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Joint promotional effort and assortment optimization under the multinomial logit model Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-04-09 Hua Xiao, Min Gong, Zhaotong Lian, Kameng Nip
Promotional effort is a common strategy to induce sales and broaden the market scope by enhancing the products' utility to customers. In this article, we incorporate promotional effort into the customer choice model and study the joint promotional effort and assortment optimization problems, where the customer's choice behavior follows the widely used multinomial‐logit (MNL) model. Motivated by various
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Supply chain structure, debt financing and product market competition Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-04-08 Qiaohai (Joice) Hu
This paper studies the interactions of capital structure and product market competition under two supply chain structures: a distribution structure where two competing retailers source from a common supplier and a parallel structure where each retailer sources from a dedicated supplier. The analyses demonstrate that if the retailers have access to external credits, they will borrow more (less), buy
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Naval Air Defense Planning problem: A novel formulation and heuristics Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-04-04 Caner Arslan, Orhan Karasakal, Ömer Kırca
This article focuses on air defense in maritime environment, which involves protecting friendly naval assets from aerial threats. Specifically, we define and address the Naval Air Defense Planning (NADP) problem, which consists of maneuvering decisions of the ships and scheduling weapons and sensors to the threats in order to maximize the total expected survival probability of friendly units. The NADP
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Editorial: Advancing pandemic preparedness through data analytics and operations research Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-28 Ebru K. Bish, Tinglong Dai, Sanjay Mehrotra
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Selling formats and platform information sharing under manufacturer competition Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-25 Xue Li, Shilu Tong, Xiaoqiang Cai, Jian Chen
Online retail platforms have increasingly utilized big data technologies to gather demand information, which is then shared with upstream manufacturers employing various selling modes, including a hybrid format that encompasses both direct and indirect selling. Previous studies have suggested that platforms should refrain from sharing demand information with manufacturers engaged in indirect selling
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Transformer‐based choice model: A tool for assortment optimization evaluation Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-22 Zhenkang Peng, Ying Rong, Tianning Zhu
Assessing the efficacy of algorithms plays a pivotal role in advancing various fields, both in theory and practice. Unlike the predictive models, due to the intricate relationship between decisions and the underlying data‐generating processes, the evaluation of decision algorithms cannot directly rely on real data. Hence, a simulator becomes indispensable for appraising decision algorithm effectiveness
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Tests for homogeneity of distributions of component lifetimes from Type‐II censored system lifetime data with known system structures Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-18 Jingjing Qu, Hon Keung Tony Ng
In system reliability analysis, researchers are interested in evaluating the characteristics of the lifetime distribution of components in a system based on system lifetime data. In collecting system lifetime data, a censoring scheme is often adopted due to time and budget constraints. In this article, we consider the situation where the system lifetime data from two different coherent systems are
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Exploring optimal outsourcing strategy with and without transfer payment Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-07 Zheng Luo, Xu Chen, Xiaojun Wang
This study investigates an original equipment manufacturer's (OEM's) outsourcing choice between a competing manufacturer (CP) and a non‐competing manufacturer (NP). We develop a benchmark self‐produce strategy and two outsourcing strategies to differentiate two manufacturing service providers, and examine the optimal strategy alongside an analysis of the respective incentives (e.g., a lump‐sum payment)
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Developing a store brand or collecting a commission: Amazon's choice and quality decision Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Hui Xiong, Ying‐Ju Chen, Lu Hsiao
Amazon, as one of the dominant online retailers (platforms), cooperates with manufacturers under wholesale contract to develop its store brands. Simultaneously, Amazon offers manufacturers with a marketplace and serves manufacturers in the agency selling. In this paper, we build a model to investigate the platform's and the manufacturer's choices on the cooperation modes (i.e., wholesale contract or
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Effects of behavioral bias regarding demand forecasting in a competitive market Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-02 Juan Li, Xuan Zhao, Yini Zheng
Considerable human judgment is involved in demand forecasting. When managers judge demands under uncertainty, they inevitably use signals to update their demand information. These signals are seldom perfect; hence, managers hold behavioral bias about the signal fidelity, that is, over‐ or under‐estimating the signal fidelity. This article models managers' behavioral bias about signal fidelity in Bayesian
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Third‐party logistics firm's technology investment and financing options in platform‐based supply chain with 4PL service Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-22 Gongbing Bi, Fuli Shen, Yang Xu
In practice, capital‐constrained third‐party logistics (3PL) firms usually obtain bank financing (BF) to invest in logistics technology to enhance the consumer shopping experience. The emergence of financial innovation has prompted the adoption of alternative financing modes by 3PLs, including e‐commerce platform financing (EPF) and fourth‐party logistics financing (4PF). To clarify the differences
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E‐commerce platform finance with dual channels Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-20 Nina Yan, Zhineng Chen, Xun Xu, Xiuli He
In the platform economy era, e‐commerce platforms function as distribution channels for sellers and offer online loans to sellers as financing providers. This study focuses on platform finance, where the platform sets a credit line or interest rate to offer either a limited or unlimited loan to capital‐constrained sellers. The sellers may have sufficient initial capital or be capital‐constrained but
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A rate randomized geometric process with applications Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-13 Majid Asadi, Shaomin Wu
The geometric process has been widely studied in various disciplines and applied in reliability, maintenance and warranty cost analysis, among others. In its applications in maintenance policy optimisation, the geometric process assumes constant repair effectiveness by its process rate. Nevertheless, in practice, maintenance effectiveness may differ from time to time and can therefore be better depicted
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Fighting terrorism: How to position rapid response teams? Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Lotte van Aken, Loe Schlicher, Marco Slikker, Geert-Jan van Houtum
In light of recent terrorist attacks, we introduce and study a Stackelberg game between a government and a terrorist. In this game, the government positions a number of heavily-armed rapid response teams on a line segment (e.g., a long boulevard or shopping avenue) and then the terrorist attacks a location with the highest potential impact of an attack. This potential impact, which we call damage,
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Reselling or dual selling? The role of consumer-to-manufacturer e-commerce platforms' voluntary investment Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-10 You Zhao, Rui Hou, Ying-Ju Chen
Recent years have witnessed e-commerce platforms that voluntarily invest in new digital technologies to help their suppliers reduce production costs. To examine its impact on channel structure, we develop a supply chain model consisting of a supplier and an e-commerce platform who purchases products from the supplier at a wholesale price and sells them to end markets. In addition, the supplier has
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Effects of green supplier integration and development in competing supply chains Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-08 Yu Guo, Chunguang Bai, Minghe Sun
This work develops a Cournot game model to study two competing supply chains, each consisting of one manufacturer and one supplier, producing and selling substitutable green products. The manufacturers decide whether to adopt the green supplier integration (GSI) strategy and the green supplier development (GSD) investment level to improve the product greenness degree. The interaction between the GSD
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Reauditing and dual sourcing? Implication of collusion deterrence measures in ethical sourcing Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Jiahui Zhou, Shiqing Yao, Kaijie Zhu
We consider a supply chain in which a buyer sources from a supplier for the production of a product. The supplier's production process is subject to probable violations of either government regulations or ethical requirements. The sourcing contract offered by the buyer demands that the supplier exerts an effort to improve its production process, thus reducing the probability of the occurrence of supplier
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Predicting failure times of coherent systems Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Jorge Navarro, Antonio Arriaza, Alfonso Suárez-Llorens
The article is focused on studying how to predict the failure times of coherent systems from the early failure times of their components. Both the cases of independent and dependent components are considered by assuming that they are identically distributed (homogeneous components). The heterogeneous components' case can be addressed similarly but more complexly. The present study is for non-repairable
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Sharing or reselling? How does manufacturer handle used products? Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Mengnan Wang, Juliang Zhang, T. C. E. Cheng
To encourage consumers to reuse their used products, some manufacturers launch second-hand platforms while others adopt sharing platforms. Which platform benefits them more is an interesting problem for such manufacturers. To address this problem, we propose a two-period model in which heterogeneous consumers decide whether to buy new products in Period 1 or to rent (buy) used products on the platform
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Strategic contract selection of an online retailer when implementing store branding Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-12-14 Mingyou Meng, Shiming Deng, He Xu, Stuart X. Zhu
This article investigates the impact of demand uncertainty on online retailers' store branding partnerships with manufacturers. The study examines whether such partnerships, involving service effort to boost demand, are effective under uncertain conditions. The supply chain comprises an intermediary and a manufacturer, with the manufacturer facing a service cost disadvantage. The benchmark case is
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Multitasking scheduling with shared processing Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Bin Fu, Yumei Huo, Hairong Zhao
Recently, the problem of multitasking scheduling has raised a lot of interest in the service industries. Hall et al. (Discrete Applied Mathematics, 2016) proposed a shared processing multitasking scheduling model which allows a team to continue to work on the primary tasks while processing the routinely scheduled activities as they occur. With a team being modeled as a single machine, the processing
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Towards a circular economy with waste-to-resource system optimization Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Tsan Sheng Adam Ng, Angel Xin Yee Mah, Kena Zhao
Motivated by mounting pressures to achieve environmental sustainability, and the emergence of online waste exchange platforms, in this work we propose an optimization-based framework for studying waste-to-resource formation in the industry. We first develop a linear programming market clearing model comprising self-interested agents participating in waste-to-resource trading. We then embed this in
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Blockage-free storage assignment and storage/retrieval scheduling in autonomous vehicle storage and retrieval systems Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Ran Chen, René De Koster, Yugang Yu, Xiaolong Guo, Hu Yu
Autonomous vehicle storage and retrieval systems have greatly increased in popularity in the last decade. In such a system, at each tier multiple roaming vehicles transport totes between the storage locations and the lifts. However, this may lead to vehicle interference. We study in which order and by which vehicle the storage and retrieval requests should be executed to minimize the makespan, without
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Multi-agent search for a moving and camouflaging target Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Miguel Lejeune, Johannes O. Royset, Wenbo Ma
In multi-agent search planning for a randomly moving and camouflaging target, we examine heterogeneous searchers that differ in terms of their endurance level, travel speed, and detection ability. This leads to a convex mixed-integer nonlinear program, which we reformulate using three linearization techniques. We develop preprocessing steps, outer approximations via lazy constraints, and bundle-based
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Firms' diverse market beliefs can facilitate information sharing and improve profit performance Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-11-19 Li Jiang, Zhongyuan Hao
A supplier sells a product through a retailer to the market with uncertain demand. The retailer has a signal useful for updating the forecast of market uncertainty, while the supplier can offer a payment to acquire the retailer's signal, termed information sharing. Due to differential means of market access and methods of data analysis, the supplier and the retailer hold diverse beliefs about market
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Optimal test planning for heterogeneous Wiener processes Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-11-16 Ya-Shan Cheng, Chien-Yu Peng
Degradation models based on heterogeneous Wiener processes are commonly used to assess information on the lifetime of highly reliable products. An optimal test plan given limited resources is generally obtained using numerical methods for heterogeneous Wiener processes. However, numerical searches for optimal test plans have the disadvantage of being time-consuming and may provide unclear explanations
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Penetrating a market with local-content and pricing decisions: Implications for a multinational firm in the competition with a local firm Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-11-08 Zhenning Dong, Liping Liang, Nanqin Liu, Mingming Leng
The internationalization of production requires multinational firms to determine a local content rate for their products made and sold in a foreign country. In this paper, we investigate the impact of a government's local content requirement (LCR) on the local content rate and pricing decisions of a multinational firm who competes with a local firm in a market. In an emerging market, the multinational
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Optimizing two-variable gamma accelerated degradation tests with a semi-analytical approach Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-11-08 Hung-Ping Tung
In this paper, we provide a semi-analytical approach to determine the optimal designs for two-variable gamma accelerated degradation tests under three criteria: -optimality, -optimality, and -optimality. We first use general equivalence theorem to prove that the optimal approximate designs only allocate test units at the four vertices of a rectangular design region, and the corresponding optimal proportion
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Robust optimization for the integrated berth allocation and quay crane assignment problem Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-17 Chong Wang, Lixin Miao, Canrong Zhang, Tao Wu, Zhe Liang
This paper studies the berth allocation and quay crane assignment problem (denoted by BACAP) under uncertainty. We assume that the ships' arrival and operation time is uncertain in this problem. We merge the proactive and reactive strategies to address the two-stage robust optimization (denoted by RO) model for the BACAP to obtain a complete schedule with robustness. We obtain the berth allocation
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A branch-and-price algorithm for identical parallel machine scheduling with multiple milestones Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-17 Weiya Zhong, Jia Cui, Yiwei Jiang
This article considers an identical parallel-machine task scheduling problem motivated by operations management of online services. A task with an integer processing time can be split into sub-tasks with integer processing times. Each task has multiple integer milestones and at each milestone a nonnegative penalty will occur. The penalty value of a task at a milestone is a convex nonincreasing function
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Impact of consumer foresight on efficient overselling Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-09 Man Yu, Wei Shi Lim
Overselling is commonly adopted in the travel and hospitality sectors where a good or service is sold in excess of actual supply. We examine the impact of consumer foresight on efficient overselling when there are two dimensions of uncertainty, namely, early consumers are uncertain about their service valuations and the seller is uncertain about late demand arrival. We show that when consumers are
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Generalized Ng–Kundu–Chan model of adaptive progressive Type-II censoring and related inference Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Anja Bettina Schmiedt, Erhard Cramer
The model of adaptive progressive Type-II censoring introduced by Ng et al. (2009) (referred to as Ng–Kundu–Chan model) is extended to allow switching from a given initial censoring plan R$$ \mathcal{R} $$ to any arbitrary given plan S$$ \mathcal{S} $$ of the same length. In this generalized model, the joint distribution of the failure times and the corresponding likelihood function is derived. It
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Impacts of gray market selling on the supply chain under product upgrade and pricing flexibility decisions Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-04 Abhishek Srivastava, Tsan-Ming Choi, Aarushi Mahajan, Vivek Roy
Gray markets are infamous for unauthorized diversion of authentic products at lower prices to harm the manufacturer's authorized distribution channel. Hence, manufacturers are becoming more proactive in shaping strategies that can counter gray markets. By considering the risk of unauthorized selling through gray markets, we analyze the manufacturer's strategic channel choice and product upgrade decision
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Managing demand by upgrade programs and markdown pricing with a product rollover Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-09-28 Yongbo Xiao, Chen Hu, Qian Liu
It has been challenging for firms to effectively manage demand when they release products of one generation after another one. Motivated by the observations from the smartphone industry, this paper investigates the effectiveness of two demand management strategies in the presence of a product rollover: the upgrade program and price markdown policy. Under an upgrade program, a firm allows customers
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Investment strategies of information-provision technology in the platform-based supply chain Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Xu Tian, Mingzheng Wang, Yang Xu
On retailing platforms, several information-provision technologies are adopted to gain profit, such as production video ads service, live streaming service, and virtual reality/augmented reality tech. In this article, we focus on the investment strategies of information-provision tech and its impact on the platform-based supply chain. To this end, we develop a general model under which the platform
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Acceleration invariance principle for Hougaard processes in degradation analysis Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-09-28 Chien-Yu Peng, Yi-Shian Dong, Tsai-Hung Fan
Accelerated degradation tests (ADTs) are widely used to assess lifetime information under normal use conditions for highly reliable products. For the accelerated tests, two basic assumptions are that changing stress levels does not affect the underlying distribution family and that there is stochastic ordering for the life distributions at different stress levels. The acceleration invariance (AI) principle
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Farmers' green technology adoption: Implications from government subsidies and information sharing Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-09-26 Xianpei Hong, Ying-Ju Chen, Yeming Gong, Hua Wang
While the previous literature on green technology adoption has not fully considered information sharing, we consider the impact of demand information sharing on the adoption of green technologies by risk-averse farmers in a vertical agricultural supply chain. We find that government subsidies and information sharing do not always promote farmers' adoption of green technologies. The accuracy of the
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Bounds for joint probabilities of multistate systems using preservation of log-concavity Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-09-16 Sanjeev Sabnis, Priyanka Majumder, Shyamal Ghosh
Log-concavity of multivariate distributions is an important concept in general and has a very special place in the field of Reliability Theory. An attempt has been made in this paper to study preservation results for (i) the discrete version of multivariate log-concavity for multistate series and multistate parallel systems consisting of n$$ n $$ independent components, states of both components and
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Optimal design of line replaceable units Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-29 Joni Driessen, Joost de Kruijff, Joachim Arts, Geert-Jan van Houtum
A line replaceable unit (LRU) is a collection of connected parts in a system that is replaced when any part of the LRU fails. Companies use LRUs as a mechanism to reduce downtime of systems following a failure. The design of LRUs determines how fast a replacement is performed, so a smart design reduces replacement and downtime cost. A firm must purchase/repair a LRU upon failure, and large LRUs are
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Robust multi-echelon inventory management with multiple suppliers Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-29 Liangquan Wang, Chaolin Yang
We study a periodic-review multi-supplier series inventory system in which the demand is restricted to partial sum uncertainty sets. We present and solve a robust rolling-horizon model for the system. We propose an induction framework to characterize the closed-form robust optimal solution of the problem. We show that the robust optimal policy combines the echelon base-stock policy and a gap-of-echelon-base-stock
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Creating a merger option to strategically prevent a merger among suppliers or customers Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-25 Lezhen Wu, Dingwei Gu, Zhiyong Yao, Wen Zhou
It is well-established in the literature that a horizontal merger in a supply chain is profitable (or beneficial to firms at another tier) if the merger synergy exceeds some threshold referred to as the profitable (or beneficial) threshold. Our paper goes one step further by finding that the profitable threshold is always lower than the beneficial threshold, which implies that a firm may have an incentive
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Spatiotemporal vaccine allocation policies for epidemics with behavioral feedback dynamics Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Julius Barth, Su Li, Hrayer Aprahamian, Diwakar Gupta
Motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic, we study how a public health authority may allocate vaccines from a limited stockpile to different jurisdictions over time. We propose an epidemiological model with time-varying contact rates determined by a stylized behavioral feedback mechanism to reflect multi-wave transmission dynamics. We evaluate the performance of various information-sensitive allocation policies
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Optimal activation of halting multi-armed bandit models Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Wesley Cowan, Michael N. Katehakis, Sheldon M. Ross
We study new types of dynamic allocation problems the Halting Bandit models. As an application, we obtain new proofs for the classic Gittins index decomposition result compare Gittins (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 1979, 41, 148–177), and recent results of the authors in Cowan and Katehakis (Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences, 2015, 29, 51–76).
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Impact of store brand competition on retailer's strategic inventory in decentralized supply chains Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-11 Ganesh Balasubramanian, Arulanantha Prabu Ponnachiyur Maruthasalam
Retailers often sell their own store brands that compete with the national brands. Store brand competition induces the supplier to quote lower wholesale prices for national brands. In multi-period selling environments, retailers may complement this wholesale price reduction by carrying strategic inventories. Hence, store brand carrying retailers face the following dilemma. On the one hand, strong store
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Optimal targeted mass screening in non-uniform populations with multiple tests and schemes Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Jiayi Lin, Hrayer Aprahamian, George Golovko
We study the problem of designing optimal targeted mass screening of non-uniform populations. Mass screening is an essential tool that is widely utilized in a variety of settings, for example, preventing infertility through screening programs for sexually transmitted diseases, ensuring a safe blood supply for transfusion, and mitigating the transmission of infectious diseases. The objective of mass
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Maximizing the throughput of a rotating Seru with nonpreemptive discrete stations Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-19 Yin Gai, Yong Yin, Dongni Li, Yaoxin Zhang, Jiafu Tang
Seru production systems are an effective way to respond to ever-changing market demand. This article focuses on maximizing the throughput of rotating serus with nonpreemptive stations, where a worker's operations cannot be disrupted. We analyze the effects of unbalanced worker velocities on non-value-added idle times. Through the use of dynamical system theories, we explicate the mechanism and dynamics
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Tax-efficient supply chain allocation in a competitive environment Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-14 Yuan Jiang, Xu Guan, Ying-Ju Chen, Yiwen Bian
Many regulations have been enacted to prevent the multinational firm's (MNF's) tax avoidance and cause the enforcement cost of incoming shifting. This paper investigates the impact of the enforcement cost on a firm's tax-efficient supply chain allocation strategy, wherein the firm can either create a research and development (R&D) center that innovates the intangible assets or create a distributor
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Cooperation strategies with third-party platform: E-tailer and manufacturer perspectives Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-14 Rui Mao, Hongqiao Chen, Houcai Shen
With the rapid development of e-commerce, both e-tailers and manufacturers have actively cooperated with third-party platforms to expand distribution channels and enhance competitiveness. There are three typical choices for firms to cooperate with a third-party platform: (i) non-cooperation, (ii) agency selling cooperation mode, and (iii) reselling cooperation mode. We consider a three-tier supply
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Order acceptance and scheduling with delivery under generalized parameters Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Lingfa Lu, Jinwen Ou, Xue Yu, Liqi Zhang
Inspired by the concept of generalized due dates introduced by Hall (IIE Transactions, 18(2), 220–222), in this article we first define four new generalized parameters in machine scheduling: the generalized release dates (GRD), generalized processing times (GPT), generalized rejection costs (GRC), and generalized delivery times (GDT). We then study order acceptance and scheduling problems with delivery
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Put it in the bag: Order fulfillment with a pocket sorter system Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Nils Boysen, Dirk Briskorn, David Füßler, Konrad Stephan
Due to high real estate costs in urban areas, shop floor space is scarce in most brick-and-mortar stores. Maneuvering newly arrived merchandise through narrow aisles during shelf replenishment is time-consuming for the sales staff and impedes customers. Therefore, many retail chains nowadays aim for store-friendly shipments (SFS). By mirroring the layout of a store in the buildup of its dedicated shipments
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Quantifying the benefits of customized vaccination strategies: A network-based optimization approach Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-06-26 Su Li, Hrayer Aprahamian
We study the problem of designing vaccine distribution strategies that maximally mitigate the negative impact of an infectious disease outbreak. This is achieved through a multiperiod optimization-based framework that embeds important subject-specific risk and contact information into the decision-making process. By analyzing the structure of the resulting optimization problem, we identify key structural
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Redundancy mechanisms to systems with statistically dependent component and redundancy lifetimes Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-06-19 Yinping You, Xiaohu Li, Ying Wei
This study deals with redundancy mechanisms of coherent systems with statistically dependent component and redundancy lifetimes. We derive the distortion function of coherent system with a redundancy mechanism at component level, and then we present the usual stochastic order and hazard rate order on redundant system lifetimes. The main results not only enrich the framework of research in this line
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Managing demand slowdown: The interplay between trade-ins and quality improvement Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-06-07 Wei Wang, Lipan Feng, Yongjian Li, Gangshu (George) Cai, Wubo Zhang
Quality improvement and trade-ins are widely used by firms to manage the demand slowdown. However, how these two strategies interact with each other is unclear. In this paper, we construct a stylized model where a monopoly sells the new product to a market comprising both new and replacement consumers. We examine and compare the firm's optimal decisions, demands, and profits under four cases with quality
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Capacity shortages, regulation, and firm incentives in the generic drugs industry Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-06-07 H. Sebastian Heese, Eda Kemahlioglu-Ziya
Drug shortages are becoming more frequent and severe in the United States, especially for generic drugs. A lack of economic incentives has been cited as a root cause. Only few firms choose to produce a such drugs, and, if they do, these firms do not allocate large levels of capacity. Hence, total industry supply is limited, increasing the odds of shortages. We develop and analyze a stylized game-theoretic
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Refined mean-field approximation for discrete-time queueing networks with blocking Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-06-02 Yang Pan, Pengyi Shi
We study a discrete-time queueing network with blocking that is primarily motivated by outpatient network management. To tackle the curse of dimensionality in performance analysis, we develop a refined mean-field approximation that deals with changing population size, a nonconventional feature that makes the analysis challenging within the existing literature. We explicitly quantify the convergence
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Sensitivity analysis of hybrid microgrids with application to deployed military units Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-05-29 Daniel Reich, Susan M. Sanchez
We introduce a framework for applying sensitivity analysis to a set of potential hybrid microgrid design options, from which a decision maker can select the most preferred one. In contrast to optimization-centric models that define an objective and produce a single solution, our goal is to empower the decision maker by providing both a range of options and accessible information that enables the decision
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Robust online detection in serially correlated directed network Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-05-28 Miaomiao Yu, Yuhao Zhou, Fugee Tsung
As the complexity of production processes increases, the diversity of data types drives the development of network monitoring technology. This paper mainly focuses on an online algorithm to detect serially correlated directed networks robustly and sensitively. First, we consider a transition probability matrix to resolve the double correlation of primary data. Further, since the sum of each row of
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Optimal and heuristic policies for production and inventory controls in dual supply chains with fluctuating demands Naval Research Logistics (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-05-20 Bing Lin, Shaoxiang Chen, Rohit Bhatnagar
In the context of fast-fashion business, we study the joint control of production, inventory, and unilateral transshipment in dual supply chains in which one supply chain is a responsive supply chain for fashion products and the other is an efficient supply chain for basic products in a fluctuating demand environment (FDE). Our research focuses on: (1) formulating an appropriate model for this complex