This study was designed to assess the influence of an infant car seat loan program on car seat utilization in a low-income community. An adjacent community, with no car seat program, was chosen for comparison. Systematic observations were made in the two neighborhoods, and this information was supplemented by telephone interviews. Greater use of infant seats was observed in the intervention com...

We consider the issue of modeling service level measures in stochastic decision making via chance constraints. More specifically we focus on service level measures in production/inventory control under stochastic demand and α service level constraints, which are constraints enforcing a prescribed non-stockout probability for the system. We introduce multiple ways of expressing these chance cons...

The present study was carried out to investigate Goyal’s model (1985) and Teng’s model (2002) using the algebraic method to determine the optimal cycle time under delay payments. This paper provides algebraic approach that must be considered as a pedagogical advantage for explaining the inventory concept to students that lack knowledge of derivatives. This algebraic approach could therefore be ...

An interesting class of production/inventory control problems considers a single product and a single stocking location, given a stochastic demand with a known non-stationary probability distribution. Under a widely-used control policy for this type of inventory system, the objective is to find the optimal number of replenishments, their timings and their respective order-up-to-levels that meet...

To protect the driver of off-highway dump trucks from the harmful vibration, this paper presents the comparison results to determine the optimal damping of the seat system by different optimization design plans. Three optimization schemes are considered including individually optimizing the damping of the cushion, individually optimizing the damping of the seat suspension, and integrately optim...

A well-known method of inventory control is the reorder-point/order-quantity system, or (r, q) system, where an order of constant size q is placed whenever the inventory position (that is, stock on hand plus on order minus backorders) drops to a fixed reorder point r. Zipkin (1986) proves that, when stockouts are backordered, the average outstanding backorders, denoted by B(q, r), is a convex f...

This paper describes the impact of two different information sharing strategies – decentralized and centralized information – combined with two inventory control policies – min-max and stock-to-demand inventory control – on the bullwhip effect. To investigate and measure this impact, simulation models are developed using the Arena 5.0 software package for a four-stage supply chain, consisting o...

Like the majority of the university establishments in the former USSR , Al Farabi university functions, for historical reasons, according to a very centralized model: this model imposes significant collections of information and permanent data exchanges which are done by heavy, complex procedures and often not very reliable. The absence of global views and management reports as well as slowness...