Consider a customer X, who wishes to obtain service at a queueing system. When X arrives at this system, he has three possible courses of action to choose from, i) join the system; ii) not to join the system now, but return later after a random amount of time; or iii) to leave without obtaining...

A supplier provides several lead-time options to its customers in a periodic review inventory system. The replenishment lead time is a multiple of the inventory review cycle. Customers are classified into two groups: short lead-time customers requiring the product immediately and long lead-time...

This paper is concerned with long-run average cost minimization of a stochastic inventory problem with Markovian demand, fixed ordering cost, and convex surplus cost. The states of the Markov chain represent different possible states of the environment. Using a vanishing discount approach, a...

Most manufacturing systems are large and complex and operate in an uncertain environment. One approach to managing such systems is that of hierarchical decomposition. This paper reviews the research devoted to proving that a hierarchy based on the frequencies of occurrence of different types of...

We consider the problem of scheduling n jobs in a pallet-constrained two-machine flowshop so as to minimize the makespan. In such a flowshop environment, each job needs a pallet the entire time, from the start of its first operation until the completion of the last operation, and the number of...

We consider a production planning problem for a general jobshop subject to breakdown and repair of machines and subject to lower and upper bound constraints on work-in-process. The machine capacities and demand processes are assumed to be finite state Markov chains. The problem is to choose the...

This paper presents an asymptotic analysis of hierarchical production planning in a general manufacturing system consisting of a network of unreliable machines producing a variety of products. The concept of a dynamic job shop is introduced by interpreting the system as a directed graph, and the...

We analyze a supply chain consisting of a supplier and a retailer. The supplier's unit production cost, which characterizes his type, is only privately known to him. When trading with the retailer, the supplier demands a reservation profit that depends on his unit production cost. We model this...

We deal with the problem of a profit-maximizing vendor selling a perishable product. At the beginningof a planning cycle, the vendor determines a minimum committed order per period. During the cycle, he may also place a supplemental order in each period based on the observed demand signal in...