At the time of the final publication of the paper, in December 2016, Yixin Zhao’s affiliation had changed.

A stochastic flow network composed of multistate arcs can be utilized to describe several practical systems such as computer networks, where transmission time taken for sending data to a sink is an important index. Determining a path with minimum transmission time is known as the quickest path problem (QPP). All algorithms addressing the QPP assume that the determined minimal paths (MPs) are disjoint

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a very effective management tool in assessing the performance of a set of decision making units (DMUs). In the efficiency evaluation using classic single stage DEA models, the internal processes of the DMUs are often neglected. In most real-world problems, it may be more realistic to evaluate the efficiency evaluation in two-stage production systems. In some cases:

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are systems allowing people to interact with the environment bypassing the natural neuromuscular and hormonal outputs of the peripheral nervous system (PNS). These interfaces record a user’s brain activity and translate it into control commands for external devices, thus providing the PNS with additional artificial outputs. In this framework, the BCIs based on the P300

This paper is motivated by the widespread availability of AI tools, whose adoption and consequent benefits are still not well understood. As a first step, some critical issues that relate to AI tools in general, humans in the context of AI tools, and AI tools in the context of operations management are identified. A discussion of how these issues could hinder employee adoption and use of AI tools is

Extending the results of Kruk (Queueing theory and network applications. QTNA 2019. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 11688. Springer, Cham, pp 263–275, 2019), we derive heavy traffic limit theorems for a single server, single customer class queue in which the server uses the Shortest Remaining Processing Time (SRPT) policy from heavy traffic limits for the corresponding Earliest Deadline First

Information asymmetry leads to short-term competitive antagonism between downstream manufacturers and upstream suppliers. This paper applies a master-slave game to reproduce the interest conflict between a manufacturer and a supplier, and proposes a cooperative decision-making model based on information sharing, considering the interest consistency of upstream supply chain members. Additionally, the

The vehicle routing problem is a traditional combinatorial problem with practical relevance for a wide range of industries. In the literature, several specificities have been tackled by dedicated methods in order to better reflect real-world situations. Following this trend, this article addresses the fleet size and mix vehicle routing problem with time windows in which companies hire a third-party

The evolving field of disruptive technologies has recently gained significant interest in various industries, including agriculture. The fourth industrial revolution has reshaped the context of agricultural technology (AgriTech) with applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and a strong focus on data-driven analytical techniques. Motivated by the advances in AgriTech for agrarian operations, the

This paper examines the extent to which herding and feedback trading behaviors drive price dynamics across nine major cryptocurrencies. Using sample price data from bitcoin, ethereum, XRP, bitcoin cash, EOS, litecoin, stellar, cardano and IOTA, respectively, we document heterogeneity in the types of feedback trading strategies investors utilize across markets. Whereas some cryptocurrency markets show

This paper investigates the variance reduction techniques Antithetic Variates (AV) and Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) when used for sequential sampling in stochastic programming and presents a comparative computational study. It shows conditions under which the sequential sampling with AV and LHS satisfy finite stopping guarantees and are asymptotically valid, discussing LHS in detail. It computationally

We consider a new class of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) modeling, which we call ‘sequential DEA’. This new approach is a relatively simple generalization of the standard and popular in practice DEA. It allows for analyzing efficiency of the decision making units that consist of a sequence of sub-DMUs (e.g., branches of banks, hospital holding company running a number of hospitals at different locations

Our study examines the literature that has been published in important journals on supply chain disruptions, a topic that has emerged the last 20 years, with an emphasis in the latest developments in the field. Based on a review process important studies have been identified and analyzed. The content analysis of these studies synthesized existing information about the types of disruptions, their impact

During the last decades, research in multi-objective optimisation has seen considerable growth. However, this activity has been focused on linear, non-linear, and combinatorial optimisation with multiple objectives. Multi-objective mixed integer (linear or non-linear) programming has received considerably less attention. In this paper we propose an algorithm to compute a finite set of non-dominated

In this paper we introduce a bi-objective location-allocation problem for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) operating in a hostile environment. The objective is to find the locations to deploy UASs and assign Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to regions for surveillance. One of the objectives is to maximize search effectiveness, while the second is the minimization of the threats posed to the UASs. These two

Security solutions for two stage games, where the second stage consists of a strategic form noncooperative game, are not reachable in many problems. The aim of this paper is to investigate such solutions. Mixed extension for the second stage game is considered and existence results for approximate mixed security solutions, together with the convergences of values, are given and illustrated by significative

Three-way group decisions provide an efficient method to settle complex and high risk decision-making problems. To obtain reasonable decision results that satisfy different backgrounds and knowledge of decision makers, it is necessary to design a proper consensus reaching process (CRP) for loss functions of decision-theoretic rough sets (DTRSs). Unlike existing researches, this paper not only extends

The disassembly line plays a vital role to recover the products for remanufacturing enterprises. For this reason, designing and balancing of the disassembly line are important to utilize the economic and tactical benefits. This study explores a multi-objective disassembly line balancing problem (MODLBP) from a different point of view by considering the workers’ heterogeneity and the multi-manned stations

SERU production system (SERU) demonstrates more manufacturing flexibility in response to volatile market demands. Although many firms have implemented SERU successfully, little research on manufacturing flexibility in SERU exists, especially empirical evidence in the context of Chinese firms. Manufacturing flexibility considers two major dimensions in SERU, namely, product mix flexibility and volume

We consider a stochastic discrete multiobjective programming process with a finite number of stages. The number of states at each stage and the number of feasible decisions at each state are also finite. The aim of the paper is to propose a new interactive procedure for such a problem based on trade-off analysis. The procedure is illustrated with project portfolio selection. There are many organizations

In this paper we generalize the graph Banzhaf value, proposed by Alonso-Meijide and Fiestras-Janeiro (Naval Res Logist 53(3):198–203, 2006) in the deterministic communication situations, to the generalized probabilistic communication situations. This new value is called the probabilistic Banzhaf value. We provide two axiomatic characterizations of the value by the probabilistic versions of component

The paper investigates national/regional power generation expansion planning for medium/long-term analysis in the presence of electricity demand uncertainty. A two-stage stochastic programming is designed to determine the optimal mix of energy supply sources with the aim to minimise the expected total cost of electricity generation considering the total carbon dioxide emissions produced by the power

The interactions and dependencies between software and hardware are often neglected in modeling system reliability in the past few decades due to the mathematical complexity. However, many system failures occurred from the interactions or simultaneous occurrences of software and hardware. This paper first proposes a new diagram of categorizing system-level failures and further incorporates such a diagram

In practice, selling goods through a powerful retailer such as Wal-Mart enables the supplier to access the retailer’s ERP for accurate demand information (e.g., Wal-Mart’s Retail Link). However, in the recent years, we observe the suppliers are suffering from longer and longer average account period when they contract with powerful retailers. Therefore, whether partnering with a powerful retailer at

The berth allocation and quay crane assignment problem (BACAP) is a complex port operation planning problem susceptible to uncertainties, such as vessel arrival time fluctuation to its estimated time of arrival and maritime markets. For promoting reliability and sustainability of container terminals, this paper addresses the optimization of BACAP under the uncertain vessels’ arrival times and fluctuation

This paper measures the efficiency and convergence of 37 stock exchanges in 35 countries over the period from 2006 to 2014, a period that encompasses a full business cycle of growth, recession and recovery. We combine a multi-stage data envelopment analysis with the window analysis approach to filter out the impact of economic environmental variables on stock exchange efficiency in the provision of

Following the emergence of the Internet, the Internet of things (IOT) brought about another wave of technological and economic revolutions. Through the lens of the production process, this study utilises the dynamic network slack-based measure model in data envelopment analysis to evaluate 32 IOT companies in Taiwan in terms of their innovation efficiency, operational efficiency and overall efficiency

Sustainable freight transportation is aimed at reducing environmental emissions and social inequity along with economic inefficiency to drive the business. Lack of a continuous sustainability assessment and monitoring tool increases the reluctance of freight transporters to adopt world-class sustainability practices. This paper attempts to develop the performance index for a sustainable freight transportation

In the present era of complex environments, banks operate in a more dynamic environment, which in turn, affects their relative efficiency. Traditional Data envelopment analysis (DEA) models are widely used to measure efficiency. However, environmental/exogenous variables can significantly influence the DEA efficiency scores. Therefore, identifying the most important environmental variables is crucial

The rapid development of green products, such as electric vehicle (EV) batteries, has brought about challenges in recycling and remanufacturing. To help tackle these challenges, in this research, we investigate how process innovation affects green product remanufacturing. Specifically, using game-theoretic models, we analyze process innovation strategies for green product remanufacturing in a closed-loop

World Health Organization (WHO) stated COVID-19 as a pandemic in March 2020. Since then, 26,795,847 cases have been reported worldwide, and 878,963 lost their lives due to the illness by September 3, 2020. Prediction of the COVID-19 pandemic will enable policymakers to optimize the use of healthcare system capacity and resource allocation to minimize the fatality rate. In this research, we design a

System reliability design and evaluation have a significant effect on the competitiveness of products and the sustainable development of enterprises. In the initial stage of system design, it must be discussed the truth-membership function, indeterminacy-membership function and falsity-membership function of basic failure events from different perspectives which belong to neutrosophic environments

As the people are becoming conscious about protection of the environment from pollutant caused by human beings, businesses are adopting green technology to procure green products to save the environment from pollution. Consequently, it is a challenging task at the firm manager to capture the market providing best green quality at fair price in a given economy. The paper plans to discuss two situations

Although the business environment is stochastic, deterministic data envelopment analysis (DEA) models are typically used to measure the efficiency of commercial banks for the purpose of simplicity. Bank operations are characterized by a network structure due to the dual role of deposits, which, on the one hand, are the output of the process of borrowing funds from depositors and, on the other hand

The coordination in post-disaster functions is a major challenge for the humanitarian supply chains. Due to uncertainty and temporary nature of the disasters, it becomes very difficult to ensure coordination among the aid organizations engaged in the humanitarian supply chain. The increasing incidents of the natural, technological and man-made disasters have attracted the attention of the researchers

The use of statistical and AI methods in civil litigation is an area likely to expand. As with many areas of social science, the data requirements are high but complex, because of the complexity of the legal process and the nature of the causal connections. This paper looks at the early stage of the process where the initial establishment of liability acts as a legal triage which affects the route

In this paper, we develop a new bi-objective model for dynamic weapon-target assignment problem. We consider that the initial weapon assignment plan of defense is disrupted during engagement because of a destroyed air target, breakdown of a weapon system or a new incoming air target. The objective functions are defined as the maximization of probability of no-leaker and the maximization of stability

This article deals with the computation of the probability, for a GBM (geometric Brownian motion) process, to hit sequences of one-sided stochastic boundaries defined as GBM processes, over a closed time interval. Explicit formulae are obtained, allowing the analytical valuation of all the main kinds of barrier options in a much more general setting than the usual one assuming constant or time-dependent

Operations research (OR) has been at the core of decision making since World War II, and today, business interactions on different platforms have changed business dynamics, introducing a high degree of uncertainty. To have a sustainable vision of their business, firms need to have a suitable decision-making process at each stage, including minute details. Our study reviews and investigates the existing

Multiple decision support methods have been developed to support multi-criteria problems, offering a structured approach. One such method is FITradeoff, which is based on tradeoff, and has a strong axiomatic structure. Implemented in a Decision Support System, FITradeoff offers an experience with low cognitive effort and time demanded by the decision maker. Despite its advantages, some issues remain

Data-driven culture is considered to bring business-oriented cultural transformation to a firm. It is considered to provide substantial dividends to the firms’ product and process innovations. Recently, several firms have been using different advanced technology-embedded business analytics (BA) tools to improve their business performance. Again, advancement of information and communication technology

Service provider portfolio selection (SPPS) can be a major challenge for organizations to achieve project success. Hence, organizations need to decide on which service provider portfolio (SPP) is appropriate for project management (PM). However, there has been limited research on how to select a SPP in PM. To address this research gap, we establish a novel model for SPPS based on a BP neural network

In cross-border logistics, mainline carriers (MCs) confronting demand uncertainty have to share their information with the overseas regional carrier (RC) via information system or electronic data interchange. However, does the RC or the incumbent MC have incentives to disclose the demand information to a new MC? The new MC competes with the incumbent MC but has no demand information, while the incumbent

A resale value guaranteed (RVG) strategy has emerged as a novel way to alleviate EV purchasers’ resale anxiety. However, certain questions, such as when to initiate a RVG strategy and whether to share information with supply chain partners, are unanswered. In this study, we aim to investigate the impacts of a RVG strategy and reliability of a RVG decision on EV adoption and supply chain performance

The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of Brexit on the dependence between European financial markets. We use the Diebold and Yilmaz (2009, 2012) approach to better map the relationship between the three main European markets and we propose an Optimal portfolio weighting to gain insights into the portfolio design dynamics in the period between 2013 and 2019, in particular any changes due

In order to make sense of future uncertainty, managers have long resorted to creating scenarios that are then used to evaluate how uncertainty affects decision-making. The large number of scenarios that are required to faithfully represent several sources of uncertainty leads to major computational challenges in using these scenarios in a decision-support context. Moreover, the complexity induced by

Inventory management of surgical instruments and material handling decisions of perioperative services are critical to hospitals’ and operating rooms’ (ORs) service levels and costs. However, efficiently coordinating these decisions is challenging due to their interdependence and the uncertainties faced by hospitals. These challenges motivated the development of this study to answer the following research

Demand information and consumer valuation uncertainty of new products have significant impacts on both consumers’ purchasing behavior and retail operations. To address the information transparency for new products launching, this study examines the profitability of omni-channel pre-ordering (i.e., compared to traditional online pre-ordering), a new advance selling strategy for retailers whereby consumers

We consider a Markov Chain in which the state space is partitioned into sets where both transitions within sets and between sets have a special structure. Transitions within each set constitute a finite level dependent quasi-birth-and-death-process (LDQBD), and transitions between sets are restricted to six types of transitions. These latter types are needed to preserve the sets structure in the reduction

In this paper, we propose a probabilistic preemption scheme in cognitive radio networks that will simultaneously ensure the primary user (PU) packets’ Quality of Service (QoS) and the secondary user (SU) packets’ transmission continuity. This scheme differs from a complete preemption scheme or a complete non-preemption scheme in conventional cognitive radio networks in that a PU packet can interrupt

In this paper, a modern computer network, cloud-based network, which comprises internet of things (IoT), edge servers, and cloud servers for data transmission, is investigated and evaluated. A cloud-based network is modeled as a graph having a set of nodes and a set of links. Each link represents a transmission route, and each node represents a device, such as an IoT device, edge server, and cloud

Financial risks associated with Fintech have been increasing with its significant growth in recent years. Aiming at addressing the problem of identifying risks in online lending investment under a financial technology platform, we develop a Q&A text risk recognition model based on attention mechanism and Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory. First, the Q&A pairing on the text data set is carried out

We investigate the nature of the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate financial performance (CFP) by examining how it changes across a third dimension that accounts for firm-specific factors. We propose a semi-latent specification of an endogenous control variable, which can, for the first time, explicitly identify, for each individual firm, the threshold level where

The paper studies product bundling in a duopoly supply chain network under the influence of different power-balance structures, bundling decisions and advertising efforts on total supply chain profit. Mathematical models comprising two manufacturers and a single retailer are developed to capture the impact of bundling policy and advertisement strategy under three power-balance structures, namely Manufacturer

Piecewise homogeneous Markov fluid models are composed by homogeneous intervals where the model is governed by an interval dependent pair of generators and the model behaviour changes at the boundaries. The main difficulty of the transient analysis of piecewise homogeneous Markov fluid models is the appropriate description of the various boundary cases. The paper proposes an analytical approach to

Societal emergence and sustainability are results of human actions and practices which can either imbalance it with maximum exploitation or retain it through responsible utilization of resources. Based on theories on institutional and resource-based views, the study explores the enablers of green sustainable practices of procurement, logistics, product and process design and regulatory frameworks for

The repeated occurrence of the same event in a process is commonly observed in many domains. Such events are referred to as recurrent events. The time to occurrence of these repeated events varies from unit to unit with a possibility of events not occurring among some of the units. Invariably such data are dealt with using some of the techniques in survival analysis called recurrent event models, which

The purpose of our study is to examine the dynamics of various liquidity proxies around specific price formation within intraday data. We examine the behavior of the measures representing price impact, depth of the market, its width and elasticity around intraday zero-return observations. Our sample is based upon quotations of blue chip stocks listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, one of the European

We incorporate consumer low-carbon awareness and social preferences, including relationship and status preferences, into a game of emissions reduction and promotion involving one manufacturer and one retailer using a long-term perspective. We investigate the channel members’ decision making and performance under three scenarios, including a decentralized scenario both with and without a cost-sharing

This paper considers an extension of the common asset universe of a pension fund to investment certificates. Investment certificates are a class of structured products particularly interesting for their special payoff structures and they are acquiring relevancy in the worldwide markets. In fact, some subclasses of certificates offer loss protection and show high liquidity and, thus, they can be very