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Bracketology, the art of successfully picking all the winners in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) annual men’s Division I college basketball championship tournament, has become a favorite national activity. In spite of the challenges and uncertainty faced in this endeavor, patterns exist in how the seeds appear in each round, particularly the later rounds. This paper statistically...
The present study fills a gap between the benchmarking literature and multi-output based efficiency and productivity studies by proposing a benchmarking framework to analyze total factor productivity (TFP). Different specifications of the Hicks–Moorsteen TFP index are tailored for specific benchmarking perspectives: (1) static, (2) fixed base and unit, and (3) dynamic TFP change. These approaches...
This paper deals with the selection of the profiles of weights to be used in cross-efficiency evaluations. In an attempt to prevent unrealistic weighting schemes, one of the issues of main interest that we address here is that of the zero weights, since their use implies that some of the variables considered are excluded from the assessments to be made. In the calculation of cross-efficiency scores,...
The concept and operation of supply chain (SC) visibility remain underexplored questions in supply chain management, as is the question of the facilitating role of inter-organizational information systems (IOIS) in achieving SC visibility. This paper seeks to elaborate on the novel concept of IOIS visibility and to explore the antecedents and consequences of IOIS visibility. Investigating SC cooperation...
Matrix game theory is concerned with how two players make decisions when they are faced with known exact payoffs. The aim of this paper is to develop a simple and an effective linear programming method for solving matrix games in which the payoffs are expressed with intervals. Because the payoffs of the matrix game are intervals, the value of the matrix game is an interval as well. Based on the definition...
This paper is derived from an interest in the development of automated approaches to tackle examination timetabling problems effectively. We propose a hybrid approach that incorporates effective heuristic operators within the great deluge algorithm. The latter was chosen because of consistently good performances being reported within the examination timetabling research domain. The additional heuristic...
Using an additive super-efficiency data envelopment analysis (DEA) model, this paper develops a new assessment index based on two frontiers for predicting corporate failure and success. The proposed approach is applied to a random sample of 1001 firms, which is composed of 50 large US bankrupt firms randomly selected from Altman's bankruptcy database and 901 healthy matching firms. This sample represents...
This paper considers a joint preventive maintenance (PM) and production/inventory control policy of an unreliable single machine, mono-product manufacturing cell with stochastic non-negligible corrective and preventive delays. The production/inventory control policy, which is based on the hedging point policy (HPP), consists in building and maintaining a safety stock of finished products in order...
Over the last forty years, new methods and methodologies have been developed to deal with wicked problems or “messes”. They are structured and rigorous but non-mathematical. Prime examples are: soft systems methodology (SSM), cognitive mapping/SODA and the strategic choice approach (SCA). Collectively they are known as Soft OR, Soft Systems, or Problem Structuring Methods (PSMs). Soft OR has now come...
In this paper we formulate fixed-charge problems with polynomials. Using polynomial formulations we show structural similarity between different kinds of linear and fixed charge formulations. We also show the benefits of applying polynomial formulation for finding an approximate solution for problems where no algorithms exist and in some cases for developing a method to provide direct solutions to...
Various methods and algorithms have been developed for multiclass classification problems in recent years. How to select an effective algorithm for a multiclass classification task is an important yet difficult issue. Since the multiclass algorithm selection normally involves more than one criterion, such as accuracy and computation time, the selection process can be modeled as a multiple criteria...
The discipline of operations management (OM) has long been offering differing quantitative techniques for improving the efficiency of banking operations. However, there has been a trend in recent years that operations and services of the banking industry are becoming more diverse and unstructured, rendering many traditional OM quantitative techniques less effective in performance improvement. By integrating...
We consider an inventory model in which a supplier makes deal offers with random discount prices at random points in time. Assuming that discount offerings follow a Poisson process and discount price is a discrete random variable with a known distribution, we propose a continuous-review control policy for the model and derive optimality conditions for the policy parameters. The model is then extended...
This paper deals with the dynamic multi-item capacitated lot-sizing problem under random period demands (SCLSP). Unfilled demands are backordered and a fill rate constraint is in effect. It is assumed that, according to the static-uncertainty strategy of Bookbinder and Tan [1], all decisions concerning the time and the production quantities are made in advance for the entire planning horizon regardless...
Vaccination against infectious disease is an extremely important public health endeavor. Yet, in the past 40 years, the manufacture of pediatric vaccines has become less profitable due to rising costs and limited demand, inducing many pharmaceutical companies to leave the market. To ensure the safe, secure, and reliable provision of vaccines, the economic interests of the vaccine industry must be...
This paper presents a prescriptive account of diagnostic problem solving, or diagnosis, in quality and process control. This paper identifies a general strategy, named branch-and-prune, whose manifestations can be found in disciplines such as medical diagnosis, troubleshooting of devices, and model-based diagnosis in artificial intelligence. The work aims to offer a clear conceptualization of this...
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