OPERATIONS RESEARCH CENTER Working Paper MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY by Optimizing Product Line Designs : Efficient Methods and Comparisons OR 373 - 05

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY by Optimizing Product Line Designs : Efficient Methods and Comparisons OR 373 - 05

Toubia for the data used in the study. We compare a broad range of optimal product line design methods. The comparisons take advantage of recent advances that make it possible to identify the optimal solution to problems that are too large for complete enumeration. Several of the methods perform surprisingly well, including Simulated Annealing, Product-Swapping and Genetic Algorithms. The Produ...

Fairness, Efficiency and Flexibility in Organ Allocation for Renal Transplantation

We propose a scalable, data-driven method for designing national policies for the allocation of deceased donor kidneys to patients on a waiting list, in a fair and efficient way. We focus on policies that have the same form as the one currently used in the U.S. In particular, we consider policies that are based on a point system, which ranks patients according to some priority criteria, e.g., w...

An FPTAS for optimizing a class of low-rank functions over a polytope

We present a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for optimizing a very general class of nonlinear functions of low rank over a polytope. Our approximation scheme relies on constructing an approximate Pareto-optimal front of the linear functions which constitute the given low-rank function. In contrast to existing results in the literature, our approximation scheme does not requir...

Technical Appendix: Optimizing Product Line Designs: Efficient Methods and Comparisons

A Hierarchy of Suboptimal Policies for the Multi-period, Multi-echelon, Robust Inventory Problem

Sloan School of Management and Operations Research Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, E40-147, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA Operations Research Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, E40-130, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts...