摘要:

AbstractThe Bank of England recently decided to relocate its Registrar's Department outside London in order to reduce operational costs. This case study describes a multiattribute evaluation of the relocation options available, and discusses how these attributes were identified, scored and weighted against each other. The process was greatly facilitated by the use of‘Hiview’, a decision-support package which helped our group of decision-makers explore and resolve their important uncertainties.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1989.122

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1989

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

AbstractIn this paper we consider an item that is sold in a number of different prescribed sizes, an example being an item of clothing. We first deal with the situation where the total demand for a forthcoming period is known accurately but only historical or subjective estimates of the fractions of demand in each size are available. A procedure is developed for optimally allocating a given stock budget among the different sizes. Its performance is compared with a simpler, proportional allocation scheme. The numerical examples include data on clothing provided by a major municipal organization. The case where the total demand is a random variable is also treated.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1989.123

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1989

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

AbstractThe problem of placing bridges to alleviate congestion in a heavily loaded local-area computer network is briefly described. It is suggested that the generalization to that of placing transfer centres in other situations in which demand is arranged linearly may also be profitable. In order to obtain a better understanding of the problem, this paper concentrates on models in which demand is proportional (that is, the traffic intensity from one user to another is proportional to the product of their activity rates as measured by the traffic each produces). The results are rather surprising, it being demonstrated that the extent to which congestion can be relieved is severely limited.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1989.124

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1989

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

AbstractThe problem of reducing predictive cost is considered in the case when the cost of error function is not symmetric and the optimality criterion is the minimization of the median cost of the error of prediction. Examples are given and comparisons made with the usual solution based on the minimization of the mean cost. In the case of a Gaussian process, the median solution is found to be a simple additive adjustment to the predictive mean, and far easier to compute than the solution based on expected cost.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1989.125

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1989

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

AbstractMany service organizations follow a scheduling policy whereby employees alternate between direct customer service (e.g. bank deposits and withdrawals) and an ancillary activity (e.g. bookkeeping, paperwork). When queues are short, employees are diverted to ancillary activities; when queues become long, employees return to customer service. This paper evaluates trade-offs between the system objectives of (1) minimizing customer delay, (2) minimizing teller idle time, and (3) minimizing the disruption of ancillary activities, for queueing systems with ancillary activities. Customers are assumed to arrive by a stationary Poisson process, and service times are exponential random variables. In terms of objectives (1) and (3), the best of four policies studied is to add a server when the queue sizeper serverreaches a maximum and remove a server when the queue size equals zero. The difference in teller idle time between the policies is generally small, particularly when the traffic intensity is large.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1989.126

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1989

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

AbstractThe potential for improving the cost-effectiveness of public transport operations by designing better integrated feeder-bus/rail rapid transit systems has been widely recognized. This paper defines the feeder-bus network-design problem (FBNDP) as that of designing a feeder-bus network to access an existing rail system. The FBNDP is considered under two different demand patterns, many-to-one (M-to-1) and many-to-many (M-to-M). We present a mathematical programming model for the M-to-1 FBNDP, and show that it can be generalized to the M-to-M FBNDP. The FBNDP is a large and difficult vehicle-routeing-type problem with an additional decision variable—operating frequency. A heuristic model is presented, which generalizes the‘savings approach’to incorporate operating frequency. The computational analysis shows that the proposed heuristic provides reasonable feeder-bus networks and consistent responses to‘what if’questions. A comparison indicates that the proposed heuristic provides solutions that are superior to manually designed networks. The advantages of this heuristic are particularly significant under variable demand.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1989.127

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1989

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

AbstractWe consider the problem of supplying perishable goods to disloyal customers. As in traditional stock-control literature, a penalty is incurred whenever there is a stockout. However, in contrast to mainstream models, loss of goodwill is explicitly treated by incorporating the behavioural assumption that a fixed proportion of unsatisfied demand is lost forever after each stockout. The problem consists of finding supply levels which minimize costs of over- and underproduction, given unknown but deterministic demand. We derive optimal adaptive search procedures under varying assumptions ofa prioriknowledge about demand. Optimal strategies are compared to myopic strategies. Our methodology extends the mathematical theory of‘high-low search’for a hidden point to incorporate the‘Heisenberg principle’: the position of the hidden point (demand) is directly influenced by the actions (supply levels) of the searcher.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1989.128

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1989

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

AbstractIn a recent paper, it was suggested that the use of integer goal programming is questionable. No mathematical proof was provided to substantiate such a serious and far-reaching claim; instead, several‘counterexamples’were presented in support of the allegations. In this paper, we present a refutation of these allegations, and examine the reasons why such erroneous conclusions might have been reached.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1989.129

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1989

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

AbstractAn analysis of the willingness of a risk-neutral decision-taker to pay for a parallel research strategy is undertaken. The results, which are based on the management science/operational research literature about the value of information, examine the relationship between this willingness to pay and the statistical moments of the distribution of research outcomes. Only the benefits are considered in studying the above-mentioned problem in a non-traditional economic approach. More precisely, the case of the winner-takes-all is studied to evaluate the willingness to pay for a parallel strategy rather than for a non-parallel one. Upper bounds on the willingness to pay are computed and analysed with respect to the distribution of research outcomes.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1989.130

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1989

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

AbstractThis paper describes a method for assessing the combat degradation of an army, based on the Shannon entropy measure. It is shown that this measure is useful for analysing combat degradation due to casualties, since it is in broad agreement with the values established from past battle experience. It is also shown that the measure can be used to evaluate the degree of confidence in the outcome of training manoeuvres when weapons simulators are employed.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1989.131

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1989

数据来源: Taylor