This book analyses decision-making in dynamic economic environments. By applying a wide range of methodological approaches, combining both analytical and computational methods, the contributors examine various aspects of optimal firm behaviour and relevant policy areas. Topics covered include optimal control, dynamic games, economic decision-making, and applications in finance and economics, as well as policy implications in areas such as pollution regulation. This book is dedicated to Christophe Deissenberg, a well-known and distinguished scholar of economic dynamics and computational economics. It appeals to academics in the areas of optimal control, dynamic games and computational economics as well as to decision-makers working in policy domains such as environmental policy.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the most important and frequently considered optimization problems concerning cutting and packing. Based on appropriate modeling approaches for the problems considered, it offers an introduction to the related solution methods. It also addresses aspects like performance results for heuristic algorithms and bounds of the optimal value, as well as the packability of a given set of objects within a predefined container. The problems discussed arise in a wide variety of different fields of application and research, and as such, the fundamental knowledge presented in this book make it a valuable resource for students, practitioners, and researchers who are interested in dealing with such tasks.

Global Logistics Network Modelling and Policy provides guidelines on quality policy, covering investments, management and planning for port and hinterland infrastructure, roads, railways and inland waterway ports. The book first describes the authors' concept and formulation models, followed by a description and analysis of the applied data. As shipping companies fiercely compete in an effort to achieve greater efficiency and impact infrastructure policy and plan for the entire supply chain, they need tactics that drive quality transportation policy and new ways to model and simulate worldwide cargo movements, all while estimating demand and capacity of systems. This book provides quantitative tools for modeling, analysis, and simulation of worldwide, inter-modal cargo movement - helping forecast the impacts of logistics and related policies in each region of the world. It covers useful applications for every region of the world, allowing policymakers to tailor results for their own specific uses.

Dynamic programming (DP) has a relevant history as a powerful and flexible optimization principle, but has a bad reputation as a computationally impractical tool. This book fills a gap between the statement of DP principles and their actual software implementation. Using MATLAB throughout, this tutorial gently gets the reader acquainted with DP and its potential applications, offering the possibility of actual experimentation and hands-on experience. The book assumes basic familiarity with probability and optimization, and is suitable to both practitioners and graduate students in engineering, applied mathematics, management, finance and economics.

This book tackles the perplexing problem of how to capture the qualitative differences that exist in entrepreneurship at any given point in time or across time, by presenting a novel qualitative index: Entrepreneurship Quality Index (EQI). This comprehensive composite index is based on recognized interactions among different factors affecting intensity and types of entrepreneurial activity, which in turn is impacting the well-being. It brings qualitative differences in entrepreneurship depending on time and space into calculation of the composite index. Besides, EQI is the missing piece of the entrepreneurship puzzle, and the quality of entrepreneurship is a significant factor that shows why less developed countries do not achieve higher levels of economic growth, despite their high rate of entrepreneurial activities. This book does a masterful job in explaining the diversity of existing perspectives, their contributions, and their shortfalls. It applies rigorous tools of mathematical statistics and quality engineering, such as Bayes' rule, maximum likelihood estimation, six sigma algorithm, and standardization equation, to derive and introduce EQI, as a novel operations research model. It offers a number of important ideas and insights as to how the quality of entrepreneurship can be measured more accurately. It also illustrates the proposed approaches showing their efficacy across time. The proposed solutions are logical and empirically sound; they represent an important leap in thinking about the quality of entrepreneurship. Its contribution is crucial and timely - one that will be well recognized by researchers worldwide. They give a much-needed framework along with the necessary tools to evaluate and measure entrepreneurial activities.

This book introduces readers to advanced data science techniques for signal mining in connection with agriculture. It shows how to apply heuristic modeling to improve farm-level efficiency, and how to use sensors and data intelligence to provide closed-loop feedback, while also providing recommendation techniques that yield actionable insights. The book also proposes certain macroeconomic pricing models, which data-mine macroeconomic signals and the influence of global economic trends on small-farm sustainability to provide actionable insights to farmers, helping them avoid financial disasters due to recurrent economic crises. The book is intended to equip current and future software engineering teams and operations research experts with the skills and tools they need in order to fully utilize advanced data science, artificial intelligence, heuristics, and economic models to develop software capabilities that help to achieve sustained food security for future generations.

This book develops innovative techniques from operational research and management science for the design and implementation of a reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS), and subsequently analyzes and assesses their performance. A reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) is a paradigm that can address many of the challenges posed by the modern market. Accordingly, substantial research is now being conducted on RMS, focusing on various levels of decision-making (strategic, tactical and operational). However, as a relatively new research area, there are still only very few books and articles available on reconfigurable manufacturing system design and management. In addition to filling that gap, this book provides a forum for investigating, exchanging ideas on, and disseminating the latest advances in the broad area of RMS applications in today's industry. Gathering contributions by experts from academia, industry and policy-making, it represents an essential contribution to the existing literature on manufacturing and logistics in general and industry 4.0 in particular.

This book presents essential information on modern location science - in a word, all you need to know about location. The second edition of this handbook has been fully revised throughout, with numerous updates and chapters added, to offer an even more comprehensive overview of methods and applications. The book is divided into three parts: basic concepts, advanced concepts and applications. Written by the most respected specialists in the field and thoroughly reviewed by the editors, it first lays out the fundamental problems in location science and provides readers with basic background information on location theory. Part II covers advanced models and concepts, broadening and expanding on the content presented in Part I. It also discusses important tools to help readers grasp and solve real-world location problems. Part III focuses on the links between location science and other areas like GIS, telecommunications, healthcare, rapid transit networks, districting problems and disaster events, and presents a wide range of applications to allow readers to understand the role of facility location in such areas and learn how to handle real-world location problems. The book is intended for researchers working on theory and applications involving location problems and models. It is also suitable as a textbook for graduate courses on facility location.

The yard block of a container terminal is the central point of synchronisation for asynchronous container flows between deep-sea vessels and transport to the hinterland. The structure of the block stipulates that containers are stacked on top of each other with only the topmost container directly accessible by a yard crane. This book describes a holistic and integrative approach to container handling in yard blocks to optimise productivity by minimising re-handling operations. The results provide insights for academic scholars as well as for experts from practical terminal planning and operations. The approach presented is two-fold: first, a theoretical foundation of the interdependencies in decision-making is established using mathematical programming. Secondly, operations involving uncertain container arrival information are examined on the basis of a simulation with a rigorous experimental design and statistical evaluation. In this context, the book develops container-handling strategies and analyses the impact of a system for vehicle arrival management - the "Terminal Appointment System". The findings presented in this book are the result of a close cooperation with experts at the port of Hamburg and build on previous research.

Beginning in the mid-2010s, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has seen remarkable changes in information technology which have blurred the boundaries between the physical, digital, and biological worlds. Industry 4.0 has enabled so-called "smart factories" in which computer systems equipped with machine learning algorithms can learn and control robotics with minimal need for human input. While smart technology has enabled many manufacturing businesses to increase efficiency and cut costs, many others are still struggling with implementing it. This book aims to help students, practitioners and industry leaders to become change agents and take their first steps on the path of transformation. Smart Business and Digital Transformation addresses the challenge of becoming "smart" from three different perspectives: smart factory, smart industry, and smart environment. Covering technologies including the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), mobility, 5G, Big Data analytics, the book shows how enterprises can take advantage of them and ultimately beat the competition. The book considers the importance of operational processes, business models, and organizational culture. The contributing authors and editors, based at Corvinus University, present a multi-dimensional picture of industry 4.0 which is both diverse in its voices and unified in its vision. Smart Business and Digital Transformation meets the growing demand for a textbook that not only presents the latest concepts and theories but is also practical for planning, managing, and implementing digital transformation in practice. The chapters include case studies to demonstrate the practical applications, and each chapter ends with review and discussion questions to develop students' skills and competencies. Students of business and digital transformation on advanced undergraduate and MBA courses will find it an indispensable guide to a vibrant and challenging topic.

This book presents the main principles of preference disaggregation analysis and covers theoretical advances in preference modelling, group decision making, classification methods, robustness analysis, process mining, and decision support systems. In addition, it highlights several applications of the preference disaggregation analysis in a wide range of areas, such as customer satisfaction analysis, consumer behavior, energy and environmental policy, strategy development, and agricultural marketing. This book was published in honor of Yannis Siskos on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Piraeus, Greece. It offers a unique snapshot of the preference disaggregation philosophy in multiple criteria decision analysis and presents a range of research ideas, many of which were significantly influenced by Professor Siskos work.

This book considers a broad range of areas from decision making methods applied in the contexts of Risk, Reliability and Maintenance (RRM). Intended primarily as an update of the 2015 book Multicriteria and Multiobjective Models for Risk, Reliability and Maintenance Decision Analysis, this edited work provides an integration of applied probability and decision making. Within applied probability, it primarily includes decision analysis and reliability theory, amongst other topics closely related to risk analysis and maintenance. In decision making, it includes multicriteria decision making/aiding (MCDM/A) methods and optimization models. Within MCDM, in addition to decision analysis, some of the topics related to mathematical programming areas are considered, such as multiobjective linear programming, multiobjective nonlinear programming, game theory and negotiations, and multiobjective optimization. Methods related to these topics have been applied to the context of RRM. In MCDA, several other methods are considered, such as outranking methods, rough sets and constructive approaches. The book addresses an innovative treatment of decision making in RRM, improving the integration of fundamental concepts from both areas of RRM and decision making. This is accomplished by presenting current research developments in decision making on RRM. Some pitfalls of decision models on practical applications on RRM are discussed and new approaches for overcoming those drawbacks are presented.

This book introduces readers to the main traffic flow modelling approaches and discusses their features and applications. It provides a comprehensive and cutting-edge review of traffic flow models, from their roots in the 1930s to the latest developments in the field. In addition, it presents problem sets that offer readers further insights into the models and hands-on experience with simulation approaches. The simulations used in the exercises can be built upon for readers' own research or other applications. The models discussed in this book are applied to describe, predict and control traffic flows on roads with the aid of rapid and accurate estimations of current and future states. The book shows how these models are developed, what their chief characteristics are, and how they can be effectively employed.

This book offers a systematic introduction to the clustering algorithms for intuitionistic fuzzy values, the latest research results in intuitionistic fuzzy aggregation techniques, the extended results in interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy environments, and their applications in multi-attribute decision making, such as supply chain management, military system performance evaluation, project management, venture capital, information system selection, building materials classification, and operational plan assessment, etc.

This is a management oriented book about efficiency, quality and effectiveness designed for an audience of management practitioners, scholars, and students. The integrative approach developed in this book contains new ideas regarding quality and efficiency-based effective management. These ideas lend themselves to managerial applications. This work is not meant to provide an exhaustive account of the measurement, and applications of effectiveness, quality, and efficiency concepts. With the exception of the treatment of conventional productivity concepts and measurements in Chapter 2, and of production flexibility in Chapter 5, the discussion in this book is largely non-teclmical. Among management practitioners, the book may be of particular interest to managers with broad strategic orientations in the fields of production management, quality management, marketing, and management of human resources. The academic audience is likely to include scholars and students interested in strategic planning, applied productivity analysis, quality management, marketing management, and management of human resources. The book could also be used as a supplementary text to or part of the readings in basic and advanced courses in strategic management, production management, and quality management. Concepts and dimensions of efficiency, quality, and effectiveness, as used throughout this book, are introduced in Chapter 1. The intricate sets of relationships among effectiveness, quality, and efficiency are explored.

This book explores all aspects of the sharing economy, pursuing a multidisciplinary approach encompassing Service Design, Spatial Design, Sociology, Economics, Law, and Transport and Operations Research. The book develops a unified vision of sharing services, and pinpoints the most important new challenges. The first, more theoretical part covers general topics from the perspectives of experts in the respective disciplines. Among the subjects addressed are the role of the user in co-design and co-production; impacts of sharing services on cities, communities, and private spaces; individual rewarding and social outcomes; regulatory issues; and the scope for improving the efficiency of design, management, and analysis of sharing services. In turn, the second part of the book presents a selection of case studies of specific sharing services, in which many of the concepts described in the first part are put into practice. Readers will gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics of sharing services and of the hidden problems that may arise. Key factors responsible for the success (or failure) of sharing services are identified by analyzing some of the best (and worst) practices. Given its breadth of coverage, the book offers a valuable guide for researchers and for all stakeholders in the sharing economy, including startup founders and local administrators.

All project stakeholders have different needs, objectives, responsibilities and priorities. For many project managers it is disturbing to realise that, for any number of personal or professional reasons, some of their stakeholders may not be as co-operative and helpful as they expect. It could be a negative and powerful sponsor (the 'Anti-sponsor'), a demotivated team, low-maturity or unrealistic external clients, maliciously compliant gatekeepers and finance teams, or uninterested internal customers. The reality of project management is that stakeholders can be difficult! Jake Holloway, Professor David Bryde and Roger Joby bring their years of project management experience and combine it with research and insight from social psychology to delve into how and why project stakeholders can be difficult. The book describes some of the common stakeholder types - such as Sponsors, the Team, Gatekeepers, Clients and Contractors - and associated unhelpful or difficult behaviour profiles that you will often come across on projects. It then provides practical ideas, techniques and methods that will help the project manager to effectively manage the impact of these stakeholders on the project. As projects get larger and more complicated, the role and influence of stakeholders grows too. A Practical Guide to Dealing with Difficult Stakeholders will provide your project teams with the basis for a more sophisticated and resilient approach to stakeholder management.

This book presents a collection of mathematical models that deals with the real scenario in the industries. The primary objective of this book is to explore various effective methods for inventory control and management using soft computing techniques. Inventory control and management is a very tedious task faced by all the organizations in any sector of the economy. It makes decisions for policies, activities, and procedures in order to make sure that the right amount of each item is held in stock at any time. Many industries suffer from indiscipline while ordering and production mismatch. It is essential to provide best ordering policy to control such kind of mismatch in the industries. All the mathematical model solutions are provided with the help of various soft computing optimization techniques to determine optimal ordering policy. This book is beneficial for practitioners, educators, and researchers. It is also helpful for retailers/managers for improving business functions and making more accurate and realistic decisions.

This textbook treats graph colouring as an algorithmic problem, with a strong emphasis on practical applications. The author describes and analyses some of the best-known algorithms for colouring graphs, focusing on whether these heuristics can provide optimal solutions in some cases; how they perform on graphs where the chromatic number is unknown; and whether they can produce better solutions than other algorithms for certain types of graphs, and why. The introductory chapters explain graph colouring, complexity theory, bounds and constructive algorithms. The author then shows how advanced, graph colouring techniques can be applied to classic real-world operational research problems such as designing seating plans, sports scheduling, and university timetabling. He includes many examples, suggestions for further reading, and historical notes, and the book is supplemented by an online suite of downloadable code. The book is of value to researchers, graduate students, and practitioners in the areas of operations research, theoretical computer science, optimization, and computational intelligence. The reader should have elementary knowledge of sets, matrices, and enumerative combinatorics.

This volume is the second (II) of four under the main themes of Digitizing Agriculture and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The four volumes cover rapidly developing processes including Sensors (I), Data (II), Decision (III), and Actions (IV). Volumes are related to 'digital transformation" within agricultural production and provision systems, and in the context of Smart Farming Technology and Knowledge-based Agriculture. Content spans broadly from data mining and visualization to big data analytics and decision making, alongside with the sustainability aspects stemming from the digital transformation of farming. The four volumes comprise the outcome of the 12th EFITA Congress, also incorporating chapters that originated from select presentations of the Congress. The first part of this book (II) focuses on data technologies in relation to agriculture and presents three key points in data management, namely, data collection, data fusion, and their uses in machine learning and artificial intelligent technologies. Part 2 is devoted to the integration of these technologies in agricultural production processes by presenting specific applications in the domain. Part 3 examines the added value of data management within agricultural products value chain. The book provides an exceptional reference for those researching and working in or adjacent to agricultural production, including engineers in machine learning and AI, operations management, decision analysis, information analysis, to name just a few. Specific advances covered in the volume: Big data management from heterogenous sources Data mining within large data sets Data fusion and visualization IoT based management systems Data Knowledge Management for converting data into valuable information Metadata and data standards for expanding knowledge through different data platforms AI - based image processing for agricultural systems Data - based agricultural business Machine learning application in agricultural products value chain

This book presents recent developments and results found by participants of the Third International Conference on the Dynamics of Information Systems, which took place at the University of Florida, Gainesville FL, USA on February 16-18, 2011. The purpose of this conference was to bring together scientists and engineers from industry, government, and universities to exchange knowledge and results in a broad range of topics relevant to the theory and practice of the dynamics of information systems.

Dynamics of Information plays an increasingly critical role in our society. The influence of information on social, biological, genetic, and military systems must be better understood to achieve large advances in the capability and understanding of these systems. Applications are widespread and include: research in evolutionary theory, optimization of information workflow, military applications, climate networks, collision work, and much more.

Dynamics of Information plays an increasingly critical role in our society. The influence of information on social, biological, genetic, and military systems must be better understood to achieve large advances in the capability and understanding of these systems. Applications are widespread and include: research in evolutionary theory, optimization of information workflow, military applications, climate networks, collision work, and much more.

The Japan Association of Simulation & Gaming (JASAG) and the Science Council of Japan (SCJ) hosted ISAGA 2003, the 34th annual conference of the International Simulation and Gaming Association (ISAGA), at Kazusa Akademia Park in Kisarazu, Japan,August 25-29, 2003. About 450 participants and guests attended,with 330 from Japan and 101 from 34 other countries. The number of submitted papers and reports exceeded 210, and in addition, many poster presentations and experiential sessions were held. This book is made up of 30 papers submitted to ISAGA 2003 and provides a good example of the diverse scope and standard of research achieved in simu- tion and gaming today.The theme of ISAGA 2003 was "Social Contributions and Responsibilities of Simulation and Gaming." Looking back over the history of simulation and gaming research in Japan,in 1991 JASAG hosted ISAGA 1991 in Kyoto. However,even though there were only 12 years between ISAGA 1991 and ISAGA 2003,and both conferences were held in the same country,Japan,for Japanese researchers,the meaning of hosting these two international conferences of simulation and gaming research was very different.

The book presents the proceedings of the 4th EAI International Conference on Management of Manufacturing Systems (MMS 2019), which took place in Krynica Zdroj, Poland, on October 8-10, 2019. The conference covered Management of Manufacturing Systems with support for Industry 4.0, Logistics and Intelligent Manufacturing Systems and Applications, Cooperation management and its effective applications. Topics include RFID Applications, Economic Impacts in Logistics, ICT Support for Industry 4.0, Industrial and Smart Logistics, Intelligent Manufacturing Systems and Applications, and much more.

This book demonstrates what kind of problems, originating in a management accounting setting, may be solved with game theoretic models. Game theory has experienced growing interest and numerous applications in the field of management accounting. The main focus traditionally has been on the field of non-cooperative behaviour, but the area of cooperative game theory has developed rapidly and has received increasing attention. Intensive research, in combination with the changing culture of publishing, has produced a nearly unmanageable number of publications in the areas concerned. Therefore, one main purpose of this volume is providing an intensive analysis of the intersection of these areas. In addition, the book strengthens the relationship between the theory and the practical applications and it illustrates the two-sided relationship between game theory and management accounting: new game theoretic models offer new fields of applications and these applications raise new questions for the theory.

This book analyzes a range of new developments in various fields concerning the concepts of chaos and complexity theory. The proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Chaos, Complexity and Leadership feature newly developed concepts involving various research methodologies for identifying chaos and complexity in different fields of the sciences and leadership. In addition, it explores chaotic and complex systems from all fields of knowledge in order to stake a claim of prevalence of compatibility between knowledge fields. Particular emphasis is placed on exploring non-linearity in order to open a discussion on new approaches to and perspectives on chaos, complexity and leadership. Readers will find coverage of important events that have recently taken place in our world, regardless of whether they were social, political, economic or scientific in nature. The book explores diverse aspects of and issues related to the effects of chaos and complexity in the world; discusses the application of nonlinear dynamics in order to arrive at transformational policies; and offers projections of tomorrow's world using an interdisciplinary approach. Though primarily intended for readers with an interest in nonlinear science, thanks to its focus on the application of chaos and complexity to other disciplines, the book appeals to a broad readership.