Kategoria BISAC: Business & Economics >> Operations Research

Decision makers are often faced with several conflicting alternatives. How do they evaluate trade-offs when there are more than three criteria? To help people make optimal decisions, scholars in the discipline of multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) continue to develop new methods for structuring preferences and determining the correct relative weights for criteria. A compilation of modern decision-making techniques, Multiple Attribute Decision Making: Methods and Applications focuses on the fuzzy set approach to multiple attribute decision making (MADM). Drawing on...

Until now, no book addressed convexity, monotonicity, and variational inequalities together. Generalized Convexity, Nonsmooth Variational Inequalities, and Nonsmooth Optimization covers all three topics, including new variational inequality problems defined by a bifunction.

The first part of the book focuses on generalized convexity and generalized monotonicity. The authors investigate convexity and generalized convexity for both the differentiable and nondifferentiable case. For the nondifferentiable case, they introduce the concepts in terms of a...

Distributed decision making (DDM) has become of increasing importance in quantitative decision analysis. In applications like supply chain management, service operations, or managerial accounting, DDM has led to a paradigm shift. The book provides a unified approach to such seemingly diverse fields as multi-level stochastic programming, hierarchical production planning, principal agent theory, negotiations or contract theory. Different settings like multi-level one-person decision problems, multi-person antagonistic planning, and leadership situations are covered. Numerous...

Paul Williams, a leading authority on modeling in integer programming, has written a concise, readable introduction to the science and art of using modeling in logic for integer programming. Written for graduate and postgraduate students, as well as academics and practitioners, the book is divided into four chapters that all avoid the typical format of definitions, theorems and proofs and instead introduce concepts and results within the text through examples. References are given at the end of each chapter to the more mathematical papers and texts on the subject, and exercises are...

A path player game is a new innovative type of game which considers network flow problems from the viewpoint of network owners. This strategy enables modeling real-world problems and has many practical applications.

Key features:

* Presents a rigorous exposition of the theoretical foundations of the concept of a path player game;

* Suggests 18 practical open problems for future research in such areas as traffic planning, computation of equilibria, and optimization;

* Examines potentials for games on polyhedra as well as integer versions of generalized Nash...

The primary objective of this essential text is to emphasize the deep relations existing between the semiring and dioid structures with graphs and their combinatorial properties. It does so at the same time as demonstrating the modeling and problem-solving flexibility of these structures. In addition the book provides an extensive overview of the mathematical properties employed by "nonclassical" algebraic structures which either extend usual algebra or form a new branch of it.

In the global knowledge economy, corporate governance, organisational behaviour and performance of the supply chain are becoming increasingly important aspects of the evaluation of an enterprise. The subject of this book is the development of a contemporary organisation behaviour performance measurement (OBPM) model for enterprises in the modern economy. The fields of organisation behaviour and supply chain management are integrated with an Open Socio-Technical Systems theory of management and the application of Operations Research to corporate governance for the measurement of...

The application of auto-repeat facilities in telephone systems, as well as the use of random access protocols in computer networks, have led to growing interest in retrial queueing models. Since much of the theory of retrial queues is complex from an analytical viewpoint, with this book the authors give a comprehensive and updated text focusing on approximate techniques and algorithmic methods for solving the analytically intractable models.

Retrial Queueing Systems: A Computational Approach also

• Presents motivating examples in telephone and computer...

Although modern location theory is now more than 90 years old, the focus of researchers in this area has been mainly problem oriented. However, a common theory, which keeps the essential characteristics of classical location models, is still missing.

This monograph addresses this issue. A flexible location problem called the Ordered Median Problem (OMP) is introduced. For all three main subareas of location theory (continuous, network and discrete location) structural properties of the OMP are presented and solution approaches provided. Numerous illustrations and examples help the...

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...

This book covers recent advances in efficiency evaluations, most notably Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) methods. It introduces the underlying theories, shows how to make the relevant calculations and discusses applications. The aim is to make the reader aware of the pros and cons of the different methods and to show how to use these methods in both standard and non-standard cases.

Several software packages have been developed to solve some of the most common DEA and SFA models. This book relies on R, a free, open source software environment for...