding is one of the attractions in kish island that is known as an entertainment and enjoyable sport. moreover, it is beneficial to the environmental goals and tourism industry. for this aim, the bicycle rental system is provided by nineteen bicycle stations that have been distributed all around the island by kish free zone organization; also, to spread the bike riding culture and incr...

Rental records contain much sensitive information on individuals, so if abused by the rental service providers, user privacy could be jeopardized. To mitigate this concern, we present a privacy preserving rental system where interests of both the users and the service provider are protected. In particular, users are enabled to engage in a rental service in an anonymous manner; however, users wh...

The present paper is an attempt to develop a new heuristic algorithm, find the optimal sequence to minimize the utilization time of the machines and hence their rental cost for two stage specially structured flow shop scheduling under specified rental policy in which processing times and set up time are associated with their respective probabilities including transportation time. Further jo...

The first two chapters of this thesis focus on the operation of rental businesses, which provides a novel and increasingly significant application of a supply chain and service operation. According to IBISWorld industry reports, at least fifteen different rental industries in the United States have annual revenues exceeding $1 billion. Furthermore, the consumer trend of “access over ownership” ...

Several methods and techniques are systematized for transforming a current product selling business into a reuse business, which is defined as “products are collected and reused in the same or other markets within a framework of rental or lease service”. The proposed methodology consists of six technical elements. There are two major approaches to making a decision to start a reuse business: a ...

This paper discusses a case study where the artificial society approach is used to examine effects of a robot rental mechanism in a multiplayer online game, under development at the authors’ laboratory. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed rental mechanism, namely, better game balance and inflation control. These results also indicate that the artificial society approach ha...

We present the first optimal randomized online algorithms for the TCP acknowledgment problem [3] and the Bahncard problem [5]. These problems are well known to be generalizations of the classical online ski-rental problem, however, they appeared to be harder. In this paper we demonstrate that a number of online algorithms which have optimal competitive ratios of e/(e − 1), including these, are ...

We develop an equilibrium-econometric analysis in the context of rental housing markets with indivisibilities. The theory provides some bridge between a (competitive) market equilibrium theory and a statistical/econometric analysis. First, we develop this theory: The listing service of apartments, which we call the housing magazine, provides the information to both households (and landlords) an...