This monograph contains some ofthe papers presented at a UK-Japanese Workshop on Stochastic Modelling in Innovative Manufacturing held at Churchill College, Cambridge on July 20 and 21st 1995, sponsored jointly by the UK Engineering and Physical Science Research Council and the British Council. Attending were 19 UK and 24 Japanese delegates representing 28 institutions. The aim of the workshop was to discuss the modelling work being done by researchers in both countries on the new activities and challenges occurring in manufacturing. These challenges have arisen because of the increasingly uncertain environment of modern manufacturing due to the commercial need to respond more quickly to customers demands, and the move to just-in-time manufacturing and flexible manufacturing systems and the increasing requirements for quality. As well as time pressure, the increasing importance of the quality of the products, the need to hold the minimum stock of components, and the importance of reliable production systems has meant that manufacturers need to design production systems that perform well in randomly varying conditions and that their operating procedures can respond to changes in conditions and requirements. This has increased the need to understand how manufacturing systems work in the random environments, and so emphasised the importance of stochastic models of such systems.

The use of credit scoring - the quantitative and statistical techniques to assess the credit risks involved in lending to consumers - has been one of the most successful if unsung applications of mathematics in business for the last fifty years. Now with lenders changing their objectives from minimising defaults to maximising profits, the saturation of the consumer credit market allowing borrowers to be more discriminating in their choice of which loans, mortgages and credit cards to use, and the Basel Accord banking regulations raising the profile of credit scoring within banks there are a number of challenges that require new models that use credit scores as inputs and extensions of the ideas in credit scoring. This book reviews the current methodology and measures used in credit scoring and then looks at the models that can be used to address these new challenges. The first chapter describes what a credit score is and how a scorecard is built which gives credit scores and models how the score is used in the lending decision. The second chapter describes the different ways the quality of a scorecard can be measured and points out how some of these measure the discrimination of the score, some the probability prediction of the score, and some the categorical predictions that are made using the score. The remaining three chapters address how to use risk and response scoring to model the new problems in consumer lending. Chapter three looks at models that assist in deciding how to vary the loan terms made to different potential borrowers depending on their individual characteristics. Risk based pricing is the most common approach being introduced. Chapter four describes how one can use Markov chains and survival analysis to model the dynamics of a borrower's repayment and ordering behaviour . These models allow one to make decisions that maximise the profitability of the borrower to the lender and can be considered as part of a customer relationship management strategy. The last chapter looks at how the new banking regulations in the Basel Accord apply to consumer lending. It develops models that show how they will change the operating decisions used in consumer lending and how their need for stress testing requires the development of new models to assess the credit risk of portfolios of consumer loans rather than a models of the credit risks of individual loans.

Credit scoring is one of the most successful application of statistical and management science techniques in finance in the last forty years. This unique collection of recent papers, with comments by experts in the field, provides excellent coverage of recent developments, advances and sims in credit scoring. Aimed at statisticians, economists, operational researchers and mathematicians working in both industry and acedemia, and to all working on credit scoring and data mining, it is an invaluable source of reference.