This book offers a comprehensive overview of quality and quality management. It also explores total quality management, covering its human, technological and analytical imperatives. It also examines quality systems and system standards, highlighting essential features and avoiding a reproduction of the ISO 9000 standard, as well as people-related issues in implementing a quality system. A holistic understanding of quality considerations, which now permeate every aspect of human life, should guide related policies, plans and practices. The book describes the all-pervasive characteristics of quality, putting together diverse definitions of "quality," outlining its different dimensions, and linking it with reliability and innovation. It goes on to assess the quality of measurements in terms of precision, accuracy and uncertainty and discusses managing quality with a focus on business performance. This is followed by a chapter on improving process quality, which is the summum bonum of quality management, and a chapter addressing the crucial problem of measuring customer satisfaction through appropriate models and tools. Further, it covers non-traditional subjects such as quality of life, quality of working life, quality assurance and improvement in education, with special reference to higher education, quality in research and development and characterizes the quality-related policies and practices in Indian industry. The last chapter provides a broad sketch of some recent advances in statistical methods for quality management. Along with the research community, the book's content is also useful for practitioners and industry watchers.

This volume provides a complete record of presentations made at Industrial Engineering, Management Science and Applications 2015 (ICIMSA 2015), and provides the reader with a snapshot of current knowledge and state-of-the-art results in industrial engineering, management science and applications. The goal of ICIMSA is to provide an excellent international forum for researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry to share cutting-edge developments in the field and to exchange and distribute the latest research and theories from the international community. The conference is held every year, making it an ideal platform for people to share their views and experiences in industrial engineering, management science and applications related fields.

< p=""> The book covers the domain of multi-criteria decision making, a topic which has gained significant attention of researchers and practitioners spanning a variety of disciplines for enhancing their decision making in real life situation. The topics in this volume help readers understand the techniques in the model building and analysis stage. The chapters cover a variety of techniques and their applications for interesting problems. This book will be of interest to readers in diverse disciplines such as engineering, business, management, humanities, psychology and law. ^

The book provides a thorough treatment of set functions, games and capacities as well as integrals with respect to capacities and games, in a mathematical rigorous presentation and in view of application to decision making. After a short chapter introducing some required basic knowledge (linear programming, polyhedra, ordered sets) and notation, the first part of the book consists of three long chapters developing the mathematical aspects. This part is not related to a particular application field and, by its neutral mathematical style, is useful to the widest audience. It gathers many results and notions which are scattered in the literature of various domains (game theory, decision, combinatorial optimization and operations research). The second part consists of three chapters, applying the previous notions in decision making and modelling: decision under uncertainty, decision with multiple criteria, possibility theory and Dempster-Shafer theory.

This book systematically studies the stochastic non-cooperative differential game theory of generalized linear Markov jump systems and its application in the field of finance and insurance. The book is an in-depth research book of the continuous time and discrete time linear quadratic stochastic differential game, in order to establish a relatively complete framework of dynamic non-cooperative differential game theory. It uses the method of dynamic programming principle and Riccati equation, and derives it into all kinds of existence conditions and calculating method of the equilibrium strategies of dynamic non-cooperative differential game. Based on the game theory method, this book studies the corresponding robust control problem, especially the existence condition and design method of the optimal robust control strategy. The book discusses the theoretical results and its applications in the risk control, option pricing, and the optimal investment problem in the field of finance and insurance, enriching the achievements of differential game research. This book can be used as a reference book for non-cooperative differential game study, for graduate students majored in economic management, science and engineering of institutions of higher learning.

This book provides a handy, unified introduction to the theory of compact extended formulations of exponential-size integer linear programming (ILP) models. Compact extended formulations are equally powerful, but polynomial-sized, models whose solutions do not require the implementation of separation and pricing procedures. The book is written in a general, didactic form, first developing the background theoretical concepts (polyhedra, projections, linear and integer programming) and then delving into the various techniques for compact extended reformulations. The techniques are illustrated through a wealth of examples touching on many application areas, such as classical combinatorial optimization, network design, timetabling, scheduling, routing, computational biology and bioinformatics. The book is intended for graduate or PhD students - either as an advanced course on selected topics or within a more general course on ILP and mathematical programming - as well as for practitioners and software engineers in industry exploring techniques for developing optimization models for their specific problems.

This book is the eighth volume in a series entitled "Contemporary Logistics in China," authored by researchers from the Logistics Research Center at Nankai University. In the spirit of the seven preceding annual volumes, this book carries on the ideal of providing a systematic exposition on the logistics development in China for the English-speaking community at large. Specially, this volume captures China's logistics development at a crucial turning point. This present report consists of ten chapters, organized into three sections. The introductory section, consisting of three chapters, depicts the current development status of the logistics market, the logistics facilities and technology, and the regional logistics market. The second section addresses the logistics characteristics of four rapidly expanding industries in China-the third-party logistics, the highway logistics, the express logistics, and the multimodal transport. The final section, consisting of three chapters, discusses some hot logistics topics in China. Chapter 8 studies the capital operation in China's logistics industry. The next chapter deals with the development of intelligent logistics in China. The last chapter of this section presents the development of regional logistics along the Belt and Road routes. As with the previous volumes, the ultimate aim of this book is to present a timely portrait of the rapid growth of China's logistics market and the status quo of its logistics industry. In so doing, the book offers an in-depth analysis of critical issues involved in the ongoing dynamic and multi-faceted development, and provides a valuable reference resource for interested readers in the academic and professional fields.

This book gives a thorough and systematic introduction to the latest research results about fuzzy decision-making method based on prospect theory. It includes eight chapters: Introduction, Intuitionistic fuzzy MADM based on prospect theory, QUALIFLEX based on prospect theory with probabilistic linguistic information, Group PROMETHEE based on prospect theory with hesitant fuzzy linguistic information, Prospect consensus with probabilistic hesitant fuzzy preference information, Improved TODIM based on prospect theory and the improved TODIM with probabilistic hesitant fuzzy information, etc. This book is suitable for the researchers in the fields of fuzzy mathematics, operations research, behavioral science, management science and engineering, etc. It is also useful as a textbook for postgraduate and senior-year undergraduate students of the relevant professional institutions of higher learning.

This book shows how common operation management methods and algorithms can be extended to deal with vague or imprecise information in decision-making problems. It describes how to combine decision trees, clustering, multi-attribute decision-making algorithms and Monte Carlo Simulation with the mathematical description of imprecise or vague information, and how to visualize such information. Moreover, it discusses a broad spectrum of real-life management problems including forecasting the apparent consumption of steel products, planning and scheduling of production processes, project portfolio selection and economic-risk estimation. It is a concise, yet comprehensive, reference source for researchers in decision-making and decision-makers in business organizations alike.

This edited book examines the challenges and opportunities arising from today's sharing economy from an operations management perspective. Individual chapter authors present state-of-the-art research that examines the general impact of sharing economy on production and consumption; the intermediary role of a sharing platform; crowdsourcing management; and context-based operational problems. Sharing economy refers to a market model that enables and facilitates the sharing of access to goods and services. For example, Uber allows riders to share a car. Airbnb allows homeowners to share their extra rooms with renters. Groupon crowdsources demands, enabling customers to share the benefit of discounted goods and services, whereas Kickstarter crowdsources funds, enabling backers to fund a project jointly. Unlike the classic supply chain settings in which a firm makes inventory and supply decisions, in sharing economy, supply is crowdsourced and can be modulated by a platform. The matching-supply-with-demand process in a sharing economy requires novel perspectives and tools to address challenges and identify opportunities. The book is comprised of 20 chapters that are divided into four parts. The first part explores the general impact of sharing economy on the production, consumption, and society. The second part explores the intermediary role of a sharing platform that matches crowdsourced supply with demand. The third part investigates the crowdsourcing management on a sharing platform, and the fourth part is dedicated to context-based operational problems of popular sharing economy applications. "While sharing economy is becoming omnipresence, the operations management (OM) research community has begun to explore and examine different business models in the transportation, healthcare, financial, accommodation, and sourcing sectors. This book presents a collection of the state-of-the-art research work conducted by a group of world-leading OM researchers in this area. Not only does this book cover a wide range of business models arising from the sharing economy, but it also showcases different modeling frameworks and research methods that cannot be missed. Ultimately, this book is a tour de force - informative and insightful!" Christopher S. Tang Distinguished Professor and Edward Carter Chair in Business Administration UCLA Anderson School of Management

This proceedings volume highlights the role and importance of Operational Research (OR) in the digital era and the underlying ICT challenges. The selected papers cover recent advances in all branches of operational research, mathematical modeling and decision making. It covers a wide range of key areas from digital economy, to supply chain management, and also finance. The book adopts an applied perspective that covers the contributions of OR in the broad field of business and economics linked with the discipline of computer science. The chapters are based on papers presented at the 6th International Symposium & 28th National Conference on Operational Research. Although the conference is organized by the Hellenic Operational Research Society (HELORS), the contributions in this book promotes international co-operation among researchers and practitioners working in the field.

This Palgrave Pivot presents tournament design mainly within the axioms of incentive compatibility and fairness. It illustrates the advantages of an axiomatic approach through various examples, including several FIFA and UEFA tournaments, and uses theoretical tools and simulation methodology in its analysis. Chapter 1 discusses scoring systems of championships with multiple competitions, ranking in Swiss-system tournaments, and tie-breaking rules in round-robin leagues. It is followed by a thorough critical analysis of the current and previous FIFA World Rankings. The broad focus is substantially narrowed in Chapter 2, which turns to the topic of incentive (in)compatibility in multiple qualifiers. It is revealed that UEFA has faced at least three times recently this problem in the qualification to the UEFA Europa League, qualification to the UEFA Champions League, and the draw of the UEFA Champions League groups. Analogously, Chapter 3 discusses incentive (in)compatibility when there is only one group-based tournament but the complex progression rules to the subsequent stage can be designed poorly. Our examples include the qualifying tournaments of recent FIFA World Cups and UEFA European Championships. Chapter 4 moves to the problem of penalty shootout rules in soccer, where the fairness and complexity of some alternative mechanisms from the literature are evaluated. Fairness remains the central issue in Chapter 5, which presents the challenges of designing a tournament with 24 teams if the number of teams per group cannot exceed four. As expected, there is no perfect solution, and both FIFA and UEFA have introduced a reform in this format recently. Chapter 6 deals with the qualification for the 2020 UEFA European Football Championship. Its tournament design is perhaps the most complicated one that has ever been implemented in the real-world and suffers from serious shortcomings.

This book offers a timely overview of fuzzy and rough set theories and methods. Based on selected contributions presented at the International Symposium on Fuzzy and Rough Sets, ISFUROS 2017, held in Varadero, Cuba, on October 24-26, 2017, the book also covers related approaches, such as hybrid rough-fuzzy sets and hybrid fuzzy-rough sets and granular computing, as well as a number of applications, from big data analytics, to business intelligence, security, robotics, logistics, wireless sensor networks and many more. It is intended as a source of inspiration for PhD students and researchers in the field, fostering not only new ideas but also collaboration between young researchers and institutions and established ones.

Financial economics is a fascinating topic where ideas from economics, mathematics and, most recently, psychology are combined to understand financial markets. This book gives a concise introduction into this field and includes for the first time recent results from behavioral finance that help to understand many puzzles in traditional finance. The book is tailor made for master and PhD students and includes tests and exercises that enable the students to keep track of their progress. Parts of the book can also be used on a bachelor level. Researchers will find it particularly useful as a source for recent results in behavioral finance and decision theory.

The field of real options is concerned with the management and financial valuation of operational flexibility in business endeavors. From the very outset, energy and commodity markets - which play fundamental roles in the worldwide economy - have provided a relevant context for real option analysis, both in theory and practice.This volume is a collection of six chapters covering recent research on real options in energy and commodity markets, reflecting the significance of these markets for real option analysis. The volume is divided into two parts - the first on theory and the second on methods and applications.The two chapters in the first part of the book respectively address commodity storage and the concept of convenience yield, and how the management of real options can be impacted by the trader's own market decisions in the context of commodity shipping.The four chapters in the second part of the book propose and apply real option models in various domains - modeling the evolution of futures prices of emission certificates; managing copper extraction illustrated with an application to a project at Codelco, Chile, the largest copper producer in the world; the core ideas behind real option analysis in the context of the merchant management of hydrocarbon cracking operations; and optimizing the portfolio of contracts that oil refineries use to market their gasoline production.

This book is the seventh volume in a series entitled "Contemporary Logistics in China," authored by researchers from the Logistics Center at Nankai University. In the spirit of the six preceding annual volumes, this book carries on the ideal of providing a systematic exposition on the logistics development in China for the English-speaking community at large. Specially, this volume captures China's logistics development at a crucial turning point. On the one hand, it reflects the new horizon advocated by the Government's One-Belt-One-Road Initiative global cooperation strategy; on the other, it explores the Internet revolution, which has had major impacts on e-commerce and urban logistics in China. Subjects covered in this volume encompass the macro-factors pertaining to logistics development, region-specific plans, industry-wide transformation, globally-oriented moves, and current hot topics. The expositions on and analyses of these subjects are based on the latest available sources and statistical data. As with the previous volumes, the ultimate aim of this book is to present a timely portrait of the rapid growth of China's logistics market and the status quo of its logistics industry. In so doing, the book offers an in-depth analysis of critical issues involved in the ongoing dynamic and multi-faceted development, and provides a valuable reference resource for interested readers in the academic and professional fields.

To ensure the security and economy of future power system operation in the context of a high degree of renewable energy penetration, this thesis proposes a new distributed algorithm called generalized master-slave-splitting (G-MSS) theory and a new transmission-distribution coordinated energy management (TDCEM) method that is based on the G-MSS theory. The thesis studies the mathematical properties of the G-MSS theory in detail. Based on the G-MSS theory, a distributed TDCEM method - which involves distributed security analysis, distributed voltage stability analysis, distributed economic dispatch and distributed optimal power flow for an integrated transmission-distribution system - is then developed for the first time. The thesis demonstrates that the proposed TDCEM method significantly contributes to more reliable and optimal operation in power systems. The book will benefit researchers, scientists and engineers in the field of power system operation and optimization.

This book presents a structured approach to formulate, model, and solve mathematical optimization problems for a wide range of real world situations. Among the problems covered are production, distribution and supply chain planning, scheduling, vehicle routing, as well as cutting stock, packing, and nesting. The optimization techniques used to solve the problems are primarily linear, mixed-integer linear, nonlinear, and mixed integer nonlinear programming. The book also covers important considerations for solving real-world optimization problems, such as dealing with valid inequalities and symmetry during the modeling phase, but also data interfacing and visualization of results in a more and more digitized world. The broad range of ideas and approaches presented helps the reader to learn how to model a variety of problems from process industry, paper and metals industry, the energy sector, and logistics using mathematical optimization techniques.

Fundamental Theories of Mega Infrastructure Construction Management: Theoretical Considerations from Chinese Practices is a collection of decades of research and applications of managing megaprojects using theories of complex systems and management sciences. It presents basic (classical) theory of megaproject management and is a showcase of more than 30 years of research of complex system and management sciences on the theory of megaproject management resulting from the integrating of theory and practice of megaprojects. The theory and models have undergone rigorous systematic testing during the management and implementation of megaprojects in China. Megaprojects are huge undertakings, often in infrastructure (bridges, tunnels, airports, etc.) that involve huge levels of investment, often take years to complete, and typically run into delays, cost overruns, and any number of unforeseen problems. Over the last few decades, no one country has undertaken more of these projects than China, and this book presents the fundamental theories underlying the practice of Mega Infrastructure Construction Management as practiced in China. Individual chapters provide a basic definition of Mega Infrastructure Construction and it's management; an overview of the theories behind it; the Formation Path; basic concepts; fundamental principles; scientific problems; the Method System of Meta-synthesis; specialized methods in research; and intelligent management of Mega Infrastructure Construction. Although the theoretical construction management problems in this book are derived from construction practices in China, they can be applied universally and extended for great fundamental significance.

"Definite" is a decision support software package that improves the quality of environmental decision making since it: structures the decision process; makes full use of available information; provides a rational, responsible and justifiable decision that is open for external review; and allows the exploration of all the options by the use of 'what if?' scenarios. "Definite" is, in fact, a whole toolkit of methods that can be used on a wide variety of problems. If there is a problem to be solved and alternative solutions can be identified, then "Definite" can weigh up the alternatives and assess the most reasonable option. The system contains a number of methods for supporting problem definition as well as graphical and other methods to support representation. In the assessment of the problem, "Definite" can support priority allocation in a number of ways. "Definite" can deal with all types of alternatives, thanks to the inclusion of five different multicriteria methods, as well as cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis. Related procedures such as weight assessment, standardization, discounting, and a wide variety of methods for sensitivity analysis are also available. "Definite" - allowing for fifty alternatives and fifty effects - supports the whole decision process, from problem definition to report generation. The structured approach adopted ensures that the decisions arrived at are systematic and consistent. The full version of "Definite" comprises: the book, "Multiobjective Decision Support for Environmental Management"; "The Definite User Manual"; the Definite software package; and a helpdesk for user support.

The book gives a systematic and detailed description of a new integrated product and process development approach for sheet metal manufacturing. Special attention is given to manufacturing that unites multidisciplinary competences of product design, material science, and production engineering, as well as mathematical optimization and computer based information technology. The case study of integral sheet metal structures is used by the authors to introduce the results related to the recent manufacturing technologies of linear flow splitting, bend splitting, and corresponding integrated process chains for sheet metal structures.

This book introduces the reader to the field of multiobjective optimization through problems with simple structures, namely those in which the objective function and constraints are linear. Fundamental notions as well as state-of-the-art advances are presented in a comprehensive way and illustrated with the help of numerous examples. Three of the most popular methods for solving multiobjective linear problems are explained, and exercises are provided at the end of each chapter, helping students to grasp and apply key concepts and methods to more complex problems. The book was motivated by the fact that the majority of the practical problems we encounter in management science, engineering or operations research involve conflicting criteria and therefore it is more convenient to formulate them as multicriteria optimization models, the solution concepts and methods of which cannot be treated using traditional mathematical programming approaches.

This book is a comprehensive introduction of the reader into the simulation and modelling techniques and their application in the management of organisations. The book is rooted in the thorough understanding of systems theory applied to organisations and focuses on how this theory can apply to econometric models used in the management of organisations. The econometric models in this book employ linear and dynamic programming, graph theory, queuing theory, game theory, etc. and are presented and analysed in various fields of application, such as investment management, stock management, strategic decision making, management of production costs and the lifecycle costs of quality and non-quality products, production quality Management, etc.

The book presents a broad view on the nature of intelligent decision-making which is characterized by the use of models and methods in the framework of decision support for management. Contributions to this volume dedicated to Paul StAhly on the occasion of his 65th birthday include theoretical research and applications in optimization, operations research as well as decision support and management systems.