Regardless of where we live, the management of the public sector impacts on our lives. Hence, we all have an interest, one way or another, in the achievement of efficiency and productivity improvements in the activities of the public sector. For a government agency that provides a public service, striving for unreasonable benchmark targets for efficiency may lead to a deterioration of service quality, along with an increase in stress and job dissatisfaction for public sector employees. Slack performance targets may lead to gross inefficiency, poor quality of service, and low self-esteem for employees. In the case of regulation, inappropriate policies can lead to unprecedented disasters. Examples include the decimation of fish stocks through mismanagement of fisheries, and power blackouts through inappropriate restrictions on electricity generators and distributors. Efficient taxation policies minimise the tax bill for citizens. In all of these cases, efficient management is required, although it is often unclear how to assess this efficiency. In this volume, several authors consider various aspects and contexts of performance measurement. Hence, this volume represents a unique collection of advances in efficiency assessment for the public sector by leading researchers in the field. Efficiency in the Public Sector is divided into two sections. The first is titled "Issues in Public Sector Efficiency Evaluation" and comprises of chapters 1-4. The second section is titled "Efficiency Analysis in the Public Sector - Advances in Theory and Practice." This division is somewhat arbitrary, in the sense there are significant overlapping themes in both sections. However, it serves to separate chapters that can be characterised as dealing with broader issues (Section I), from chapters that can be characterised as focusing on specific theoretical problems and empirical cases (Section II).

The world of retailing has changed dramatically in the past decade. Sales originating at online channels have been steadily increasing, and even for sales transacted at brick-and-mortar channels, a much larger fraction of sales is affected by online channels in different touch points during the customer journey. Shopper behavior and expectations have been evolving along with the growth of digital channels, challenging retailers to redesign their fulfillment and execution processes, to better serve their customers. This edited book examines the challenges and opportunities arising from the shift towards omni- channel retail. We examine these issues through the lenses of operations management, emphasizing the supply chain transformations associated with fulfilling an omni-channel demand. The book is divided into three parts. In the first part, "Omni-channel business models", we present four studies that explore how retailers are adjusting their fundamental business models to the new omni-channel landscape. The second part, "Data-driven decisions in an omni-channel world", includes five chapters that study the evolving data opportunities enabled by omni-channel retail and present specific examples of data-driven analyses. Finally, in the third part, "Case studies in Omni-channel retailing", we include four studies that provide a deep dive into how specific industries, companies and markets are navigating the omni-channel world. Ultimately, this book introduces the reader to the fundamentals of operations in an omni-channel context and highlights the different innovative research ideas on the topic using a variety of methodologies.

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 presents the latest tools, techniques, and solutions that decision makers use to overcome the challenges faced by their sustainable supply chains. Given the ever increasing significance of socio-economic and environmental factors, the management of sustainable supply chains has become a complex and dynamic task. Multiple and conflicting objectives of stakeholders including suppliers, manufacturers, service providers, and retailers add to the complexity of decisions that modern day managers of supply chains face. With the unprecedented technological developments and innovations at hand, sustainability can be maximized for all the activities of a supply chain including: service concept and product design, material sourcing and procurement, manufacturing processes, delivery of the final product, and end-of-life management of the product. Consequently, the sustainable supply chains' problems require a systematic and integrated approach. Modeling and simulation, in general, as well as system dynamics and agent-based modeling, in particular, have the capabilities to deal with the complexity of sustainable supply chain related problems. This book will appeal to professionals and researchers in the field.

Decision Criteria and Optimal Inventory Processes provides a theoretical and practical introduction to decision criteria and inventory processes. Inventory theory is presented by focusing on the analysis and processes underlying decision criteria. Included are many state-of-the-art criterion models as background material. These models are extended to the authors' newly developed fuzzy criterion models which constitute a general framework for the study of stochastic inventory models with special focus on the real world inventory theoretic reservoir operations problems. The applications of fuzzy criterion dynamic programming models are illustrated by reservoir operations including the integrated network of reservoir operation and the open inventory network problems. An interesting feature of this book is the special attention it pays to the analysis of some theoretical and applied aspects of fuzzy criteria and dynamic fuzzy criterion models, thus opening up a new way of injecting the much-needed type of non-cost, intuitive, and easy-to-use methods into multi-stage inventory processes. This is accomplished by constructing and optimizing the fuzzy criterion models developed for inventory processes. Practitioners in operations research, management science, and engineering will find numerous new ideas and strategies for modeling real world multi- stage inventory problems, and researchers and applied mathematicians will find this work a stimulating and useful reference.

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.

Hybrid Optimization focuses on the application of artificial intelligence and operations research techniques to constraint programming for solving combinatorial optimization problems. This book covers the most relevant topics investigated in the last ten years by leading experts in the field, and speculates about future directions for research.

This book includes contributions by experts from different but related areas of research including constraint programming, decision theory, operations research, SAT, artificial intelligence, as well as others. These diverse perspectives are actively combined and contrasted in order to evaluate their relative advantages.

This volume presents techniques for hybrid modeling, integrated solving strategies including global constraints, decomposition techniques, use of relaxations, and search strategies including tree search local search and metaheuristics. Various applications of the techniques presented as well as supplementary computational tools are also discussed.

Agent-based modeling and social simulation have emerged as both developments of and challenges to the social sciences. The developments include agent-based computational economics and investigations of theoretical sociological concepts using formal simulation techniques. Among the challenges are the development of qualitative modeling techniques, implementation of agent-based models to investigate phenomena for which conventional economic, social, and organizational models have no face validity, and the application of physical modeling techniques to social processes. Bringing together diverse approaches to social simulation and research agendas, this book presents a unique collection of contributions from the First World Congress on Social Simulation, held in 2006 in Kyoto, Japan. The work emerged from the collaboration of the Pacific Asian Association for Agent-Based Approach in Social Systems Sciences, the North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Science, and the European Social Simulation Association.

The problem of allocating scarce resources over time to perform a given set of activities - that is, project scheduling - appears in the vast spectrum of real-world situations. Over the last forty years project scheduling problems have been carefully studied, resulting in a considerable body of knowledge. Recently, however, the power and ubiquity of the computer has had a pronounced effect on research in project scheduling and project scheduling models. As a result, considerable progress has been made in all directions of modeling and finding solutions to these problems. This volume is a state-of-the-art treatment of Project Scheduling in general and of recent developments in particular. Part I deals with classical models. By classical model' we mean the deterministic problems involving discrete resources only and the evaluation of schedules on the basis of a single criterion. This term covers a wide variety of problems, including (discrete) resource-duration interaction, i.e. multi-mode models. Part 2 deals with heuristic algorithms for these models. It is complemented by chapters treating such important problems as benchmark instances, interval capacity consistency tests, and the evolution of software quality for (classical) project scheduling problems. In Part 3 the most important new or non-classical' models are considered. These include probabilistic and fuzzy models, and continuous resources as well as multi-criteria formulations and knowledge-based systems. Part 4 contains some important extensions and/or applications of the project scheduling problems considered in the previous chapters.

The "EffizienzCluster LogistikRuhr" was a winner in the Leading Edge Science Cluster competition run by the German federal Ministry of Education and Research. The mission and aim of the "EffizienzCluster LogistikRuhr" is to facilitate tomorrow's individuality - in the sense of individual goods supply, mobility, and production - using 75 percent of today's resources. Efficiency - both in economical and ecological terms - is enabled by state-of-the-art and innovative logistical solutions including transportation, production and intralogistics. These proceedings "Efficiency and Logistics" give first answers from 27 research projects as an insight into the current state of research of Europe's leading research and development cluster in logistics and as a contribution to the discussion on how logistics as a science can help to cope with foreseeable resource shortage and sustainability as global challenges.

Studies in generalized convexity and generalized monotonicity have significantly increased during the last two decades. Researchers with very diverse backgrounds such as mathematical programming, optimization theory, convex analysis, nonlinear analysis, nonsmooth analysis, linear algebra, probability theory, variational inequalities, game theory, economic theory, engineering, management science, equilibrium analysis, for example are attracted to this fast growing field of study. Such enormous research activity is partially due to the discovery of a rich, elegant and deep theory which provides a basis for interesting existing and potential applications in different disciplines. The handbook offers an advanced and broad overview of the current state of the field. It contains fourteen chapters written by the leading experts on the respective subject; eight on generalized convexity and the remaining six on generalized monotonicity.

Previously, the conventional wisdom about organizations was "If it's not broken, then don't fix it. " Today, the new dictum seems to be "If it works, make it work better. " There is a shift from a posture of reaction to one that embraces change. The prevailing wisdom is changing because many of our organizations are now or will soon be in a state of crisis. Every day we read about a proud old firm going bankrupt, manufacturers who must cut costs and retrench in order to survive, and failures in our governmental agencies. Who's next? Many organizations are failing but others are doing well. All wonder if something terrible could happen to their organization. Thus, it seems prudent to anticipate and proactively manage change rather than to passively sit by until some crisis strikes. All of us know that any organization can be improved. There will always be a gap between some desired state and our current reality. There will always be differences among people about what is desirable and what is not. Every change energizes these gaps. Because there are so many changes taking place, it is no wonder that there is continuous clamor for organizational change. These gaps and differences are the source of problems. Once a problem is recognized and agreed to, efforts are made to generate a solution to it. Every solution has both its intended and unintended consequences.

- Authoritative but highly accessible introduction to the underlying economics of airports, their role, regulation and implications. - Written for all aviation managers, relevant local authorities and regulators, as well as serving as teaching material for air transport Masters programmes. - The book uniquely offers economic analysis and presents facts in the context of economic reasoning with clear policy recommendations.

This book explores economic concepts related to disaster losses, describes mechanisms that determine the economic consequences of a disaster, and reviews methodologies for making decisions regarding risk management and adaptation. The author addresses the need for better understanding of the consequences of disasters and reviews and analyzes three scientific debates on linkage between disaster risk management and adaptation to climate change. The first involves the existence and magnitude of long-term economic impact of natural disasters on development. The second is the disagreement over whether any development is the proper solution to high vulnerability to disaster risk. The third debate involves the difficulty of drawing connections between natural disasters and climate change and the challenge in managing them through an integrated strategy. The introduction describes economic views of disaster, including direct and indirect costs, output and welfare losses, and use of econometric tools to measure losses. The next section defines disaster risk, delineates between "good" and "bad" risk-taking, and discusses a pathway to balanced growth. A section entitled "Trends in Hazards and the Role of Climate Change" sets scenarios for climate change analysis, discusses statistical and physical models for downscaling global climate scenarios to extreme event scenarios, and considers how to consider extremes of hot and cold, storms, wind, drought and flood. Another section analyzes case studies on hurricanes and the US coastline; sea-level rises and storm surge in Copenhagen; and heavy precipitation in Mumbai. A section on Methodologies for disaster risk management includes a study on cost-benefit analysis of coastal protections in New Orleans, and one on early-warning systems in developing countries. The next section outlines decision-making in disaster risk management, including robust decision-making, No-regret and No-risk strategies; and strategies that reduce time horizons for decision-making. Among the conclusions is the assertion that risk management policies must recognize the benefits of risk-taking and avoid suppressing it entirely. The main message is that a combination of disaster-risk-reduction, resilience-building and adaptation policies can yield large potential gains and synergies.

This book arose out of an invited feature article on visualization and opti mization that appeared in the ORSA Journal on Computing in 1994. That article briefly surveyed the current state of the art in visualization as it ap plied to optimization. In writing the feature article, it became clear that there was much more to say. Apparently others agreed, and thus this book was born. The book is targeted primarily towards the optimization community rather than the visualization community. Although both optimization and visualization both seek to help people understand complex problems, prac titioners in one field are generally unaware of work in the other field. Given the common goals of the respective fields, it seemed fruitful to consider how each can contribute to the other. One might argue that this book should not be focused specifically on optimization but on decision making in general. Perhaps, but it seems that there is sufficient material to create a book targeted specifically to optimization. Certainly many of the ideas presented in the book are appli cable to other areas, including computer simulation, decision theory and stochastic modeling. Another book could discuss the use of visualization in these areas."

This book presents the methodology and applications of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) in measuring productivity, efficiency and effectiveness in Financial Services firms such as banks, bank branches, stock markets, pension funds, mutual funds, insurance firms, credit unions, risk tolerance, and corporate failure prediction. Financial service DEA research includes banking; insurance businesses; hedge, pension and mutual funds; and credit unions. Significant business transactions among financial service organizations such as bank mergers and acquisitions and valuation of IPOs have also been the focus of DEA research. The book looks at the range of DEA uses for financial services by presenting prior studies, examining the current capabilities reflected in the most recent research, and projecting future new uses of DEA in finance related applications.

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.

The design and location of production facilities are important aspects of corporate strategy which can have a significant impact on the socio economy of nations and regions. Here, these decisions are recognized as being interrelated; that is, the optimal plant design (input mix and output level) depends on the location of the plant, and the optimal location of the plant depends on the design of the plant. Until the late 1950s, however, the questions of where a firm should locate its plant and what should be its planned input mix and output level were treated, for the most part, as separate questions, and were investigated by different groups of research ers. Although there was some recognition that these questions are inter I 1928; Hoover 1948; Isard 1956], no detailed analysis related [e. g. , Pre doh or formal structure was developed combining these two problems until the work of Moses [1958]. In recent years scholarly interest in the integrated production/locaton decision has been increasing rapidly. At the same time that research on the integrated production/location problem was expanding, significant related work was occurring in the fields of operations research, transportation science, industrial engineering, eco nomics, and geography. Unfortunately, the regional scientists working on the production/location problem had little contact with researchers in other fields. They generally publish in different journals and attend dif ferent professional meetings. Consequently, little of the recent work in these fields has made its way into the production/location research and vice versa.

In many decision problems, e.g. from the area of production and logistics manage ment, the evaluation of alternatives and the determination of an optimal or at least suboptimal solution is an important but dif?cult task. For most such problems no ef?cient algorithm is known and classical approaches of Operations Research like Mixed Integer Linear Programming or Dynamic Pro gramming are often of limited use due to excessive computation time. Therefore, dedicated heuristic solution approaches have been developed which aim at providing good solutions in reasonable time for a given problem. However, such methods have two major drawbacks: First, they are tailored to a speci?c prob lem and their adaption to other problems is dif?cult and in many cases even impos sible. Second, they are typically designed to "build" one single solution in the most effective way, whereas most decision problems have a vast number of feasible solu tions. Hence usually the chances are high that there exist better ones. To overcome these limitations, problem independent search strategies, in particular metaheuris tics, have been proposed. This book provides an elementary step by step introduction to metaheuristics focusing on the search concepts they are based on. The ?rst part demonstrates un derlying concepts of search strategies using a simple example optimization problem.

This book presents new insights and successful solutions to the operational problems of automated container terminals and cargo systems. It comprises reports on the state of the art, applications of quantitative methods, as well as case studies and simulation results. Its contributions are written by leading experts from academia and business and address practitioners and researchers in logistics, transportation, and management.

As its title implies, Advances in Multicriteria Analysis presents the most recent developments in multicriteria analysis and in some of its principal areas of application, including marketing, research and development evaluation, financial planning, and medicine. Special attention is paid to the interaction between multicriteria analysis, decision support systems and preference modeling. The five sections of the book cover: methodology; problem structuring; utility assessment; multi-objective optimisation; real world applications. Audience: Researchers and professionals who are operations researchers, management scientists, computer scientists, statisticians, decision analysts, marketing managers and financial analysts.

This Handbook is a collection of chapters on key issues in the design and analysis of computer simulation experiments on models of stochastic systems. The chapters are tightly focused and written by experts in each area. For the purpose of this volume "simulation" refers to the analysis of stochastic processes through the generation of sample paths (realization) of the processes.
Attention focuses on design and analysis issues and the goal of this volume is to survey the concepts, principles, tools and techniques that underlie the theory and practice of stochastic simulation design and analysis. Emphasis is placed on the ideas and methods that are likely to remain an intrinsic part of the foundation of the field for the foreseeable future. The chapters provide up-to-date references for both the simulation researcher and the advanced simulation user, but they do not constitute an introductory level 'how to' guide.
Computer scientists, financial analysts, industrial engineers, management scientists, operations researchers and many other professionals use stochastic simulation to design, understand and improve communications, financial, manufacturing, logistics, and service systems. A theme that runs throughout these diverse applications is the need to evaluate system performance in the face of uncertainty, including uncertainty in user load, interest rates, demand for product, availability of goods, cost of transportation and equipment failures.
* Tightly focused chapters written by experts
* Surveys concepts, principles, tools, and techniques that underlie the theory and practice of stochastic simulation design and analysis
* Provides an up-to-date reference for bothsimulation researchers and advanced simulation users

The increasing power of computer technologies, the evolution of software en- neering and the advent of the intelligent transport systems has prompted traf c simulation to become one of the most used approaches for traf c analysis in s- port of the design and evaluation of traf c systems. The ability of traf c simulation to emulate the time variability of traf c phenomena makes it a unique tool for capturing the complexity of traf c systems. In recent years, traf c simulation - and namely microscopic traf c simulation - has moved from the academic to the professional world. A wide variety of traf- c simulation software is currently available on the market and it is utilized by thousands of users, consultants, researchers and public agencies. Microscopic traf c simulation based on the emulation of traf c ows from the dynamics of individual vehicles is becoming one the most attractive approaches. However, traf c simulation still lacks a uni ed treatment. Dozens of papers on theory and applications are published in scienti c journals every year. A search of simulation-related papers and workshops through the proceedings of the last annual TRB meetings would support this assertion, as would a review of the minutes from speci cally dedicated meetings such as the International Symposiums on Traf c Simulation (Yokohama, 2002; Lausanne, 2006; Brisbane, 2008) or the International Workshops on Traf c Modeling and Simulation (Tucson, 2001; Barcelona, 2003; Sedona, 2005; Graz 2008). Yet, the only comprehensive treatment of the subject to be found so far is in the user's manuals of various software products.

This volume develops and describes an ontology of modern conflict. Modern conflict is a complex adaptive system. As such, it exhibits emergent properties, or properties that are not predictable from simple descriptions of the system. The Modern Conflict Ontology (MCO) creates a structure for collecting and analyzing information regarding both conventional and unconventional conflict in the face of uncertainty. The first three chapters of the book begin the discussion of the MCO. The first chapter introduces the foundational concepts. The second chapter discusses modern conflict in detail. The third chapter provides an overview of ontologies in sufficient detail to make the rest of the book understandable, but without covering the minutia of the subject. The next ten chapters describe the parts of the MCO. Each part is a sub-ontology and is discussed in detail, including connections to the other parts. Instances are used very liberally to ensure that the concepts are made concrete. The final chapter consolidates the descriptions of the ontology into a discussion of "what we can know." It describes the implementation history and changes from the predecessor Unconventional Conflict Ontology (UCO) to the MCO, plus some uses of the ontology and potential future enhancements. Providing an ontology that describes the entire modern conflict domain, this volume is appropriate for military professionals and academics and professionals in political science, computer science, and operations research.