2019 marked the 85th anniversary of Heinrich Freiherr von Stackelberg's habilitation thesis "Marktform und Gleichgewicht," which formed the roots of bilevel optimization. Research on the topic has grown tremendously since its introduction in the field of mathematical optimization. Besides the substantial advances that have been made from the perspective of game theory, many sub-fields of bilevel optimization have emerged concerning optimal control, multiobjective optimization, energy and electricity markets, management science, security and many more. Each chapter of this book covers a specific aspect of bilevel optimization that has grown significantly or holds great potential to grow, and was written by top experts in the corresponding area. In other words, unlike other works on the subject, this book consists of surveys of different topics on bilevel optimization. Hence, it can serve as a point of departure for students and researchers beginning their research journey or pursuing related projects. It also provides a unique opportunity for experienced researchers in the field to learn about the progress made so far and directions that warrant further investigation. All chapters have been peer-reviewed by experts on mathematical optimization.

The last two decades increasingly have challenged the field of management by confronting it with rapidly growing levels of dynamism, inter-connectedness, and complexity. Systems-based management approaches, their promise already proven, offer great potentials for influencing and coping with this development. This collection of essays offers ideas and exemplary case studies from experts in systemic management, organiza-tional cybernetics, and system dynamics for meeting the challenges in so-cio-economic systems. This book was compiled to honor the academic achievement of Markus Schwaninger, a leading protagonist in developing the field of systemic management and organizational cybernetics. His stature in the field is demonstrated in the forewords by Raul Espejo and John Sterman. The efforts of 18 researchers and practitioners, all closely related to Markus Schwaninger, offer conceptual and empirical approaches that will allow managers and advanced students of the management profession to analyze, understand, and design intelligent organizations. The book weaves its content from both theory and practice and offers hints for improving a variety of organizations, both private and public, profit and non-profit, and large and small.

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive and systematic introduction to the ranking methods for interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets, multi-criteria decision-making methods with interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets, and group decision-making methods with interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations. Including numerous application examples and illustrations with tables and figures and presenting the authors' latest research developments, it is a valuable resource for researchers and professionals in the fields of fuzzy mathematics, operations research, information science, management science and decision analysis.

The main purpose of this book is to introduce the essential theories and tools for production (manufacturing operations) management for students in engineering, junior professionals in supply chain and production managers who are starting their career in a manufacturing firm.With a focus on selected key techniques and a practical application of these skills, the book uses a real-world inspired case studies while providing readers with in-depth exploration. Designed as a coaching handbook for instructors or motivated self-learners, it is an ideal resource for project-based learning.It is suitable for graduates in technology management and engineering, and professionals in the field of manufacturing who want to revise their practical knowledge while enhancing theoretical background.

Pierre Wack was head of scenario planning at Royal Dutch / Shell Oil in London for just over ten years. He died in 1997. He was a pioneer of what we know today as scenario planning - an alternative and complement to strategic planning. Scenarios explore a variety of possible futures for examining decisions in organizational planning. Pierre was a unique man with interests in Indian and Japanese cultures and traditions. He travelled extensively and led a unique life that involved long periods of visiting gurus in India and extended sabbaticals in Japan. His experiences with Eastern thought no doubt shaped his ability to evolve the scenario method at Shell, and as a result he was able to lead a team that foresaw the oil crises of the 1970's and 80's. This new volume will cover the basic context of his life timeline and attach it to the development of his thinking about scenario planning over the course of his career. After his death, Wack's materials, papers and documents were collected by Napier Collyns and have recently been made available at the University of Oxford where the Pierre Wack Memorial Library has been established. These documents contain a variety of clues and stories that reveal more about who Pierre Wack was, how he thought and will provide details about scenario planning that have never been seen or published. They also reveal a curious man and include a timeline written by his wife, Eve, which details their relationship over the course of 40 years. Written for management and business historians and researchers, this book will uncover unseen contributions by a scenario planning pioneer shaped by significant events in his personal life that helped him to see the world differently.

The first edition of Search Methodologies: Introductory Tutorials in Optimization and Decision Support Techniques was originally put together to offer a basic introduction to the various search and optimization techniques that students might need to use during their research, and this new edition continues this tradition. Search Methodologies has been expanded and brought completely up to date, including new chapters covering scatter search, GRASP, and very large neighborhood search. The chapter authors are drawn from across Computer Science and Operations Research and include some of the world's leading authorities in their field. The book provides useful guidelines for implementing the methods and frameworks described and offers valuable tutorials to students and researchers in the field. "As I embarked on the pleasant journey of reading through the chapters of this book, I became convinced that this is one of the best sources of introductory material on the search methodologies topic to be found. The book's subtitle, "Introductory Tutorials in Optimization and Decision Support Techniques", aptly describes its aim, and the editors and contributors to this volume have achieved this aim with remarkable success. The chapters in this book are exemplary in giving useful guidelines for implementing the methods and frameworks described." Fred Glover, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder, USA "[The book] aims to present a series of well written tutorials by the leading experts in their fields. Moreover, it does this by covering practically the whole possible range of topics in the discipline. It enables students and practitioners to study and appreciate the beauty and the power of some of the computational search techniques that are able to effectively navigate through search spaces that are sometimes inconceivably large. I am convinced that this second edition will build on the success of the first edition and that it will prove to be just as popular." Jacek Blazewicz, Institute of Computing Science, Poznan University of Technology and Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences

The purpose of this book is to describe how lean and supply chain management can be combined to achieve world-class business performance. To accomplish this purpose, the book contains both basic material on lean and supply chain management, as well as content from current journal research findings, strategies, issues, concepts, philosophies, procedures, methodologies, and practices in managing a lean supply chain. Presented in a topical fashion, the chapters deal with a wide-range of subjects that support, nurture, and advance principles, concepts, and methodologies of lean supply chain management.

The overwhelming data produced everyday and the increasing performance and cost requirements of applicationsare transversal to a wide range of activities in society, from science to industry. In particular, the magnitude and complexity of the tasks that Machine Learning (ML) algorithms have to solve are driving the need to devise adaptive many-core machines that scale well with the volume of data, or in other words, can handle Big Data.

This book gives a concise view on how to extend the applicability of well-known ML algorithms in Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) with data scalability in mind. It presents a series of new techniques to enhance, scale and distribute data in a Big Learning framework. It is not intended to be a comprehensive survey of the state of the art of the whole field of machine learning for Big Data. Its purpose is less ambitious and more practical: to explain and illustrate existing and novel GPU-based ML algorithms, not viewed as a universal solution for the Big Data challenges but rather as part of the answer, which may require the use of different strategies coupled together."

This book offers an overview on the main modern important topics in random variables, random processes, and decision theory for solving real-world problems. After an introduction to concepts of statistics and signals, the book introduces many essential applications to signal processing like denoising, texture classification, histogram equalization, deep learning, or feature extraction. The book uses MATLAB algorithms to demonstrate the implementation of the theory to real systems. This makes the contents of the book relevant to students and professionals who need a quick introduction but practical introduction how to deal with random signals and processes

The Future of Industrial Man is the only book by Peter Drucker in which he systematically develops a basic social theory. He presents the requirements for any society to be functioning and legitimate, and then applies these general concepts to the special case of the industrial society. In his new introduction, Drucker explains that his reference to mercantilism in The Future of Industrial Man can today be called neoconservatism, which, he asserts, denies rather than affirms the reality of industrial and postindustrial society. Drucker outlines the major shifts of previous centuries. He describes the move from an agrarian to an industrial economy, illustrates the structure and dynamics of this new industrial order, and warns of the abuses inherent in the system if attempts are made to maintain it under anachronistic social conventions. He emphasizes the fact that the new industrial order must operate under a "legitimate" system of po-litical power supported by social authority. He discusses the particular roles of the owners, the workers, the managers the corporation itself as he pinpoints the problem that he considers the most central and the most critical: how to maintain the continuing freedom of the individual in an increasingly intricate, bureaucratized world. Following the initial publication of this work, Jacques Barzun wrote in The New Republic, "Here is a book which is so perfectly planned and so transparently written as to read with almost indecent ease. . . . Each page is the fruit of much learning and long reflection. It should accordingly by studied, pondered over, ana-lyzed word by word." According to W. H. Chamberlain of The Atlantic Monthly, "[Drucker] possesses a fund of historical and economic knowledge." The Future of Industrial Man is a landmark study by a noted analyst of the modern corporation. It is of continuing importance to economists, industrial studies scholars, and profes-sionals in business.

Organizations - whether profit or nonprofit, services or manufacturing - need to be able to adapt and transform their cultures to succeed. Yet cultural transformation can seem either too easy or completely overwhelming. "Transforming Culture" shows how effective and sustainable cultural transformation can be achieved even in a challenging environment such as a General Motors manufacturing plant. The authors offer both a practical approach and tools to draw on the energy and ideas of employees and executives, remove obstacles to change, and create durable improvements.

The connected dominating set has been a classic subject studied in graph theory since 1975. Since the 1990s, it has been found to have important applications in communication networks, especially in wireless networks, as a virtual backbone. Motivated from those applications, many papers have been published in the literature during last 15 years. Now, the connected dominating set has become a hot research topic in computer science. In this book, we are going to collect recent developments on the connected dominating set, which presents the state of the art in the study of connected dominating sets. The book consists of 16 chapters. Except the 1st one, each chapter is devoted to one problem, and consists of three parts, motivation and overview, problem complexity analysis, and approximation algorithm designs, which will lead the reader to see clearly about the background, formulation, existing important research results, and open problems. Therefore, this would be a very valuable reference book for researchers in computer science and operations research, especially in areas of theoretical computer science, computer communication networks, combinatorial optimization, and discrete mathematics.

Co-operatives provide a different approach to organizing business through their ideals of member ownership and democratic practice. Every co-operative member has an equal vote regardless of his or her own personal capital investment. The contemporary significance of co-operatives was highlighted by the United Nations declaration of 2012 as the International Year of Co-operatives. This book provides an international perspective on the development of co-operatives since the mid-nineteenth century, exploring the economic, political, and social factors that explain their varying fortunes and transformation into different forms. By looking at what co-operatives are; how they have changed; the developments as well as the persecutions of the co-operative movement; and how it is an important force in promoting development and self-sufficiency in non-industrialized areas, this book provides valuable insight not only to academics, but also to practitioners and policy makers.

This book develops the concepts of various unique optimization techniques in the crisp and fuzzy environment. It provides an extensive overview of geometric programming methods within a unifying framework, and presents an in-depth discussion of the modified geometric programming problem, fuzzy geometric programming, as well as new insights into goal geometric programming. With numerous examples and exercises together with detailed solutions for several problems, the book also addresses fuzzy multi-objective geometric programming techniques. Geometric programming, which falls into the general class of signomial problems, has applications across disciplines, from engineering to economics, and is extremely useful in applications of a variety of optimization problems. Organized into thirteen chapters, this book is a valuable resource for graduate and advanced undergraduate students and researchers in applied mathematics and engineering.

This book covers three fundamental problems at the interface of multi-project management and human resource management: the selection of projects, the composition of small project teams, and workload leveling. Matthias Walter proposes optimization models and solution methods for these problems, assuming multi-skilled workers with heterogeneous skill levels. For the first time, the author presents exact and heuristic methods that support managers to form small teams. Additionally, he outlines a new skill chaining strategy that increases workforce flexibility.

With the rise of global competitiveness among industries, it has become increasingly vital to develop novel strategies to assist in optimizing value-chain networks, thus helping to secure economic success. By employing engineer-to-order practices, many enterprises have improved their manufacturing processes. Supply Chain Strategies and the Engineer-to-Order Approach evaluates innovative processes and original operational models, frameworks, and architectures in the topic areas of industrial engineering and management science. Featuring optimized enterprise chain management strategies and emergent research within the field, this book is an essential reference source for professional, academics, and researchers specializing in enterprise operations and engineer-to-order procedures.

This book explores the underlying causes of the pervasive dominance of 'unethics' in contemporary affairs in economics, business, and society. It is argued that the state of unethics is related to the overexpansion of market and market values in all spheres of social life and human activities. A correlate of this development is the emergence of an extremely individualistic, materialistic and narcissistic mind-set that dictates the decisions and behavior of people and organizations. The author argues that art can help to overcome the dominant market metaphysics of our age, as genuine art creates models of 'poetic dwelling,' which can generate non-linear, progressive change that opens up a larger playing field for ethics. Aesthetics and ethics go hand in hand. Ethical action is not just right for its own sake, but makes the world a richer, livable and more beautiful place. Ethics, Meaning, and Market Society will be of interest to students at an advanced level, academics, researchers and professionals. It addresses the topics with regard to ethics in economics, business, and society in a contemporary context.

The study and teaching of marketing as a university subject is generally understood to have originated in America during the early 20th century emerging as an applied branch of economics. This book tells a different story describing the influence of the German Historical School on institutional economists and economic historians who pioneered the study of marketing in America and Britain during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing from archival materials at the University of Wisconsin, Harvard Business School, and the University of Birmingham, this book documents the early intellectual genealogy of marketing science and traces the ideas that early American and British economists borrowed from German scholars to study and teach marketing. Early marketing scholars both in America and Britain openly credited the German School, and its ideology based on social welfare and distributive justice was a strong motivation for many institutional economists who studied marketing in America, predating the modern macro-marketing school by many decades. Challenging many traditional beliefs, this book provides an authoritative new narrative of the origins of marketing thought. It will be of great interest to educators, scholars and advanced students with an interest in marketing theory and history, and in the history of economic thought.

Concept of the Corporation was the first study ever of the constitution, structure, and internal dynamics of a major business enterprise. Basing his work on a two-year analysis of the company done during the closing years of World War II, Drucker looks at the General Motors managerial organization from within. He tries to understand what makes the company work so effectively, what its core principles are, and how they contribute to its successes. The themes this volume addresses go far beyond the business corporation, into a consideration of the dynamics of the so-called corporate state itself. When the book initially appeared, General Motors managers rejected it as unfairly critical and antibusiness. Yet, the GM concept of the corporation and its principles of organization later became models for organizations worldwide. Not only businesses, but also government agencies, research laboratories, hospitals, and universities have found in Concept of the Corporation a basis for effective organization and management. Because it offers a fundamental theory of corporate goals, this book is a valuable resource for business professionals and organization analysts. It will also be of interest to students and professionals in economics, public administration, and political science. Professional and technical readers who admire Peter Drucker's work will want to be certain this volume is in their personal library. At a time when everything from the size to the structure of corporations is being questioned, this classic should prove a valuable guide.

Changes in the dynamics of economic activities since the last decades of the 20th century have yielded major changes in the composition of industries and the division of labor and production across different regions of the world. Despite these shifts in the global economy, some industries have remained competitive even without relocating their operations overseas. Industries and Global Competition examines how and why the specificities of certain industries and firms determined their choice of location and competitiveness. This volume identifies the major drivers of this process and explains why some firms and industries moved to other parts of world while others did not. Relocation was not the sole determinant of the success or failure of firms and industries. Indeed some were able to reinvent themselves at their original location and build new competitive advantages. The path that each industry or firm took varied. This book argues that the specific characteristics of each industry defined the conditions of competitiveness and provide a wide range of cases as illustrations. Aimed at scholars, researchers and acadmeics in the fields of business history, international business and related disciplines Industries and Global Competition exmaines the unique questions; How and why did the specificities of certain industries and firms determine their choice of location and competitiveness?

Finite-dimensional optimization problems occur throughout the mathematical sciences. The majority of these problems cannot be solved analytically. This introduction to optimization attempts to strike a balance between presentation of mathematical theory and development of numerical algorithms. Building on students' skills in calculus and linear algebra, the text provides a rigorous exposition without undue abstraction. Its stress on statistical applications will be especially appealing to graduate students of statistics and biostatistics. The intended audience also includes students in applied mathematics, computational biology, computer science, economics, and physics who want to see rigorous mathematics combined with real applications. In this second edition the emphasis remains on finite-dimensional optimization. New material has been added on the MM algorithm, block descent and ascent, and the calculus of variations. Convex calculus is now treated in much greater depth. Advanced topics such as the Fenchel conjugate, subdifferentials, duality, feasibility, alternating projections, projected gradient methods, exact penalty methods, and Bregman iteration will equip students with the essentials for understanding modern data mining techniques in high dimensions.

This book deals with complex variants of Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) and Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) within the manufacturing and service industries. The objective is to develop heuristics for these supply chain problems in order to offer practical solutions to improve operational efficiency. These heuristics are evaluated using benchmark and derived data-sets. Case studies pertaining to logistics in different industries including textile machinery manufacturing and banking are also included to demonstrate the created heuristics. High competition in today's global market has forced the organizations to invest in and focus on their logistics system. The critical function of logistics is the transportation within and across various supply chain entities. Both supply and distribution procedure require effective transportation management. A small improvement in routing problems can lead to huge logistics savings in absolute terms. This book should appeal to executives, researchers and consultants seeking supply chain management solutions.

Examining the dynamics of competence-building processes at the firm level, this book looks at a sample of Japanese and European companies engaged in the field of optoelectronics. The concept was derived from the notion of firm-specific competences which are closely related to the firm's intangible assets and accumulated technological bases. Several factors affect the rate and direction of competence-building, chief among them being primary markets, top management strategy and the evolution of research and development organization, and organizational learning. The book also introduces a technique to assess competences using three types of data on US patenting, scientific publications and qualitative interview data.

Japanese Management in Evolution illustrates the significant changes that have been taking place in Japanese business by focusing on "emerging industries" in the relatively neglected service and "creative" sectors as well as other key industries, and to put those changes in historical perspective by providing an overview of business development since World War II. By employing state-of-the-art research techniques and unconventional innovative approaches in analysing Japanese management - including network and discourse analysis, ethnographic explorations, and more - the book reveals historical developments and in-depth analyses of established and emerging composition of sectors and industries where cultural capital matters. Throughout the book, the common theme conveyed to readers is a consistently strong message that the change is ongoing and the evolution of management style is real in the Japanese context. The book would be of great interest to researchers, academics and practitioners in fields of global management, international management, and Asian capitalism.