The present lecture note is dedicated to the study of the optimality conditions and the duality results for nonlinear vector optimization problems, in ?nite and in?nite dimensions. The problems include are nonlinear vector optimization problems, s- metric dual problems, continuous-time vector optimization problems, relationships between vector optimization and variational inequality problems. Nonlinear vector optimization problems arise in several contexts such as in the building and interpretation of economic models; the study of various technolo- cal processes; the development of optimal choices in ?nance; management science; production processes; transportation problems and statistical decisions, etc. In preparing this lecture note a special effort has been made to obtain a se- contained treatment of the subjects; so we hope that this may be a suitable source for a beginner in this fast growing area of research, a semester graduate course in nonlinear programing, and a good reference book. This book may be useful to theoretical economists, engineers, and applied researchers involved in this area of active research. The lecture note is divided into eight chapters: Chapter 1 brie?y deals with the notion of nonlinear programing problems with basic notations and preliminaries. Chapter 2 deals with various concepts of convex sets, convex functions, invex set, invex functions, quasiinvex functions, pseudoinvex functions, type I and generalized type I functions, V-invex functions, and univex functions.

V-INVEX FUNCTIONS AND VECTOR OPTIMIZATION summarizes and synthesizes an aspect of research work that has been done in the area of Generalized Convexity over the past several decades. Specifically, the book focuses on V-invex functions in vector optimization that have grown out of the work of Jeyakumar and Mond in the 1990?s. V-invex functions are areas in which there has been much interest because it allows researchers and practitioners to address and provide better solutions to problems that are nonlinear, multi-objective, fractional, and continuous in nature. Hence, V-invex functions have permitted work on a whole new class of vector optimization applications. There has been considerable work on vector optimization by some highly distinguished researchers including Kuhn, Tucker, Geoffrion, Mangasarian, Von Neuman, Schaiible, Ziemba, etc. The authors have integrated this related research into their book and demonstrate the wide context from which the area has grown and continues to grow. The result is a well-synthesized, accessible, and usable treatment for students, researchers, and practitioners in the areas of OR, optimization, applied mathematics, engineering, and their work relating to a wide range of problems which include financial institutions, logistics, transportation, traffic management, etc.

Postponement strategy is one of the major supply chain management (SCM) pr- tices that has a discernible impact on rms' competitive advantage and organi- tional performance. Postponement is a mass customization strategy that captures the advantages of both mass production and mass customization. Recent research studies have identi ed four common postponement strategies, namely pull, logistics, form and price postponement. The former three postponement strategies are linked to production and manufacturing, while the last one is a pure pricing strategy. They aim at balancing the costs and bene ts of mass production and mass customization. Practical examples of postponement can be found in the high-tech industry, food industry and other industries that require high differentiation. However, empirical studies have found that postponement may not be an evident SCM practice compared to the other practices. In addition, postponement has both positive and negative impacts on a supply chain. The advantages include following the JIT principles, reducing end-product inventory, making forecasting easier and pooling risk. The high cost of designing and manufacturing generic components is the main drawback of postponement. Thus, the evaluation of postponement strategy is an important research issue and there have been many qualitative and quantitative models for analyzing postponement under different scenarios.

Candlestick charts are often used in speculative markets to describe and forecast asset price movements. This book is the first of its kind to investigate candlestick charts and their statistical properties. It provides an empirical evaluation of candlestick forecasting. The book proposes a novel technique to obtain the statistical properties of candlestick charts. The technique, which is known as the range decomposition technique, shows how security price is approximately logged into two ranges, i.e. technical range and Parkinson range. Through decomposition-based modeling techniques and empirical datasets, the book investigates the power of, and establishes the statistical foundation of, candlestick forecasting.

The book focuses on forecasting foreign exchange rates via artificial neural networks. It creates and applies the highly useful computational techniques of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to foreign-exchange-rate forecasting. The result is an up-to-date review of the most recent research developments in forecasting foreign exchange rates coupled with a highly useful methodological approach to predicting rate changes in foreign currency exchanges. Foreign Exchange Rate Forecasting with Artificial Neural Networks is targeted at both the academic and practitioner audiences. Managers, analysts and technical practitioners in financial institutions across the world will have considerable interest in the book, and scholars and graduate students studying financial markets and business forecast will also have considerable interest in the book. The book discusses the most important advances in foreign-exchange-rate forecasting and then systematically develops a number of new, innovative, and creatively crafted neural network models that reduce the volatility and speculative risk in the forecasting of foreign exchange rates. The book discusses and illustrates three general types of ANN models. Each of these model types reflect the following innovative and effective characteristics: (1) The first model type is a three-layer, feed-forward neural network with instantaneous learning rates and adaptive momentum factors that produce learning algorithms (both online and offline algorithms) to predict foreign exchange rates. (2) The second model type is the three innovative hybrid learning algorithms that have been created by combining ANNs with exponential smoothing, generalized linearauto-regression, and genetic algorithms. Each of these three hybrid algorithms has been crafted to forecast various aspects synergetic performance. (3) The third model type is the three innovative ensemble learning algorithms that combining multiple neural networks into an ensemble output. Empirical results reveal that these creative models can produce better performance with high accuracy or high efficiency.

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.

Owing to the convergence of multiple cultures coupled with the unprecedented rapid development in the decades since the late 1990s, the value creation and innovation logic of Asia Pacific business models (BMs) has been constantly altered by cultural heterogeneity. As a result, a more complex and diverse landscape relative to Western developed economy BMs evolved. Moreover, the digitalization has fundamentally changed the way people do business, which has promoted a new wave of BM evolution. Unlike a typical linear mode of innovation driven by market demands in many Western cultures, a large number of entrepreneurial enterprises from the Asia Pacific with eastern religions and philosophies have tended to adopt unconventional, culturally grounded strategies of value creation and innovation in their BMs. However, it is difficult to find a Western equivalent to the value-creating route that embodies the humanitarian spirit of Confucianism accommodating simultaneously social and economic values to accelerate innovation during internationalization in existing literatures. This book offers a more holistic picture and contemporary interpretation for identifying and characterizing the unorthodox innovation patterns and the perplexing value-creating logic of Asia Pacific BMs at the crossroads of diverse cultures. It was originally published as a special issue of the Asia Pacific Business Review. This book is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72272136; 71988101).

With the internationalization of Renminbi (RMB), the gradual liberalization of China's capital account and the recent reform of the RMB pricing mechanism, the RMB exchange rate has been volatile. This book examines how we can forecast exchange rate reliably. It explains how we can do so through a new methodology for exchange rate forecasting. The book also analyzes the dynamic relationship between exchange rate and the exchange rate data decomposition and integration, the domestic economic situation, the international economic situation and the public's expectations and how these interactions would affect the exchange rate. The book also explains why this comprehensive integrated approach is the best model for optimizing accuracy in exchange rate forecasting.

With the internationalization of Renminbi (RMB), the gradual liberalization of China's capital account and the recent reform of the RMB pricing mechanism, the RMB exchange rate has been volatile. This book examines how we can forecast exchange rate reliably. It explains how we can do so through a new methodology for exchange rate forecasting. The book also analyzes the dynamic relationship between exchange rate and the exchange rate data decomposition and integration, the domestic economic situation, the international economic situation and the public's expectations and how these interactions would affect the exchange rate. The book also explains why this comprehensive integrated approach is the best model for optimizing accuracy in exchange rate forecasting.

Candlestick charts are often used in speculative markets to describe and forecast asset price movements. This book is the first of its kind to investigate candlestick charts and their statistical properties. It provides an empirical evaluation of candlestick forecasting. The book proposes a novel technique to obtain the statistical properties of candlestick charts. The technique, which is known as the range decomposition technique, shows how security price is approximately logged into two ranges, i.e. technical range and Parkinson range. Through decomposition-based modeling techniques and empirical datasets, the book investigates the power of, and establishes the statistical foundation of, candlestick forecasting.

This book provides an updated, concise summary of forecasting air travel demand methodology. It looks at air travel demand forecasting research and attempts to outline the whole intellectual landscape of demand forecasting. It helps readers to understand the basic idea of TEI@I methodology used in forecasting air travel demand and how it is used in developing air travel demand forecasting methods. The book also discusses what to do when facing different forecasting problems making it a useful reference for business practitioners in the industry.

This book is devoted to analysis and design of supply chain contracts with stochastic demand. Given the extensive utilization of contracts in supply chains, the issues concerning contract analysis and design are extremely important for supply chain management (SCM), and substantial research has been developed to address those issues over the past years. Despite the abundance of classical research, new research needs to be conducted in response to new issues emerging with the recent changing business environments, such as the fast-shortening life cycle of product and the increasing globalization of supply chains. This book addresses these issues, with the intention to present new research on how to apply contracts to improve SCM. Contract Analysis and Design for Supply Chains with Stochastic Demand contains eight chapters and each chapter is summarized as follows: Chapter 1 provides a comprehensive review of the classical development of supply chain contracts. Chapter 2 examines the effects of demand uncertainty on the applicability of buyback contracts. Chapter 3 conducts a mean-risk analysis for wholesale price contracts, taking into account contracting value risk and risk preferences. Chapter 4 studies the optimization of product service system by franchise fee contracts in the service-oriented manufacturing supply chain with demand information asymmetry. Chapter 5 develops a bidirectional option contract model and explores the optimal contracting decisions and supply chain coordination issue with the bidirectional option. Chapter 6 addresses supply chain options pricing issue and a value-based pricing scheme is developed for the supply chain options. With a cooperative game theory approach, Chapter 7 explores the issues concerning supply chain contract selection/implementation with the option contract under consideration. Chapter 8 concludes the book and suggests worthy directions for future research.

This book discusses important issues related to managing supply chain disruption risks from various perspectives. It explores the essence and principles relating to managing these risks and provides the framework and multi-goal model groups for managing such risks. The book also discusses research development of managing supply chain disruptive risks, supply chain risk conduction and loss assessment methods of supply chain disruptive events. It also includes the consideration of supply chain coordinating models in the cases of demand and supply disruption risks. It also deals on the subject of managing models of supply chain disruption risks by looking at manufacturers and responding decision methods oriented towards demand in disruption and coordination. It also summarizes the relevant findings and provides future research questions and orientations. The book will contributes significantly to the growing body of knowledge concerning the theory of managing supply chains.

This book discusses important issues related to managing supply chain disruption risks from various perspectives. It explores the essence and principles relating to managing these risks and provides the framework and multi-goal model groups for managing such risks. The book also discusses research development of managing supply chain disruptive risks, supply chain risk conduction and loss assessment methods of supply chain disruptive events. It also includes the consideration of supply chain coordinating models in the cases of demand and supply disruption risks. It also deals on the subject of managing models of supply chain disruption risks by looking at manufacturers and responding decision methods oriented towards demand in disruption and coordination. It also summarizes the relevant findings and provides future research questions and orientations. The book will contributes significantly to the growing body of knowledge concerning the theory of managing supply chains.

This book provides insights into China's energy consumption and pollution as well as its energy saving policies. It explores energy saving ways and argues for an energy consumption revolution, which includes technologies to improve transportation resource efficiency, modification of existing transportation infrastructure and structure. This book uses various analytical models to study the relationships within the transportation system. It also includes comparative analysis of China, Japan, the US and developing countries on traffic demand and transportation energy consumption. This book highlights the urgent need to review China's current transportation policies in order to secure a breakthrough in energy saving and emissions reduction.

This book studies the information spillover among financial markets and explores the intraday effect and ACD models with high frequency data. This book also contributes theoretically by providing a new statistical methodology with comparative advantages for analyzing co-movements between two time series. It explores this new method by testing the information spillover between the Chinese stock market and the international market, futures market and spot market. Using the high frequency data, this book investigates the intraday effect and examines which type of ACD model is particularly suited in capturing financial duration dynamics.

The book will be of invaluable use to scholars and graduate students interested in co-movements among different financial markets and financial market microstructure and to investors and regulation departments looking to improve their risk management.

This book is devoted to analysis and design of supply chain contracts with stochastic demand. Given the extensive utilization of contracts in supply chains, the issues concerning contract analysis and design are extremely important for supply chain management (SCM), and substantial research has been developed to address those issues over the past years. Despite the abundance of classical research, new research needs to be conducted in response to new issues emerging with the recent changing business environments, such as the fast-shortening life cycle of product and the increasing globalization of supply chains. This book addresses these issues, with the intention to present new research on how to apply contracts to improve SCM. Contract Analysis and Design for Supply Chains with Stochastic Demand contains eight chapters and each chapter is summarized as follows: Chapter 1 provides a comprehensive review of the classical development of supply chain contracts. Chapter 2 examines the effects of demand uncertainty on the applicability of buyback contracts. Chapter 3 conducts a mean-risk analysis for wholesale price contracts, taking into account contracting value risk and risk preferences. Chapter 4 studies the optimization of product service system by franchise fee contracts in the service-oriented manufacturing supply chain with demand information asymmetry. Chapter 5 develops a bidirectional option contract model and explores the optimal contracting decisions and supply chain coordination issue with the bidirectional option. Chapter 6 addresses supply chain options pricing issue and a value-based pricing scheme is developed for the supply chain options. With a cooperative game theory approach, Chapter 7 explores the issues concerning supply chain contract selection/implementation with the option contract under consideration. Chapter 8 concludes the book and suggests worthy directions for future research.

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 provides cutting-edge research results and application experiencesfrom researchers and practitioners in multiple criteria decision making areas. It consists of three parts: MCDM Foundation and Theory, MCDM Methodology, and MCDM Applications. In Part I, it covers the historical MCDM development, the influence of MCDM on technology, society and policy, Pareto optimization, and analytical hierarchy process. In Part II, the book presents different MCDM algorithms based on techniques of robust estimating, evolutionary multiobjective optimization, Choquet integrals, and genetic search. In Part III, this book demonstrates a variety of MCDM applications, including project management, financial investment, credit risk analysis, railway transportation, online advertising, transport infrastructure, environmental pollution, chemical industry, and regional economy. The 17 papers of the book have been selected out of the 121 accepted papers at the 20th International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making "New State of MCDM in 21st Century," held at Chengdu, China, in 2009. The 35 contributors of these papers stem from 10 countries."

This book provides insights into China's energy consumption and pollution as well as its energy saving policies. It explores energy saving ways and argues for an energy consumption revolution, which includes technologies to improve transportation resource efficiency, modification of existing transportation infrastructure and structure. This book uses various analytical models to study the relationships within the transportation system. It also includes comparative analysis of China, Japan, the US and developing countries on traffic demand and transportation energy consumption. This book highlights the urgent need to review China's current transportation policies in order to secure a breakthrough in energy saving and emissions reduction.

The book focuses on forecasting foreign exchange rates via artificial neural networks. It creates and applies the highly useful computational techniques of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to foreign-exchange-rate forecasting. The result is an up-to-date review of the most recent research developments in forecasting foreign exchange rates coupled with a highly useful methodological approach to predicting rate changes in foreign currency exchanges. Foreign Exchange Rate Forecasting with Artificial Neural Networks is targeted at both the academic and practitioner audiences. Managers, analysts and technical practitioners in financial institutions across the world will have considerable interest in the book, and scholars and graduate students studying financial markets and business forecast will also have considerable interest in the book.

The book discusses the most important advances in foreign-exchange-rate forecasting and then systematically develops a number of new, innovative, and creatively crafted neural network models that reduce the volatility and speculative risk in the forecasting of foreign exchange rates. The book discusses and illustrates three general types of ANN models. Each of these model types reflect the following innovative and effective characteristics: (1) The first model type is a three-layer, feed-forward neural network with instantaneous learning rates and adaptive momentum factors that produce learning algorithms (both online and offline algorithms) to predict foreign exchange rates. (2) The second model type is the three innovative hybrid learning algorithms that have been created by combining ANNs with exponential smoothing, generalized linear auto-regression, and genetic algorithms. Each of these three hybrid algorithms has been crafted to forecast various aspects synergetic performance. (3) The third model type is the three innovative ensemble learning algorithms that combining multiple neural networks into an ensemble output. Empirical results reveal that these creative models can produce better performance with high accuracy or high efficiency.

This volume summarizes and synthesizes an aspect of research work that has been done in the area of Generalized Convexity over the past few decades. Specifically, the book focuses on V-invex functions in vector optimization that have grown out of the work of Jeyakumar and Mond in the 1990 s. The authors integrate related research into the book and demonstrate the wide context from which the area has grown and continues to grow.

Credit risk analysis is one of the most important topics in the field of financial risk management. Due to recent financial crises and regulatory concern of Basel II, credit risk analysis has been the major focus of financial and banking industry. Especially for some credit-granting institutions such as commercial banks and credit companies, the ability to discriminate good customers from bad ones is crucial. The need for reliable quantitative models that predict defaults accurately is imperative so that the interested parties can take either preventive or corrective action. Hence credit risk analysis becomes very important for sustainability and profit of enterprises. In such backgrounds, this book tries to integrate recent emerging support vector machines and other computational intelligence techniques that replicate the principles of bio-inspired information processing to create some innovative methodologies for credit risk analysis and to provide decision support information for interested parties.

The present lecture note is dedicated to the study of the optimality conditions and the duality results for nonlinear vector optimization problems, in ?nite and in?nite dimensions. The problems include are nonlinear vector optimization problems, s- metric dual problems, continuous-time vector optimization problems, relationships between vector optimization and variational inequality problems. Nonlinear vector optimization problems arise in several contexts such as in the building and interpretation of economic models; the study of various technolo- cal processes; the development of optimal choices in ?nance; management science; production processes; transportation problems and statistical decisions, etc. In preparing this lecture note a special effort has been made to obtain a se- contained treatment of the subjects; so we hope that this may be a suitable source for a beginner in this fast growing area of research, a semester graduate course in nonlinear programing, and a good reference book. This book may be useful to theoretical economists, engineers, and applied researchers involved in this area of active research. The lecture note is divided into eight chapters: Chapter 1 brie?y deals with the notion of nonlinear programing problems with basic notations and preliminaries. Chapter 2 deals with various concepts of convex sets, convex functions, invex set, invex functions, quasiinvex functions, pseudoinvex functions, type I and generalized type I functions, V-invex functions, and univex functions.

MCDM 2009, the 20th International Conference on Multiple-Criteria Decision M- ing, emerged as a global forum dedicated to the sharing of original research results and practical development experiences among researchers and application developers from different multiple-criteria decision making-related areas such as multiple-criteria decision aiding, multiple criteria classification, ranking, and sorting, multiple obj- tive continuous and combinatorial optimization, multiple objective metaheuristics, multiple-criteria decision making and preference modeling, and fuzzy multiple-criteria decision making. The theme for MCDM 2009 was "New State of MCDM in the 21st Century." The conference seeks solutions to challenging problems facing the development of multiple-criteria decision making, and shapes future directions of research by prom- ing high-quality, novel and daring research findings. With the MCDM conference, these new challenges and tools can easily be shared with the multiple-criteria decision making community. The workshop program included nine workshops which focused on different topics in new research challenges and initiatives of MCDM. We received more than 350 submissions for all the workshops, out of which 121 were accepted. This includes 72 regular papers and 49 short papers. We would like to thank all workshop organizers and the Program Committee for the excellent work in maintaining the conference's standing for high-quality papers.