Covid-19 has hit the world unprepared, as the deadliest pandemic of the century. Governments and authorities, as leaders and decision makers fighting against the virus, enormously tap on the power of AI and its data analytics models for urgent decision supports at the greatest efforts, ever seen from human history. This book showcases a collection of important data analytics models that were used during the epidemic, and discusses and compares their efficacy and limitations. Readers who from both healthcare industries and academia can gain unique insights on how data analytics models were designed and applied on epidemic data. Taking Covid-19 as a case study, readers especially those who are working in similar fields, would be better prepared in case a new wave of virus epidemic may arise again in the near future.

Earned Value Management (EVM) is a project management technique for measuring project progress in terms of cost, schedule and scope, and has developed into a very effective way to uncover performance problems at an early and correctible stage in any given project. From its earliest days as a financial analysis tool in the US in the early 1960 s, it steadily grew in use through the US Department of Defense until it was made the standard measurement for all DoD, NASA, and Department of Energy projects, and was widely adopted by publicly-traded companies trying to comply with the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley ruling calling for greater transparency and accountability. It has also long been used in software engineering projects.

Winning the 2008 Research Award from IPMA for his research leading to this proposed book, author Mario Vanhoucke has surveyed the published literature to find and evaluate the effectiveness of the latest developments (and established practices) in EVM. After first explaining the fundamentals and terminology of the practice, he explores all the latest research trends and then tests them against a group of fictitious projects to gauge their effectiveness, offering general results applicable to a wide set of project types that researchers and practitioners can use to expand their work in EVM-managed projects. With a focus on the simple calculations behind EVM systems, Vanhoucke shows how they can often lead to misinterpretation and frustration and how to avoid common mistakes.

Meant to complement rather than compete with the existing books on the subject, the proposed book deals with the project performance and control phases of the project life cycle to present a detailed investigation of the project s time performance measurement methods and risk analysis techniques in order to evaluate existing and newly developed methods in terms of their abilities to improve the corrective actions decision-making process during project tracking. As readers apply what is learned from the book, EVM practices will become even more effective in project management and cost engineering. Individual chapters look at simulation studies in forecast accuracy (under nine different scenarios); schedule adherence; time sensitivity; activity sensitivity; and using top-down or bottom-up project tracking. Vanhoucke also offers an actual real-life case study, a tutorial on the use of ProTrack software (newly developed based on his research) in EVM, and conclusions on the relative effectiveness for each technique presented. This will be an important read for anyone researching, using, or studying EVM and will certainly help to push the field forward in the coming years.

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This book focuses on the tactical planning level for spare parts management. It describes a series of multi-item inventory models and presents exact and heuristic optimization methods, including greedy heuristics that work well for real, life-sized problems. The intended audience consists of graduate students, starting scholars in the field of spare parts inventory control, and spare parts planning specialists in the industry. In individual chapters the authors consider topics including: a basic single-location model; single-location models with multiple machine types and/or machine groups; the multi-location model with lateral transshipments; the classical METRIC model and its generalization to multi-indenture systems; and a single-location model with an explicit modeling of the repair capacity for failed parts and the priorities that one can set there. Various chapters of the book are used in a master course at Eindhoven University of Technology and in a PhD course of the Graduate Program Operations Management and Logistics (a Dutch network that organizes PhD courses in the field of OM&L). The required pre-knowledge consists of probability theory and basic knowledge of Markov processes and queuing theory. End-of-chapter problems appear for all chapters, with some answers appearing in an appendix.

'A refreshing and useful addition to the folklore of management. All in all this is a worthwhile insight into the management views and structure of some of our leading construction companies.' - J.J. Farrow, Chartered Builder This volume describes and analyses the behaviour of large UK construction firms in the determination and implementation of their strategy. It covers, in addition to the selection of objectives and the methods for their achievement, policies on growth and diversification, finance, marketing and bidding, international operations, management and labour and subcontracting. Throughout the book the relationship is examined between the theory outlined in the companion volume and the actual behaviour of firms. The final chapter concludes with a discussion of the means to bridge the gaps which are found to exist between theory and practice.

This book covers important issues related to managing supply chain risks from various perspectives. Supply chains today are vulnerable to disruptions with a significant impact on firms' business and performance. The aim of supply chain risk management is to identify the potential sources of risks and implement appropriate actions in order to mitigate supply chain disruptions. This book presents a set of models, frameworks, strategies, and analyses that are essential for managing supply chain risks. As a comprehensive collection of the latest research and most recent cutting-edge developments on supply chain risk and its management, the book is structured into three main parts: 1) Supply Chain Risk Management; 2) Supply Chain Vulnerability and Disruptions Management; and 3) Toward a Resilient Supply Chain. Leading academic researchers as well as practitioners have contributed chapters, combining theoretical findings and research results with a practical and contemporary view on how companies can manage the supply chain risks and disruptions, as well as how to create a resilient supply chain. This book can serve as an essential source for students and scholars who are interested in pursuing research or teaching courses in the rapidly growing area of supply chain risk management. It can also provide an interesting and informative read for managers and practitioners who need to deepen their knowledge of effective supply chain risk management.

The analysis and design of engineering and industrial systems has come to rely heavily on the use of optimization techniques. The theory developed over the last 40 years, coupled with an increasing number of powerful computational procedures, has made it possible to routinely solve problems arising in such diverse fields as aircraft design, material flow, curve fitting, capital expansion, and oil refining just to name a few. Mathematical programming plays a central role in each of these areas and can be considered the primary tool for systems optimization. Limits have been placed on the types of problems that can be solved, though, by the difficulty of handling functions that are not everywhere differentiable. To deal with real applications, it is often necessary to be able to optimize functions that while continuous are not differentiable in the classical sense. As the title of the book indicates, our chief concern is with (i) nondifferentiable mathematical programs, and (ii) two-level optimization problems. In the first half of the book, we study basic theory for general smooth and nonsmooth functions of many variables. After providing some background, we extend traditional (differentiable) nonlinear programming to the nondifferentiable case. The term used for the resultant problem is nondifferentiable mathematical programming. The major focus is on the derivation of optimality conditions for general nondifferentiable nonlinear programs. We introduce the concept of the generalized gradient and derive Kuhn-Tucker-type optimality conditions for the corresponding formulations.

Franz Ferschl is seventy. According to his birth certificate it is true, but it is unbelievable. Two of the three editors remembers very well the Golden Age of Operations Research at Bonn when Franz Ferschl worked together with Wilhelm Krelle, Martin Beckmann and Horst Albach. The importance of this fruitful cooperation is reflected by the fact that half of the contributors to this book were strongly influenced by Franz Ferschl and his colleagues at the University of Bonn. Clearly, Franz Ferschl left his traces at all the other places of his professional activities, in Vienna and Munich. This is demonstrated by the present volume as well. Born in 1929 in the Upper-Austrian Miihlviertel, his scientific education brought him to Vienna where he studied mathematics. In his early years he was attracted by Statistics and Operations Research. During his employment at the Osterreichische Bundeskammer fUr Gewerbliche Wirtschaft in Vienna he prepared his famous book on queueing theory and stochastic processes in economics. This work has been achieved during his scarce time left by his duties at the Bundeskammer, mostly between 6 a.m. and midnight. All those troubles were, however, soon rewarded by the chair of statistics at Bonn University. As a real Austrian, the amenities of the Rhineland could not prevent him from returning to Vienna, where he took the chair of statistics.

Logistics and supply chain management is facing disruptive economic, technological and climate change developments that require new strategies. New technologies such as the Internet-of-Things, digital manufacturing or blockchain are emerging quickly and could provide competitive advantage to those companies that leverage the technologies smartly while managers that do not adopt and embrace change could be left behind. Last but perhaps most important for mankind, sustainability aspects such as low-carbon transportation, closed loop supply chains or socially-responsible supply chain setups will become essential to operate successfully in the future. All these aspects will affect logistics and supply chains as a whole as well as different functional areas such as air cargo, maritime logistics or sourcing/procurement. This book aims to dive into several of these functional topics to highlight the key developments in the next decade predicted by leading global experts in the field. It features contributions and key insights of globally leading scholars and senior industry experts. Their forward-looking perspectives on the anticipated trends are aimed at informing the reader about how logistics and supply chain management will evolve in the next decade and which academic qualities and skills will be required to succeed in the "new normal" environment that will be characterized by volatile and increasingly disrupted business eco-systems. Future scenarios are envisaged to provide both practitioners and students with insights that will help them to adapt and succeed in a fast changing world.

In the 21st century, advancements in the digital world are bringing about rapid waves of change in organizational management. As such, it is increasingly imperative to discover ways for businesses to adapt to changes in the markets and seize various digital marketing opportunities. Improving Business Performance Through Innovation in the Digital Economy is an essential reference source for the latest research on the impact of digital computing. It investigates new economic and entrepreneurial approaches to enhancing community development. Featuring research on topics such as business ethics, mobile technology, and cyber security, this book is ideally designed for knowledge workers, business managers, executives, entrepreneurs, small and medium enterprise managers, academicians, researchers, students, and global leaders seeking coverage on the management of sustainable enterprises.

This monograph presents a comprehensive treatment of the maximum-entropy sampling problem (MESP), which is a fascinating topic at the intersection of mathematical optimization and data science. The text situates MESP in information theory, as the algorithmic problem of calculating a sub-vector of pre-specificed size from a multivariate Gaussian random vector, so as to maximize Shannon's differential entropy. The text collects and expands on state-of-the-art algorithms for MESP, and addresses its application in the field of environmental monitoring. While MESP is a central optimization problem in the theory of statistical designs (particularly in the area of spatial monitoring), this book largely focuses on the unique challenges of its algorithmic side. From the perspective of mathematical-optimization methodology, MESP is rather unique (a 0/1 nonlinear program having a nonseparable objective function), and the algorithmic techniques employed are highly non-standard. In particular, successful techniques come from several disparate areas within the field of mathematical optimization; for example: convex optimization and duality, semidefinite programming, Lagrangian relaxation, dynamic programming, approximation algorithms, 0/1 optimization (e.g., branch-and-bound), extended formulation, and many aspects of matrix theory. The book is mainly aimed at graduate students and researchers in mathematical optimization and data analytics.

One of the most well-known of all network optimization problems is the shortest path problem, where a shortest connection between two locations in a road network is to be found. This problem is the basis of route planners in vehicles and on the Internet. Networks are very common structures; they consist primarily of a ?nite number of locations (points, nodes), together with a number of links (edges, arcs, connections) between the locations. Very often a certain number is attached to the links, expressing the distance or the cost between the end points of that connection. Networks occur in an extremely wide range of applications, among them are: road networks; cable networks; human relations networks; project scheduling networks; production networks; distribution networks; neural networks; networks of atoms in molecules. In all these cases there are "objects" and "relations" between the objects. A n- work optimization problem is actually nothing else than the problem of ?nding a subset of the objects and the relations, such that a certain optimization objective is satis?ed.

This book presents a consistent methodology for making decisions under uncertain conditions, as is almost always the case. Tools such as value of information and value of flexibility are explored as a means to make more complex and nuanced decisions. The book develops the complete formalism for assessing the value of acquiring information with two novel approaches. Firstly, it integrates the fuzzy characteristics of data, and secondly develops a methodology for assessing data acquisition actions that optimize the value of projects from a holistic perspective. The book also discusses the formalism for including flexibility in the project decision assessment. Practical examples of oil- and gas-related decision problems are included and discussed to facilitate the learning process. This book provides valuable advice and case studies applicable to engineers, researchers, and graduate students, particularly in the oil and gas industry and pharmaceutic industry.

Operations Research Management Science approaches have helped people for the last 40 years to understand the complex functioning of the systems based upon natural resources, as well as to manage natural resources in the most efficient manner. The areas usually viewed within the natural resources field are: agriculture, fisheries, forestry, and mining and water resources. All of these areas share the common problem of optimally allocating scarcity over a period of time. The scale of time or length of the planning horizon differs from one area to another. We have almost a continuous renewal in the case of the fisheries, periodic cycles in the case of agriculture and forestry and enormous periods of time much beyond the human perception in the case of mining resources. But in all the cases, the critical issue is to obtain an efficient use of the resource along its planned time horizon.

Another element of connection among the different natural resources is due to the interaction between the use of the resource and the environmental impact caused by its extraction or harvest. This type of interaction implies additional complexities in the underlying decision-making process, making the use of OR/MS tools especially relevant.

HANDBOOK OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH IN NATURAL RESOURCES will be the first systematic handbook treatment of quantitative modeling natural resource problems, their allocated efficient use, and societal and economic impact. AndrA(c)s Weintraub is the very top person in Natural Resource research. Moreover, he has an international reputation in OR and a former president of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS). He has selectedco-editors who are at the top of the sub-fields in natural resources: agriculture, fisheries, forestry, and mining. The book will cover these areas in terms with contributions from researchers on modeling natural research problems, quantifying data, developing algorithms, and discussing the benefits of research implementations. The handbook will include tutorial contributions when necessary. Throughout the book, technological advances and algorithmic developments that have been driven by natural resource problems will be called out and discussed.

This book aims at providing cases with inspiring findings for global researchers in capacity allocation and reservation. Capacity allocation mechanisms are introduced in the book, as well as the measures to build models and the ways to achieve supply chain coordination. In addition, it illustrates the capacity reservation contract and quantity flexible contract with comparisons and some numerical studies. The book is divided into 7 chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the background and the latest development of the research. Chapter 2 introduces how to manage downstream competition through capacity allocation in symmetric market, including proportional mechanism and lexicographic mechanism. Demand competition is introduced in Chapter 3 as well as the uniform allocation mechanism and the comparisons among three different mechanisms. In Chapter 4, we give information about demand competition with fixed factor allocation, and the comparison with other allocations. Chapter 5 provides the optimal strategies under fixed allocation with multiple retailers and the impacts of fixed proportions. Chapter 6 illustrates how to achieve supply chain coordination through capacity reservation contract and its comparison with the quantity flexibility contract, and in Chapter 7 we describe outsourcing decisions and order policies in different systems with some numerical studies. We sincerely hope that this book can provide some useful suggestions and inspirations for scholars around the world who have the same interests in this field.

Using numerical examples to illustrate their concepts and results, this book examines recently developed fuzzy multi-criteria methods, such as Intuitionistic Fuzzy TOPSIS, Intuitionistic Fuzzy TOPSIS & DEA-AHP, Intuitionistic VIKOR, Pythagorean WASPAS, Pythagorean ENTROPI, Hesitant CBD, Hesitant MABAC, Triangular EDAS, Triangular PROMETHEE, q-Rung Orthopair COPRAS, and Fuzzy Type - 2 ELECTRE. Each chapter covers practical applications in addition to fresh developments and results. Given its structure and scope, the book can be used as a textbook in graduate courses on operations research and industrial engineering. It also offers a valuable resource for scientists working in a range of disciplines that require multi-criteria decision making.

This volume is dedicated to Bill Helton on the occasion of his sixty fifth birthday. It contains biographical material, a list of Bill's publications, a detailed survey of Bill's contributions to operator theory, optimization and control and 19 technical articles. Most of the technical articles are expository and should serve as useful introductions to many of the areas which Bill's highly original contributions have helped to shape over the last forty odd years. These include interpolation, Szegoe limit theorems, Nehari problems, trace formulas, systems and control theory, convexity, matrix completion problems, linear matrix inequalities and optimization. The book should be useful to graduate students in mathematics and engineering, as well as to faculty and individuals seeking entry level introductions and references to the indicated topics. It can also serve as a supplementary text to numerous courses in pure and applied mathematics and engineering, as well as a source book for seminars.

Services requiring parts has become a $1.5 trillion business annually worldwide, creating a tremendous incentive to manage the logistics of these parts efficiently by making planning and operational decisions in a rational and rigorous manner. This book provides a broad overview of modeling approaches and solution methodologies for addressing service parts inventory problems found in high-powered technology and aerospace applications. The focus in this work is on the management of high cost, low demand rate service parts found in multi-echelon settings.

This unique book, with its breadth of topics and mathematical treatment, begins by first demonstrating the optimality of an order-up-to policy [or (s-1, s)] in certain environments. This policy is used in the real world and studied throughout the text. The fundamental mathematical building blocks for modeling and solving applications of stochastic process and optimization techniques to service parts management problems are summarized extensively. A wide range of exact and approximate mathematical models of multi-echelon systems is developed and used in practice to estimate future inventory investment and part repair requirements.

The text may be used in a variety of courses for first-year graduate students or senior undergraduates, as well as for practitioners, requiring only a background in stochastic processes and optimization. It will serve as an excellent reference for key mathematical concepts and a guide to modeling a variety of multi-echelon service parts planning and operational problems.

This book aims to stimulate debate in the growing and highly controversial area of measuring scholarly work. The authors examine key aspects of this topic through the lens of the latest theoretical developments in service science and associated fields. It includes chapters explaining the theoretical developments and methodological aspects of measuring the quality of academic teaching and research, while other chapters provide a review and analysis of various types of scholarly work metrics and processes with examples from several countries, cultures, and educational systems. The current growing concern about higher education (HE) quality has prompted institutions to divide university teachers' work into different areas and to design methods aimed at measuring the productivity of these areas. It is widely accepted that the need to evaluate HE service quality is a relevant issue for any society. However, the authors argue that most of the current practices used in the pursuit of this objective are jeopardizing the future of the university as a place of knowledge generation, science evolution and professional education.

This graduate-level textbook covers modelling, programming and analysis of stochastic computer simulation experiments, including the mathematical and statistical foundations of simulation and why it works. The book is rigorous and complete, but concise and accessible, providing all necessary background material. Object-oriented programming of simulations is illustrated in Python, while the majority of the book is programming language independent. In addition to covering the foundations of simulation and simulation programming for applications, the text prepares readers to use simulation in their research. A solutions manual for end-of-chapter exercises is available for instructors.

Businesses in the Asia-Pacific communities provide enormous opportunities for local entrepreneurs to develop and collectively collaborate with other economies. However, several challenges and success factors exist for effective business operations in the region. Innovative Management and Business Practices in Asia is a collection of innovative research that enhances understanding and collaboration in business, management, and technology in Asia for the present and in the future. While highlighting topics including corporate culture, international trade, and business administration, this book is ideally designed for managers, executives, CEOs, board members, corporate professionals, managing directors, deans, decision makers, professors, researchers, policymakers, industry practitioners, and students.

Risk management has become an essential issue in supply chain management, from the modeling of the decision maker's risk preference, and the studies on uncertain elements such as demand, supply, price, lead time, etc., to the consideration of more practical background including cash flow constraints, inventory financing and delayed cash payment. In this new volume, the authors provide a framework to study the interaction of various factors related to risk and their influence on supply chain management. The scope of areas covered includes operations management, decision analysis, and business administration. This book focuses on several key issues of risk management in supply chains. Specifically, an analysis framework is presented for studying the supplier selection problem and identifying the optimal sourcing strategy in a one-retailer two-suppliers supply chain with random yields. The optimal sourcing strategy of a retailer and the pricing strategies of two suppliers under an environment of supply disruption are investigated. Besides, the authors study the dynamic inventory control problems with cash flow constraints, financing decisions as well as delayed cash payment. In addition, originating from the annual international iron ore price negotiation, the authors model the bargaining process to deal with the risk of wholesale price in the game analysis context. Within the three perspectives of risk management in supply chains, the modeling of decision maker's risk preference has been extensively studied and many results have been obtained to guide the practice. However, the analysis on the other two kinds of topics is still in its infancy, and needs more efforts from academia. It is thus the ambition and innovation for this book to contribute on risk management in supply chains in the following ways: (1) characterizing the explicit sourcing strategy (i.e., single sourcing or dual sourcing) to deal with supply disruption risk; (2) introducing the concepts of financial risk measurement by incorporating cash flow constraints, inventory financing and delayed cash payment into inventory management models; and (3) providing insights for the iron ore price negotiation to help steel manufacturers handle the risk of price increase.

This book introduces the advances in synchromodal logistics and provides a framework to classify various optimisation problems in this field. It explores the application of this framework to solve a broad range of problems, such as problems with and without a central decision-maker, problems with and without full information, deterministic problems, problems coping with uncertainty, optimisation of a full network design problem. It covers theoretical constructs, such as discrete optimisation, robust optimisation, optimisation under uncertainty, multi-objective optimisation and agent based equilibrium models. Moreover, practical elaborated use cases are presented to deepen understanding. The book gives both researchers and practitioners a good overview of the field of synchromodal optimisation problems and offers the reader practical methods for modelling and problem-solving.

Although chaos theory refers to the existence of between seemingly random events, it has been gaining the attention of science, technology and managements fields. The shift from traditional procedures to the dynamics of chaos and complexity theory has resulted in a new element of complexity thinking allowing for a greater capability for analysing and understanding key business processes. Chaos and Complexity Theory for Management: Nonlinear Dynamics explores the chaos and complexity theory and its relationship with the understanding of the natural chaos in the business environment. Utilising these theories would aid in comprehending the development of businesses as a complex adaptive system.

This book defines and studies a combinatorial object called the pedigree and develops the theory for optimising a linear function over the convex hull of pedigrees (the Pedigree polytope). A strongly polynomial algorithm implementing the framework given in the book for checking membership in the pedigree polytope is a major contribution. This book challenges the popularly held belief in computer science that a problem included in the NP-complete class may not have a polynomial algorithm to solve. By showing STSP has a polynomial algorithm, this book settles the P vs NP question. This book has illustrative examples, figures, and easily accessible proofs for showing this unexpected result. This book introduces novel constructions and ideas previously not used in the literature. Another interesting feature of this book is it uses basic max-flow and linear multicommodity flow algorithms and concepts in these proofs establishing efficient membership checking for the pedigree polytope. Chapters 3-7 can be adopted to give a course on Efficient Combinatorial Optimization. This book is the culmination of the author's research that started in 1982 through a presentation on a new formulation of STSP at the XIth International Symposium on Mathematical Programming at Bonn.

"Schedule-Based Modeling of Transportation Networks: Theory and Applications" follows the book Schedule-Based Dynamic Transit Modeling, published in this series in 2004, recognizing the critical role that schedules play in transportation systems.

Conceived for the simulation of transit systems, in the last few years the schedule-based approach has been expanded and applied to operational planning of other transportation schedule services besides mass transit, e.g. freight transport. This innovative approach allows forecasting the evolution over time of the on-board loads on the services and their time-varying performance, using credible user behavioral hypotheses. It opens new frontiers in transportation modeling to support network design, timetable setting, and investigation of congestion effects, as well as the assessment of such new technologies, such as users system information (ITS technologies).