Kategoria BISAC: Business & Economics >> Operations Research

From the birth of international trade along such exotic trails as the Silk Road to the economics of running a lemonade stand to a day in the life of a CEO, "Anatomy of a Business" traces the evolution of modern business practices and how they are applied today, in enterprises of all shapes and sizes. Through dozens of examples and illustrations, "Anatomy of a Business" defines the major types of business (including corporation, partnership, privately-held company, and non-profit) and then metaphorically takes the roof off an office building to peer inside, explaining how each business...

Our globalized world brings us increasing complexity and many computationally hard problems. Metaheuristics are mathematical optimization methods that have become a powerful answer to many of these difficult problems. As a growing set of robust methods, Metaheuristics is producing effective algorithms that compute approximate solutions of high quality in realistic computational time.

METAHEURISTICS: Progress as Real Problem Solvers is a peer-reviewed volume of eighteen current, cutting-edge papers by leading researchers in the field. Included are an invited paper by...

We are witnessing the important developments of complex dynamic systems which include the areas of telecommunications, manufacturing, transportation or power networks, and the rapidly emerging research area seeking to understand and analyze biological systems using the tools of systems theory. In addition, countries' economies are increasingly dependent in the ongoing globalization of economic exchanges. This is in large part made possible by the massive development of information technologies, and the ubiquity of communication systems which permit the existence of global marketplaces....

Recent years have seen a great variety of applications of DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) for use in evaluating the performances of many different kinds of entities engaged in many different activities in many different contexts in many different countries. One reason is that DEA has opened up possibilities for use in cases which have been resistant to other approaches because of the complex (often unknown) nature of the relations between multiple inputs and multiple outputs involved in many of these activities (which are often reported in non-commeasurable units). Examples include the...

Formal decision and evaluation models are so widespread that almost no one can pretend not to have used or suffered the consequences of one of them. This book is a guide aimed at helping the analyst to choose a model and use it consistently. A sound analysis of techniques is proposed and the presentation can be extended to most decision and evaluation models as a "decision aiding methodology."

The service economy is now the largest portion of the industrialized world's economic activity. This development has dramatically raised the importance of maximizing productivity excellence in service organizations. The need for productivity excellence has led service organization managers to use benchmarking techniques to identify and adopt best practices in their organizations. Benchmarking has enabled service organizations to continuously improve by allowing service units to learn from methods that prove the most efficient and effective.

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) offer a general framework for representing non-linear mappings from several input variables to several output variables, and they can be considered as an extension of the many conventional mapping techniques. In addition to many considerations on their biological foundations and their really wide spectrum of applications, constructing appropriate ANNs can be seen as a really hard problem. A distinguished task in building ANNs is the tuning of a set of parameters known as weights. This will be the main focus of the present book. The trained ANNs can be...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has grown has grown into a powerful quantitative, analytical tool for measuring and evaluating performance. It has been successfully applied to a host of different entities engaged in a wide variety of activities in many complex, multi-layered contexts worldwide.

DATA ENVELOPMENT ANALYSIS: A Comprehensive Text with Models, Applications, References, And DEA-Solver Software, 2nd Edition is designed to provide a systematic introduction to DEA and its uses as a multifaceted tool for evaluating problems in a variety of contexts....

A number of methodologies have been employed to provide decision making solutions globalized markets. Hidden Markov Models in Finance offers the first systematic application of these methods to specialized financial problems: option pricing, credit risk modeling, volatility estimation and more. The book provides tools for sorting through turbulence, volatility, emotion, chaotic events - the random "noise" of financial markets - to analyze core components.

In a relatively short period of time, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has grown into a powerful quantitative, analytical tool for measuring and evaluating performance. It has been successfully applied to a whole variety of problems in many different contexts worldwide. The analysis of an array of these problems has been resistant to other methodological approaches because of the multiple levels of complexity that must be considered. Several examples of multifaceted problems in which DEA analysis has been successfully used are: (1) maintenance activities of US Air Force bases in...

Operations Research Management Science approaches have helped people for the last 40 years to understand the complex functioning of the systems based upon natural resources, as well as to manage natural resources in the most efficient manner. The areas usually viewed within the natural resources field are: agriculture, fisheries, forestry, and mining and water resources. All of these areas share the common problem of optimally allocating scarcity over a period of time. The scale of time or length of the planning horizon differs from one area to another. We have almost a continuous renewal...

DYNAMIC OPTIMIZATION AND DIFFERENTIAL GAMES has been written to address the increasing number of Operations Research and Management Science problems (that is, applications) that involve the explicit consideration of time and of gaming among multiple agents. It is a book that will be used both as a textbook and as a reference and guide to engineers, operation researchers, applied mathematicians and social scientists whose work involves the theoretical aspects of dynamic optimization and differential games. Included throughout the text are detailed explanations of several original dynamic...

Quantifying and assessing the value of an organisations design department can be problematic. The tools traditionally used by auditors are usually insufficient to measure either the value of design projects or their influence within an organisation. This book demystifies the design development and design management process, scrutinising it against a new set of auditing principles which illuminates its true value in a contemporary context.

Featuring a series of international case studies, Design Management: Exploring Fieldwork...

Quantifying and assessing the value of an organization's design department can be problematic. The tools traditionally used by auditors are usually insufficient to 'measure' either the value of design projects or their influence within an organization. This book demystifies the design development and design management process, scrutinising it against a new set of auditing principles which illuminates its true value in a contemporary context.

Featuring a series of international case studies, Design Management: Exploring Fieldwork and Applications argues that...

Brings together leading in the most important sub-fields of stochastic programming to present a rigourous overview of basic models, methods and applications of stochastic programming. The text is intended for researchers, students, engineers and economists, who encounter in their work optimization problems involving uncertainty.