Operational Research (OR) deals with the use of advanced analytical methods to support better decision-making. It is multidisciplinary with strong links to management science, decision science, computer science and many application areas such as engineering, manufacturing, commerce and healthcare. In the study of emergent behaviour in complex adaptive systems, Agent-based Modelling & Simulation (ABMS) is being used in many different domains such as healthcare, energy, evacuation, commerce, manufacturing and defense. This collection of articles presents a convenient introduction to ABMS with papers ranging from contemporary views to representative case studies. The OR Essentials series presents a unique cross-section of high quality research work fundamental to understanding contemporary issues and research across a range of Operational Research (OR) topics. It brings together some of the best research papers from the esteemed Operational Research Society and its associated journals, also published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Thecontinuousandincreasinginterestconcerningvectoroptimizationperc- tible in the research community, where contributions dealing with the theory of duality abound lately, constitutes the main motivation that led to writing this book. Decisive was also the research experience of the authors in this ?eld, materialized in a number of works published within the last decade. The need for a book on duality in vector optimization comes from the fact that despite the large amount of papers in journals and proceedings volumes, no book mainly concentrated on this topic was available so far in the scienti?c landscape. There is a considerable presence of books, not all recent releases, on vector optimization in the literature. We mention here the ones due to Chen,HuangandYang(cf. [49]),EhrgottandGandibleux(cf. [65]),Eichfelder (cf. [66]), Goh and Yang (cf. [77]), G.. opfert and Nehse (cf. [80]), G.. opfert, - ahi, Tammer and Z? alinescu (cf. [81]), Jahn (cf. [104]), Kaliszewski (cf. [108]), Luc (cf. [125]), Miettinen (cf. [130]), Mishra, Wang and Lai (cf. [131,132]) and Sawaragi, Nakayama and Tanino (cf. [163]), where vector duality is at most tangentially treated. We hope that from our e?orts will bene? t not only researchers interested in vector optimization, but also graduate and und- graduate students. The framework we consider is taken as general as possible, namely we work in (locally convex) topological vector spaces, going to the usual ?nite - mensional setting when this brings additional insights or relevant connections to the existing literature.

Over the last fifty-plus years, the increased complexity and speed of integrated circuits have radically changed our world. Today, semiconductor manufacturing is perhaps the most important segment of the global manufacturing sector. As the semiconductor industry has become more competitive, improving planning and control has become a key factor for business success. This book is devoted to production planning and control problems in semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities. It is the first book that takes a comprehensive look at the role of modeling, analysis, and related information systems for such manufacturing systems. The book provides an operations research- and computer science-based introduction into this important field of semiconductor manufacturing-related research.

The book shows how simulation's long history and close ties to industry since the third industrial revolution have led to its growing importance in Industry 4.0. The book emphasises the role of simulation in the new industrial revolution, and its application as a key aspect of making Industry 4.0 a reality - and thus achieving the complete digitisation of manufacturing and business. It presents various perspectives on simulation and demonstrates its applications, from augmented or virtual reality to process engineering, and from quantum computing to intelligent management. Simulation for Industry 4.0 is a guide and milestone for the simulation community, as well as those readers working to achieve the goals of Industry 4.0. The connections between simulation and Industry 4.0 drawn here will be of interest not only to beginners, but also to practitioners and researchers as a point of departure in the subject, and as a guide for new lines of study.

With increased globalization and offshore sourcing, global supply chain management is becoming an important issue for many businesses as it involves a company's worldwide interests and suppliers rather than simply a local or national orientation. The storage systems significantly affect the level of quality of products, the customer's service level, and the global logistic cost. The mission of warehousing systems design, control and optimization is to effectively ship products in the right place, at the right time, and in the right quantity (i.e. in any configuration) without any damages or alterations, and minimizing costs. Warehousing in the Global Supply Chain presents and discusses a set of models, tools and real applications, including a few case studies rarely presented with a sufficient detail by other literature, to illustrate the main challenges in warehousing activities. This includes all warehouse operations (from receiving to shipping), problems and issues (e.g. storage allocation, assignment, layout, vehicle routing) for industrial and service systems as parts of global supply chains. Advanced and effective solving methods are also illustrated and the discussed case studies help the reader to quickly apply the proposed models and techniques/algorithms. Warehousing in the Global Supply Chain is useful to managers and practitioners of industry and service sectors for the determination and modeling of the critical issues concerning warehousing systems planning and design. It is a valuable source of information for engineering students, doctoral and post-doctoral students, and researchers of academic institutions who are searching for advanced modeling approaches and solving techniques to complex logistic decision making problems. Warehousing in the Global Supply Chain presents and discusses a set of models, tools and real applications, including a few case studies rarely presented with a sufficient detail by other literature, to illustrate the main challenges in warehousing activities. This includes all warehouse operations (from receiving to shipping), problems and issues (e.g. storage allocation, assignment, layout, vehicle routing) for industrial and service systems as parts of global supply chains. Advanced and effective solving methods are also illustrated and the discussed case studies help the reader to quickly apply the proposed models and techniques/algorithms. Warehousing in the Global Supply Chain is useful to managers and practitioners of industry and service sectors for the determination and modeling of the critical issues concerning warehousing systems planning and design. It is a valuable source of information for engineering students, doctoral and post-doctoral students, and researchers of academic institutions who are searching for advanced modeling approaches and solving techniques to complex logistic decision making problems.

The book provides an encompassing overview of all aspects relating to the sharing economy paradigm in different fields of study, and shows the ongoing research efforts in filling previously identified gaps in understanding in this area. Control and optimization analytics for the sharing economy explores bespoke analytics, tools, and business models that can be used to help design collaborative consumption services (the shared economy). It provides case studies of collaborative consumption in the areas of energy and mobility. The contributors review successful examples of sharing systems, and explore the theory for designing effective and stable shared-economy models. They discuss recent innovations in and uses of shared economy models in niche areas, such as energy and mobility. Readers learn the scientific challenging issues associated with the realization of a sharing economy. Conceptual and practical matters are examined, and the state-of-the-art tools and techniques to address such applications are explained. The contributors also show readers how topical problems in engineering, such as energy consumption in power grids, or bike sharing in transportation networks, can be formulated and solved from a general collaborative consumption perspective. Since the book takes a mathematical perspective to the topic, researchers in business, computer science, optimization and control find it useful. Practitioners also use the book as a point of reference, as it explores and investigates the analytics behind economy sharing.

This book helps designers and manufacturers to select and develop the most suitable and competitive steel structures, which are safe, fit for production and economic. An optimum design system is used to find the best characteristics of structural models, which guarantee the fulfilment of design and fabrication requirements and minimize the cost function. Realistic numerical models are used as main components of industrial steel structures. Chapter 1 containts some experiences with the optimum design of steel structures Chapter 2 treats some newer mathematical optimization methods. Chapter 3 gives formulae for fabrication times and costs. Chapters 4 deals with beams and columns. Summarizes the Eurocode rules for design. Chapter 5 deals with the design of tubular trusses. Chapter 6 gives the design of frame structures and fire-resistant design rules for a frame. In Chapters 7 some minimum cost design problems of stiffened and cellular plates and shells are worked out for cases of different stiffenings and loads. Chapter 8 gives a cost comparison of cylindrical and conical shells. The book contains a large collection of literatures and a subject list and a name index.

Systemics of Emergence: Research and Development is a volume devoted to exploring the core theoretical and disciplinary research problems of emergence processes from which systems are established. It focuses on emergence as the key point of any systemic process. This topic is dealt with within different disciplinary approaches, indicated by the organization in sections: 1) Applications; 2) Biology and human care; 3) Cognitive Science; 4) Emergence; 5) General Systems; 6) Learning; 7) Management; 8) Social Systems; 9) Systemic Approach and Information Science; 10) Theoretical issues in Systemics.

The Editors and contributing authors have produced this volume to help, encourage and widen the work in this area of General Systems Research.

This book focuses on modelling financial information flows and information-based asset pricing framework. After introducing the fundamental properties of the framework, it presents a short information-theoretic perspective with a view to quantifying the information content of financial signals, and links the present framework with the literature on asymmetric information and market microstructure by means of a dynamic, bipartite, heterogeneous agent network. Numerical and explicit analyses shed light on the effects of differential information and information acquisition on the allocation of profit and loss as well as the pace of fundamental price discovery. The dynamic programming method is used to seek an optimal strategy for utilizing superior information. Lastly, the book features an implementation of the present framework using real-world financial data.

This book aims to revisit the "traditional" interaction between channel strategies and the marketing mix in a connected world. In particular, it focuses on the following four dimensions in this context: Consumers, Products, Value Proposition and Sustainability. Keeping in mind the growing digitalization of business processes in the retail world and the move towards omni-channel retailing, the book introduces the state-of-the-art academic and practitioner studies along these dimensions that could enhance the understanding of the potential impact that new technologies and strategies can have on practice in the near future. When launching a new product/service to market, firms usually consider various components of the marketing mix to influence consumers' purchase behaviors, such as product design, convenience, value proposition, promotions, sustainability initiatives, etc. This mix varies depending on the specific channel and consumer niche that the firm is targeting. But this book shows how channel strategy also influences the effectiveness in utilizing the marketing mix to attract potential customers.

Causal analytics methods can revolutionize the use of data to make effective decisions by revealing how different choices affect probabilities of various outcomes. This book presents and illustrates models, algorithms, principles, and software for deriving causal models from data and for using them to optimize decisions with uncertain outcomes. It discusses how to describe and summarize situations; detect changes; evaluate effects of policies or interventions; learn what works best under different conditions; predict values of as-yet unobserved quantities from available data; and identify the most likely explanations for observed outcomes, including surprises and anomalies. The book resents practical techniques for causal modeling and analytics that practitioners can apply to improve understanding of how choices affect probabilities of consequences and, based on this understanding, to recommend choices that are more likely to accomplish their intended objectives.The book begins with a survey of modern analytics methods, focusing mainly on techniques useful for decision, risk, and policy analysis. Chapter 2 introduces free in-browser software, including the Causal Analytics Toolkit (CAT) software, to enable readers to perform the analyses described and to apply modern analytics methods easily to their own data sets. Chapters 3 through 11 show how to apply causal analytics and risk analytics to practical risk analysis challenges, mainly related to public and occupational health risks from pathogens in food or from pollutants in air. Chapters 12 through 15 turn to broader questions of how to improve risk management decision-making by individuals, groups, organizations, institutions, and multi-generation societies with different cultures and norms for cooperation. These chapters examine organizational learning, community resilience, societal risk management, and intergenerational collaboration and justice in managing risks.

This timely Handbook establishes the 'contextualization' of the learning organization idea as a research field.In contrast to much of the previous literature, which has approached the learning organization as a panacea that every organization could and should adopt, this major new Handbook puts the learning organization into context. It examines the relevance of the learning organization idea to organizations in various specific contexts, employing examples from a wide variety of cultures including China and Islamic nations, and from industries as diverse as the police force, care services for the elderly and family firms. Scholars and students with an interest in organizational learning will find this important Handbook enriching. Human resource practitioners will also find plenty of invaluable information in this resource. Contributors: C. Abrahamson Loefstroem, A. Ahmad, M. Babur, Y. Baruch, N. Birdthistle, D.A. Blackman, C. Blantern, P. Bogolyubov, T. Boydell, H.T.M. Bui, J. Burgoyne, X. Cong, D.J. Delgado-Hernandez, M. Drobnjak, M. Easterby-Smith, Z. Fan, C. Filstad, T.N. Garavan, P. Gottschalk, J.F.L. Hong, S.-w. Hsu, D. Jamali, B. Li, Z. Li, M. Lin, C. Lloyd, D. McDowall, A. OErtenblad, C. Peng, Y. Sidani, R.S. Snell, C. Stothard, S. Talbot, M. Torokoff-Engelbrecht, K.E. Watkins, D. Weir, J. Zhou

Neuroscience is a multidisciplinary research area that evaluates the structural and organizational function of the nervous system. When applied to business practices, it is possible to investigate how consumers, managers, and marketers makes decisions and how their emotions may play a role in those decisions. Applying Neuroscience to Business Practice provides theoretical frameworks and current empirical research in the field. Highlighting scientific studies and real-world applications on how neuroscience is being utilized in business practices and marketing strategies to benefit organizations, as well as emergent business and management techniques being developed from this research, this book is a pivotal reference source for researchers, managers, and students.

This book broadly explains the requirement to focus on core components in a business and provides a case study of open-pit mining operations throughout the book to understand the management perspective of large organizations. With globalized approaches of large businesses and the rising requirement of understanding the needs of modern organizations, it is necessary to focus on key areas of businesses to ensure sustainability of operations. Organizations look into achieving a high return on investments and short-term measures in increasing sales or revenue is considered unsuitable. It is a necessity to look for sustainability and continuous methods of innovation to boost efficiency. This book provides a case study based on large organizations and uses qualitative methodologies where data was collected using in-depth interviews of respondents from various mining companies in the top and middle-level management from different parts of the world, detailing the state of the art of information systems currently used in large scale open-pit miming (LSOPM). This book provides a sound knowledge of cutting-edge factors to the reader for managing the business to attain operational excellence and long-term sustainability, and caters to a broad spectrum of management and technical readers.

This book presents an intelligent, integrated, problem-independent method for multiresponse process optimization. In contrast to traditional approaches, the idea of this method is to provide a unique model for the optimization of various processes, without imposition of assumptions relating to the type of process, the type and number of process parameters and responses, or interdependences among them. The presented method for experimental design of processes with multiple correlated responses is composed of three modules: an expert system that selects the experimental plan based on the orthogonal arrays; the factor effects approach, which performs processing of experimental data based on Taguchi's quality loss function and multivariate statistical methods; and process modeling and optimization based on artificial neural networks and metaheuristic optimization algorithms. The implementation is demonstrated using four case studies relating to high-tech industries and advanced, non-conventional processes.

Too many new products fail. Mainly because new products are hard to differentiate from exisiting products and they don't capture the customer's imagination. The failure is due to a poor understanding of customers' needs. Companies need to take a radical approach to identifying customers' real needs, and this book demonstrates innovative ways to acheive this.

Although IT outsourcing is nothing new, it remains surprisingly challenging for professionals. This book assists the IT professional in several areas of the outsourcing process: establishing outsourcing relationships, maintaining and managing the relationship, and finally governing outsourcing projects successfully.

This book lays the foundations for quality modeling and analysis in the context of supply chains through a synthesis of the economics, operations management, as well as operations research/management science literature on quality. The reality of today's supply chain networks, given their global reach from sourcing locations to points of demand, is further challenged by such issues as the growth in outsourcing as well as the information asymmetry associated with what producers know about the quality of their products and what consumers know. Although much of the related literature has focused on the micro aspects of supply chain networks, considering two or three decision-makers, it is essential to capture the scale of supply chain networks in a holistic manner that occurs in practice in order to be able to evaluate and analyze the competition and the impacts on supply chain quality in a quantifiable manner. This volume provides an overview of the fundamental methodologies utilized in this book, including optimization theory, game theory, variational inequality theory, and projected dynamical systems theory. It then focuses on major issues in today's supply chains with respect to quality, beginning with information asymmetry, followed by product differentiation and branding, the outsourcing of production, from components to final products, to quality in freight service provision. The book is filled with numerous real-life examples in order to emphasize the generality and pragmatism of the models and tools. The novelty of the framework lies in a network economics perspective through which the authors identify the underlying network structure of the various supply chains, coupled with the behavior of the decision-makers, ranging from suppliers and manufacturers to freight service providers. What is meant by quality is rigorously defined and quantified. The authors explore the underlying dynamics associated with the competitive processes along with the equilibrium solutions. As appropriate, the supply chain decision-makers compete in terms of quantity and quality, or in price and quality. The relevance of the various models that are developed to specific industrial sectors, including pharmaceuticals and high technology products, is clearly made. Qualitative analyses are provided, along with effective, and, easy to implement, computational procedures. Finally, the impacts of policy interventions, in the form of minimum quality standards, and their ramifications, in terms of product prices, quality levels, as well as profits are explored. The book is filled with many network figures, graphs, and tables with data.

How can we advance knowledge? Which methods do we need in order to make new discoveries? How can we rationally evaluate, reconstruct and offer discoveries as a means of improving the 'method' of discovery itself? And how can we use findings about scientific discovery to boost funding policies, thus fostering a deeper impact of scientific discovery itself? The respective chapters in this book provide readers with answers to these questions. They focus on a set of issues that are essential to the development of types of reasoning for advancing knowledge, such as models for both revolutionary findings and paradigm shifts; ways of rationally addressing scientific disagreement, e.g. when a revolutionary discovery sparks considerable disagreement inside the scientific community; frameworks for both discovery and inference methods; and heuristics for economics and the social sciences.

This book promotes and describes the application of objective and effective decision making in asset management based on mathematical models and practical techniques that can be easily implemented in organizations. This comprehensive and timely publication will be an essential reference source, building on available literature in the field of asset management while laying the groundwork for further research breakthroughs in this field. The text provides the resources necessary for managers, technology developers, scientists and engineers to adopt and implement better decision making based on models and techniques that contribute to recognizing risks and uncertainties and, in general terms, to the important role of asset management to increase competitiveness in organizations.

This book represents the results of cross-fertilization between OR/MS and CS/AI. It is this interface of OR/CS that makes possible advances that could not have been achieved in isolation. Taken collectively, these articles are indicative of the state-of-the-art in the interface between OR/MS and CS/AI and of the high caliber of research being conducted by members of the INFORMS Computing Society.

Risk analysis is crucial in stochastic supply chain models. Over the past few years, the pace has quickened for research attempting to explore risk analysis issues in supply chain management problems, while the majority of recent papers focus on conceptual framework or computational numerical analysis. Pioneered by Nobel laureate Markowitz in the 1950s, the mean-risk (MR) formulation became a fundamental theory for risk management in finance. Despite the significance and popularity of MR-related approaches in finance, their applications in studying multi-echelon supply chain management problems have only been seriously explored in recent years. While the MR approach has already been shown to be useful in conducting risk analysis in stochastic supply chain models, there is no comprehensive reference source that provides the state-of-the-art findings on this important model for supply chain management. Thus it is significant to have a book that reviews and extends the MR related works for supply chain risk analysis. This book is organized into five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the topic, offers a timely review of various related areas, and explains why the MR approach is important for conducting supply chain risk analysis. Chapter 2 examines the single period inventory model with the mean-variance and mean-semi-deviation approaches. Extensive discussions on the efficient frontiers are also reported. Chapter 3 explores the infinite horizon multi-period inventory model with a mean-variance approach. Chapter 4 investigates the supply chain coordination problem with a versatile target sales rebate contract and a risk averse retailer possessing the mean-variance optimization objective. Chapter 5 concludes the book and discusses various promising future research directions and extensions. Every chapter can be taken as a self-contained article, and the notation within each chapter is consistently employed.

There is one major factor that explains business actions that has thus far escaped thorough exploration. That factor is clout, or as it is more broadly understood, power. Those with clout in the business organizations make the decisions and influence what the business does. Yet the origins and uses of clout are hidden. Everyone wants to know more about this inner world as clout is still largely unrecognized in studies of corporate culture. With Clout, the first researched-based book on the topic, Bolland fills this void. He systematically analyses the subject and answers the many questions about this aspect of business life, including exploring what organization clout is, how it has evolved, how it is manifested, how it is used and how it relates to other aspects of business organizations. Readers will be able to apply findings to their own career, and students will gain a tested framework for understanding the importance of this subject.

The development of Operations Research (OR) requires constant improvements, such as the integration of research results with business applications and innovative educational practice. The full deployment and commercial exploitation of goods and services generally need the construction of strong synergies between educational institutions and businesses. The IO2015 -XVII Congress of APDIO aims at strengthening the knowledge triangle in education, research and innovation, in order to maximize the contribution of OR for sustainable growth, the promoting of a knowledge-based economy, and the smart use of finite resources. The IO2015-XVII Congress of APDIO is a privileged meeting point for the promotion and dissemination of OR and related disciplines, through the exchange of ideas among teachers, researchers, students , and professionals with different background, but all sharing a common desire that is the development of OR.

This book provides a thorough review of tested qualitative methods often used in organization studies, and outlines the challenges and essential requirements of designing a qualitative research project. The methods examined include case studies, observation, interviewing and the repertory grid technique. By highlighting certain key 'rules' for carrying out qualitative research and describing issues that should be avoided, this second volume of Qualitative Methodologies in Organization Studies is essential reading for academics and researchers who wish to understand the current state of qualitative data gathering within organization studies. Those exploring organization studies will find this two-volume collection extremely valuable as it contains robust contributions from highly-skilled authors who are actively researching in this field.