In this paper we study an assemble-to-order environment involving a short-life-cycle product. The product is sold in two different configurations, each requiring a unique component that must be stocked in advance. Both configurations of the product are assembled on the same equipment which has limited capacity. We assume that the assembly capacity is allocated in such a way as to maximize profi...

Supply chains are composed of distributed, heterogeneous and autonomous elements, whose relationships are dynamic. Agricultural supply chains, in particular, have a number of distinguishing features e.g., they are characterized by strict regulations to ensure safety of food products, and by the need for multi-level traceability. Contracts in such chains need sophisticated specification and mana...

Based on the uncertainty theory, market demand information updating as the background, we study the coordination and optimization problem of three-stage supply chain in this paper. In half a asymmetric market information, participants are risk neutral; under the situation of the manufacturers and wholesalers having twice pre-season decision-making opportunity, wholesalers can be replenished in ...

aBstraCt In this document it is analyzed the importance of contracts for coordination between two companies in a supply chain. In the studied situation, one company, or supplier, supplies one product to the other company, who is a retailer. The companies are going to coordinate by two types of decisions: economic (concerning prices fixed on a contract), and physical exchange (concerning the inv...

W study capacity reservation contracts between a high-tech manufacturer (supplier) and her oem customer (buyer). The supplier and the buyer are partners who enter a “design-win” agreement to develop the product, and who share the stochastic demand information. To encourage the supplier for more aggressive capacity expansion, the buyer reserves capacity upfront by paying a deductible fee. As cap...

We examine a manufacturer’s pricing strategies in a dual-channel supply chain, in which the manufacturer is a Stackelberg leader and the retailer is a follower. We show the conditions under which the manufacturer and the retailer both prefer a dual-channel supply chain. We examine the coordination schemes for a dual-channel supply chain and find that a manufacturer’s contract with a wholesale p...

Symbolic path planning in autonomous robotic agents is the search, on a network of places and routes modeling the environment, for a sequence of routes which enables an agent to execute a set of interrelated tasks. When several agents are present in the environment, each having been assigned a set of tasks, the adoption of coordination mechanisms allows the task-execution costs to be decreased....

The Service Level Agreement (SLA) based grid superscheduling approach promotes coordinated resource sharing. Superscheduling is facilitated between administratively and topologically distributed grid sites by grid schedulers such as Resource brokers. In this work, we present a market-based SLA coordination mechanism. We based our SLA model on a well known contract net protocol. The key advantag...

This paper studies the coordination issue of a three level supply chain selling short life cycle products in a single period model. The manufacturer first negotiates the trade contract with the retailer, then with the supplier. We construct the so-called flexible return policy by setting the rules of pricing while postponing the determination of the final contract prices. With return policies b...

We introduce a methodology for establishing a connection between two nodes of a broadband network, that allows for securing sufficient resources at every intermediate node along the selected route, and thereby guarantee Quality of Service. We describe how a Virtual Path (VP) mechanism may be implemented within our framework, and compare the performance achieved by such a scheme with that of a V...