摘要:

AbstractThe text is the opening address of the conference onOR and the Social Sciencesorganized by the Operational Research Society, in Cambridge, 10-13 April 1989.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1990.1

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1990

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

AbstractIllustrations of the principles of operational research from sports have been widely used in teaching because of the familiarity of the ideas and rules of the games to students. In this paper, a popular board game is used as a means of developing some concepts of sequential decision-making, leading to useful ideas of strategy and objectives.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1990.2

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1990

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

AbstractIn many chess tournaments, e.g. when the Swiss system is used, the number of players is much larger than the number of rounds to be played. In such tournaments the pairing for a round depends on the results in earlier rounds, and the pairing process can be very complicated. In these pairing systems the main goals are to let players with equal scores play together, and that each player should alternately play white and black, with the restriction that no player may face the same opponent more than once. The paper describes how a weighted matching algorithm is used to find‘the best pairing’by converting the pairing rules into penalty points.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1990.3

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1990

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

AbstractThe majority of the imported raw materials used by European industry have to be purchased in commodity markets where prices fluctuate over time. The overall purchasing decision contains several component stages. The work described in this paper concentrates on the final stage of this process, the tactical buying policy. A major difficulty lies in the definition of a proper measure of performance, so as to assess the merits of any proposed buying policy. The measures previously suggested by Kingsman and Taylor are discussed, and a new measure, thought to be more appropriate, is put forward. The paper describes a new heuristic buying policy, which is applied to the purchasing of maize. The policy uses Taylor's price-trend forecasting model and leads to purchasing costs which are shown to be significantly lower than the average market prices and better than those obtained from Kingsman's pricebreak policy.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1990.4

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1990

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

AbstractThe problem of timetabling examinations is one which is faced by most educational institutions, with the problem becoming particularly acute in institutions of higher education. The situation may be formulated generally as a 0-1 integer pregramming problem but, in common with a number of other timetabling problems which have been reported, a heuristic approach is more practical and produces an acceptable solution. The procedure described takes account of the obvious constraints imposed by examination-room availability and capacity, and the need to avoid clashes between common examination papers. In addition, the examinations are scheduled such that the students are faced with a minimum number of occasions when two papers have to be taken in the same day and, for ease of marking, the larger courses are examined early. A computer program to implement the heuristic was developed and was found to produce a better timetable than the previous manual procedure as well as a considerable saving in clerical effort.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1990.5

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1990

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

AbstractThis paper describes how the analytic hierarchy process was applied to a decision concerning the selection of a computer operating system. Various practical issues and problems which arose whilst using the process are discussed. The method was found to be a useful aid for identifying the criteria upon which a decision depends. It also revealed useful data about the concerns and preferences of decision-makers. Some problems were, however, encountered when assessing the importance of an intangible factor relative to a tangible factor. Also, it was difficult to interpret the options' final scores because the method does not provide an indication of statistical significance.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1990.6

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1990

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

AbstractMany organizations must devise tours for vehicles to collect from or deliver to a given set of destinations—the vehicle-routeing problem. This paper presents the optimal solution to a real-world problem with 38 destinations and four vehicles, and is thought to be the largest such problem that has been solved optimally. The organization concerned is a local authority (Berkshire County Council) which has aims other than profit maximization. Therefore explicit consideration is given to the multi-objective nature of the problem. Attempts to solve the problem using a commercial mathematical-programming package failed, but a specially written computer program was run on a mini-computer. In the optimal solution, total travel time is reduced by 15.7% and total distance by 11.5%, while the number of empty seats in each vehicle is more equally distributed.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1990.7

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1990

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

AbstractIn this paper, the renewal theory is investigated from the point of view of the excess-time (non-excess-time) renewal intervals. Useful results are derived, and applications to several renewal models are given.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1990.8

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1990

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

AbstractA queueing model with server vacations is studied in which it is assumed that the interarrival time has a general distribution, the service-time distribution is exponential and vacations are independently and indentically distributed with a general distribution. Using the embedded Markov chain technique, the equilibrium probability distributions of system size have been obtained at pre-arrival and at random epochs separately. Finally, the distribution of waiting time of a customer in the queue (excluding service) has been derived.

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1990.9

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1990

数据来源: Taylor

ISSN:0160-5682    

DOI:10.1057/jors.1990.10

出版商:Taylor&Francis    

年代:1990

数据来源: Taylor