The batch production smoothing problem (BPSP) aims at finding appropriate batch sizes for a variety of products and sequencing the batches in such a way that their appearances are uniformly dispersed over the planning horizon. Extending the previous research work on the BPSP, this paper introduces a bounded dynamic programming (BDP) approach. Computational experiments prove that the BDP approac...

Covariance functions are the equivalent of covariance matrices for traits with many, potentially infinitely many, records in which the covariances are defined as a function of age or time. They can be fitted for any source of variation, e.g. genetic, permanent environment or phenotypic. A suitable family of functions for covariance functions are orthogonal polynomials. These give the covariance...

The point of this paper is that if output is durable then optimal behavior of a supplier is characterized by production smoothing. Durability of goods (such as capital) has opposite effects on the supply of the goods. Higher durability on the one hand raises the variability of investment demand for the goods by lowering the user’s cost, which tends to raise the variability of supply; on the oth...

This paper presents the early results of an action research project to apply the principles of the Toyota Production System to a hospital pharmacy. We demonstrate that work systems can be improved through Bowen and Spear’s [3] Rules-in-Use: defining activities better, making simpler and more direct connections, and/or smoothing pathways. We also extend this work by introducing a problem-solving...

Monthly data in physical units for seven industries are used to examine the production-smwthing hypothesis. The results strongly support this hypothesis. Significant effects of expected future sales on current production are found for four industries. and the estimated decision equations for all seven industries imply production-smoothing behavior. The previous negative results appear to be due...

This paper studies the potential benefits of collaborative forecasting (CF) partnerships in a supply chain that consists of a manufacturer and a retailer. To reflect the reality in production environments, we propose a scorecard that captures inventory considerations, production smoothing, and adherence-to-plans. We present a prescriptive convex-cost production planning model for the manufactur...

conclusions addressing and removing explainable patterns of syndromic data on meningitis is necessary to timely and accurately detection of meningitis epidemics. it was concluded that decomposition methods had better performance compared to the model based ones. background meningitis is one of the most disturbing infectious diseases due to mortality, morbidity and its ability to cause epidemic....

This article describes an effective and simple primal heuristic to greedily encourage a reduction in the number of binary or 0-1 logic variables before an implicit enumerative-type search heuristic is deployed to find integer-feasible solutions to " hard " production scheduling problems. The basis of the technique is to employ well-known smoothing functions used to solve complementarity problem...