The scope of this book is Operations Research methods in Agriculture and a thorough discussion of derived applications in the Agri-food industry. The book summarizes current research and practice in this area and illustrates the development of useful approaches to deal with actual problems arising in the agriculture sector and the agri-food industry. This book is intended to collect in one volume high quality chapters on Methods and Applications in Agriculture and Agri-food industry considering both theoretical issues and application results. Methods applied to problems in agriculture and the agri-food industry include, but are not restricted to, the following themes: Dynamic programming Multi-criteria decision methods Markov decision processes Linear programming Stochastic programming Parameter estimation and knowledge acquisition Learning from data Simulation Descriptive and normative decision tree techniques, including: agent modelling and simulation, and state of the art surveys Each chapter includes some standard and traditional methodology but also some recent research advances. All the applications presented in the chapters have been inspired and motivated by the demands from the agriculture and food production areas.

This book presents solutions to the general problem of single period portfolio optimization. It introduces different linear models, arising from different performance measures, and the mixed integer linear models resulting from the introduction of real features. Other linear models, such as models for portfolio rebalancing and index tracking, are also covered. The book discusses computational issues and provides a theoretical framework, including the concepts of risk-averse preferences, stochastic dominance and coherent risk measures. The material is presented in a style that requires no background in finance or in portfolio optimization; some experience in linear and mixed integer models, however, is required. The book is thoroughly didactic, supplementing the concepts with comments and illustrative examples.

The third edition of this textbook comprehensively discusses global supply chain and operations management (SCOM), combining value creation networks and interacting processes. It focuses on operational roles within networks and presents the quantitative and organizational methods needed to plan and control the material, information, and financial flows in supply chains. Each chapter begins with an introductory case study, while numerous examples from various industries and services help to illustrate the key concepts. The book explains how to design operations and supply networks and how to incorporate suppliers and customers. It examines how to balance supply and demand, a core aspect of tactical planning, before turning to the allocation of resources to meet customer needs. In addition, the book presents state-of-the-art research reflecting the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, and emerging, fast-paced developments in the digitalization of supply chain and operations management. Providing readers with a working knowledge of global supply chain and operations management, with a focus on bridging the gap between theory and practice, this textbook can be used in core, specialized, and advanced classes alike. It is intended for a broad range of students and professionals in supply chain and operations management.

This book is about how models can be developed to represent demand and supply on markets, where the emphasis is on demand models. Its primary focus is on models that can be used by managers to support marketing decisions. Modeling Markets presents a comprehensive overview of the tools and methodologies that managers can use in decision making. It has long been known that even simple models outperform judgments in predicting outcomes in a wide variety of contexts. More complex models potentially provide insights about structural relations not available from casual observations. In this book, the authors present a wealth of insights developed at the forefront of the field, covering all key aspects of specification, estimation, validation and use of models. The most current insights and innovations in quantitative marketing are presented, including in-depth discussion of Bayesian estimation methods. Throughout the book, the authors provide examples and illustrations. This book will be of interest to researchers, analysts, managers and students who want to understand, develop or use models of marketing phenomena.

The goal of this book is to elaborate on the main principles of the theory of the Berge equilibrium by answering the following two questions: What are the basic properties of the Berge equilibrium? Does the Berge equilibrium exist, and how can it be calculated? The Golden Rule of ethics, which appears in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism and other world religions, states the following: "Behave towards others as you would like them to behave towards you." In any game, each party of conflict seeks to maximize some payoff. Therefore, for each player, the Golden Rule is implemented through the maximization of his/her payoff by all other players, which matches well with the concept of the Berge equilibrium. The approach presented here will be of particular interest to researchers (including undergraduates and graduates) and economists focused on decision-making under complex conflict conditions. The peaceful resolution of conflicts is the cornerstone of the approach: as a matter of fact, the Golden Rule precludes military clashes and violence. In turn, the new approach requires new methods; in particular, the existence problems are reduced to saddle point design for the Germeier convolution of payoff functions, with further transition to mixed strategies in accordance with the standard procedure employed by E. Borel, J. von Neumann, J. Nash, and their followers. Moreover, this new approach has proven to be efficient and fruitful with regard to a range of other important problems in mathematical game theory, which are considered in the Appendix.

Game theory has been applied to a growing list of practical problems, from antitrust analysis to monetary policy; from the design of auction institutions to the structuring of incentives within firms; from patent races to dispute resolution. The purpose of Game Theory and Business Applications is to show how game theory can be used to model and analyze business decisions. The contents of this revised edition contain a wide variety of business functions - from accounting to operations, from marketing to strategy to organizational design. In addition, specific application areas include market competition, law and economics, bargaining and dispute resolution, and competitive bidding. All of these applications involve competitive decision settings, specifically situations where a number of economic agents in pursuit of their own self-interests and in accordance with the institutional "rules of the game" take actions that together affect all of their fortunes. As this volume demonstrates, game theory provides a compelling guide for analyzing business decisions and strategies.

A service economy era is coming As the basic discipline of service dominant era, service science mainly studies common rules of service activities, aiming to provide theoretical bases for creating service value in the new era. The book, which integrates knowledge of service management, operational management, logistics and supply chain management, constructs a research system for this emerging discipline. Service science research system constitutes service philosophy, resource allocation, operational management and service technology. Many cases about China s service enterprises are incorporated in the book, in the hope of providing readers an insight into not only service science but also the development of China s service economy."

This book presents the latest developments and breakthroughs in fuzzy theory and performance prediction of queuing and reliability models by using the stochastic modeling and optimization theory. The main focus is on analytics that use fuzzy logic, queuing and reliability theory for the performance prediction and optimal design of real-time engineering systems including call centers, telecommunication, manufacturing, service organizations, etc. For the day-to-day as well as industrial queuing situations and reliability prediction of machining parts embedded in computer, communication and manufacturing systems, the book assesses various measures of performance and effectiveness that can provide valuable insights and help arrive at the best decisions with regard to service and engineering systems. In twenty chapters, the book presents both theoretical developments and applications of the fuzzy logic, reliability and queuing models in a diverse range of scenarios. The topics discussed will be of interest to researchers, educators and undergraduate students in the fields of Engineering, Business Management, and the Mathematical Sciences.

This book provides an overview of the concept of economic psychology from behavioral and mathematical perspectives and related theoretical and empirical findings. Economic psychology is defined briefly as a general term for descriptive theories to explain the psychological processes of microeconomic behaviors and macroeconomic phenomena. However, the psychological methodology and knowledge of economic psychology have also been applied widely in such fields as economics, business administration, and engineering, and they are expected to become increasingly useful in the future-a trend suggested in several eminent scholars' studies. The book explains the numerous behavioral and mathematical models of economic psychology related to micro- and macroeconomic phenomena that have been proposed in the past, and introduces new models that are useful to explain human economic behaviors. It concludes with speculations about the future of modern economic psychology, referring to its connection with fields related to neuroscience, such as neuroeconomics, which have been developed in recent years. Readers require no advanced expertise; nonetheless, an introductory understanding of psychology, business administration, and economics, and a high- school-graduate level of mathematics are useful. To aid readers, each chapter includes a bibliography, which can be referred for more details related to economic psychology.

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration of the U.S. Department of Transportation defines hazardous materials (hazmat) as a substance or material capable of posing an unreasonable risk to health, safety, or property when transported in commerce. Hazmat accidents can result in significant impact to the population (death, injuries) and damage to the environment (destroyed or damaged buildings and infrastructure). Further, hazmat, especially explosive materials, can potentially be used by terrorists to attack civilians or to destroy critical infrastructure. This handbook provides models from Operations Research and Management Science that study various activities involving hazmat transportation: risk assessment, route planning, location decisions, evacuation planning, and emergency planning for terrorist attacks. There are two important research areas in hazmat transportation that are widely studied in the literature: risk assessment and shipment planning. In the risk assessment area, important issues include measurement of accident probabilities and consequences in hazmat transport. Example works in the risk assessment area include modeling risk probability distribution over given areas, considering hazmat types and transport modes, and environmental conditions. The first half of this handbook covers the two fields of risk assessment and shipment planning, while the second half of this handbook provides useful models and insights on other important issues including location problems for undesirable facilities, network interdiction, terrorist attack, and evacuation.

This book bridges the fields of Supply Chain Management, Digital Transformation, and Dynamic Quality models in order to illustrate how digital transformation affects the work of researchers and managers in Supply Chain Quality problems. It aims to address the gap in scholarship regarding new technologies, updating the established literature to reimagine theoretical models, dynamic games, knowledge management, supply chain coordination solutions, interfaces in circular economies, and other functional spaces for a digital era. Written for researchers, managers, and practitioners, this book offers an accessible approach to the topics through clear, management-oriented chapters, reserving mathematical background for the Appendices. It discusses an array of modern challenges in digitization, including smart device installation, Cloud data accessibility, applications of AI systems, Supply Chain monitoring via Blockchains, using sensors in operations, and digital tool integration within traditional IS frameworks.

This book is an introduction to relevant aspects of the foraging literature for algorithmic design, and an overview of key families of optimization algorithms that stem from a foraging metaphor. The authors first offer perspectives on foraging and foraging-inspired algorithms for optimization, they then explain the techniques inspired by the behaviors of vertebrates, invertebrates, and non-neuronal organisms, and they then discuss algorithms based on formal models of foraging, how to evolve a foraging strategy, and likely future developments. No prior knowledge of natural computing is assumed. This book will be of particular interest to graduate students, academics and practitioners in computer science, informatics, data science, management science, and other application domains.

Computer simulation-based education and training is a multi-billion dollar industry. With the increased complexity of organizational decision making, projected demand for computer simulation-based decisional aids is on the rise. The objective of this book is to enhance systematically our understanding of and gain insights into the general process by which human facilitated ILEs are effectively designed and used in improving users' decision making in dynamic tasks. This book is divided into four major parts. Part I serves as an introduction to the subject of "decision making in dynamic tasks", its importance and its complexity. Part II provides background material, drawing upon the relevant literature, for the development of an integrated process model on the effectiveness of human facilitated ILEs in improving decision making in dynamic tasks. Part III focuses on the design, development and application of Fish Bank ILE, in laboratory experiments, to gather empirical evidence for the validity of the process model. Finally, part IV presents a comprehensive analysis of the gathered data to provide a powerful basis for understating important phenomena of training with human facilitated simulation-based learning environments, thereby, help to drive critical lessons to be learned. This book provides the reader with both a comprehensive understanding of the phenomena encountered in decision making with human facilitated ILEs and a unique way of studying the effects of these phenomena on people's ability to make better decision in complex, dynamic tasks. This book is intended to be of use to managers and practitioners, researchers and students of dynamic decision making. The background material of Part II provides a solid base to understand and organize the existing experimental research literature and approaches.

The "Handbook of Simulation Optimization" presents an overview of the state of the art of simulation optimization, providing a survey of the most well-established approaches for optimizing stochastic simulation models and a sampling of recent research advances in theory and methodology. Leading contributors cover such topics as discrete optimization via simulation, ranking and selection, efficient simulation budget allocation, random search methods, response surface methodology, stochastic gradient estimation, stochastic approximation, sample average approximation, stochastic constraints, variance reduction techniques, model-based stochastic search methods and Markov decision processes.

This single volume should serve as a reference for those already in the field and as a means for those new to the field for understanding and applying the main approaches. The intended audience includes researchers, practitioners and graduate students in the business/engineering fields of operations research, management science, operations management and stochastic control, as well as in economics/finance and computer science.

Global supply chain has continued to gain great attention in recent decades due to globalization and economic policies by companies striving to gain bigger market share and countries that make every effort for a freer trade. The concept of supply chain has evolved progressively over time, from simple supplier systems with one or two suppliers to global chains with complex networks of suppliers, vendors, warehouses, manufacturers, shippers, wholesalers, and/or retailers. Customer-Oriented Global Supply Chains: Concepts for Effective Management provides insights and support executives, middle managers, and practitioners concerned with the management of supply chain with expertise, knowledge, information, and organizational management development in different types of industries. The book is a collection of knowledge that will assist researchers, teachers, students, and practitioners in enhancing their understanding of global supply chain management and solutions applied.

The book presents a snapshot of the state of the art in the field of fully fuzzy linear programming. The main focus is on showing current methods for finding the fuzzy optimal solution of fully fuzzy linear programming problems in which all the parameters and decision variables are represented by non-negative fuzzy numbers. It presents new methods developed by the authors, as well as existing methods developed by others, and their application to real-world problems, including fuzzy transportation problems. Moreover, it compares the outcomes of the different methods and discusses their advantages/disadvantages. As the first work to collect at one place the most important methods for solving fuzzy linear programming problems, the book represents a useful reference guide for students and researchers, providing them with the necessary theoretical and practical knowledge to deal with linear programming problems under uncertainty.

This book demonstrates the power of neural networks in learning complex behavior from the underlying financial time series data. The results presented also show how neural networks can successfully be applied to volatility modeling, option pricing, and value-at-risk modeling. These features mean that they can be applied to market-risk problems to overcome classic problems associated with statistical models.

In Industry 4.0, industrial productions are adjusted to complete smart automation, which means introducing self-automation methods, self-configuration, self-diagnosis of problems and removal, cognition, and intelligent decision making. This implementation of Industry 4.0 brings about a change in business paradigms and production models, and this will be reflected at all levels of the production process including supply chains and will involve all workers in the production process from managers to cyber-physical systems designers and customers as end-users. The Handbook of Research on Integrating Industry 4.0 in Business and Manufacturing is an essential reference source that explores the development and integration of Industry 4.0 by examining changes and innovations to manufacturing processes as well as its applications in different industrial areas. Featuring coverage on a wide range of topics such as cyber physical systems, integration criteria, and artificial intelligence, this book is ideally designed for mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, manufacturers, supply chain managers, logistics specialists, investors, managers, policymakers, production scientists, researchers, academicians, and students at the postgraduate level.

Every day decision making and decision making in complex human-centric systems are characterized by imperfect decision-relevant information. Main drawback of the existing decision theories is namely incapability to deal with imperfect information and modeling vague preferences. Actually, a paradigm of non-numerical probabilities in decision making has a long history and arose also in Keynes's analysis of uncertainty. There is a need for further generalization - a move to decision theories with perception-based imperfect information described in NL. The languages of new decision models for human-centric systems should be not languages based on binary logic but human-centric computational schemes able to operate on NL-described information. Development of new theories is now possible due to an increased computational power of information processing systems which allows for computations with imperfect information, particularly, imprecise and partially true information, which are much more complex than computations over numbers and probabilities.

The monograph exposes the foundations of a new decision theory with imperfect decision-relevant information on environment and a decision maker's behavior. This theory is based on the synthesis of the fuzzy sets theory with perception-based information and the probability theory.

The book is self containing and represents in a systematic way the decision theory with imperfect information into the educational systems. The book will be helpful for teachers and students of universities and colleges, for managers and specialists from various fields of business and economics, production and social sphere.

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Increasingly, multimedia content from music, movies, games, news, books, and digital art to sharable educational material, e-government services, and e-health services is delivered over broadband networks. With technological advances, cloud computing applications, and social networking approaches, many exciting applications are emerging to deliver this content as Interactive Digital Media (IDM). Understanding the Interactive Digital Media Marketplace: Frameworks, Platforms, Communities and Issues presents the results of a large, industry-oriented, multi-national research program. This research seeks to discover usable business models, technology platforms, market strategies and policy frameworks for the emerging global digital economy, particularly for digital media researchers and industry entrepreneurs who wish to reach users around the world.

This book describes how a model for optimizing the energy supply system in Germany can be implemented. It focuses on the open energy modeling framework (Oemof) program for modeling energy supply systems. The individual elements of Oemof are described, as well as the model's structure. The technical components of Oemof are subsequently demonstrated in mathematical calculations, along with sufficient Python code to begin basic modeling. The book will appeal to anyone with an interest in optimization models for energy supply systems, or in the mathematical description of the technical components of such systems in practical implementation, using a real example, Oemof. Thermodynamic descriptions of combustion are provided, so that readers can focus on modeling aspects. Researchers and practitioners will also find the book useful, as it expands on their knowledge of the technical components of energy supply systems, supported with detailed mathematical calculations.

This handbook is a unique, comprehensive resource for professional project managers and students in project management courses that focuses on the integration between baseline scheduling, schedule risk analysis and project control, also known as Dynamic Scheduling or Integrated Project Management and Control. It contains a set of more than 70 articles. Each individual article focuses on one particular topic and features links to other articles in this book, where appropriate. Almost all articles are accompanied with a set of questions, the answers to which are provided at the end of the book. This book is accompanied by and is based on the Project Management Knowledge Center (www.pmknowledgecenter.com), an online learning platform for Integrated Project Management.

This book addresses two-person zero-sum finite games in which the payoffs in any situation are expressed with fuzzy numbers. The purpose of this book is to develop a suite of effective and efficient linear programming models and methods for solving matrix games with payoffs in fuzzy numbers. Divided into six chapters, it discusses the concepts of solutions of matrix games with payoffs of intervals, along with their linear programming models and methods. Furthermore, it is directly relevant to the research field of matrix games under uncertain economic management. The book offers a valuable resource for readers involved in theoretical research and practical applications from a range of different fields including game theory, operational research, management science, fuzzy mathematical programming, fuzzy mathematics, industrial engineering, business and social economics.

The theme of this book is the self-generation of information by the self-modification of systems. The author explains why biological and cognitive processes exhibit identity changes in the mathematical and logical sense. This concept is the basis of a new organizational principle which utilizes shifts of the internal semantic relations in systems. There are mathematical discussions of various classes of systems (Turing machines, input-output systems, synergetic systems, non-linear dynamics etc), which are contrasted with the author's new principle. The most important implications of this include a new conception on the nature of information and which also provides a new and coherent conceptual view of a wide class of natural systems. This book merits the attention of all philosophers and scientists concerned with the way we create reality in our mathematical representations of the world and the connection those representations have with the way things really are.

This book develops and assesses a decision-making model for resource management in complex work systems in line with the "Systems Engineering" method. It applies the Balanced Scorecard to the development of the criteria system for decision-making, and employs fuzzy linguistics theory to evaluate the alternatives. Further, the book assesses the application of this model in a hospital that has to decide whether or not to outsource its sterile goods. The use of the model opens up a diverse range of fields for decision-making in the area of complex work systems.