The nature of emerging business technologies, such automatic identification, and data capture innovations, such as smart cards, touch memory, and RFID, proves to be a difficult process to implement and achieve, despite recent efforts, even as implementation continues to lessen. The economy of scales associated with bar codes is a difficult barrier to overcome. Two Pittsburgh-based companies are...

The nature of emerging business technologies, such automatic identification, and data capture innova­ tions, such as smart cards, touch memory, and RFID, proves to be a difficult process to implement and achieve, despite recent efforts, even as implementation continues to lessen. The economy of scales as­ sociated with bar codes is a difficult barrier to overcome. Two Pittsburgh-based companies...

We study the inventory control problem of a retailer working under stochastic demand and stochastic limited supply. We assume that the unfilled part of the retailer's order is fully backordered at the supplier and replenished with certainty in the following period. As it may not always be optimal for the retailer to replenish the backordered supply, we also consider the setting in which the ret...

We present a two-echelon dual-channel inventory model in which stocks are kept in both a manufacturer warehouse (upper echelon) and a retail store (lower echelon), and the product is available in two supply channels: a traditional retail store and an Internet-enabled direct channel. The system receives stochastic demand from two customer segments: those who prefer the traditional retail store a...

The simultaneous stochastic pricing and inventory management with capacitated cash-on-hand is a profit maximization problem faced by a firm, which has limited working capital for its liabilities. In addition to this working capital constraint, the company has to dynamically price its products and determine inventory levels to minimize its expected cost. In our study, we tackle this complicated ...

OBJECTIVE The aim of family focused grief therapy is to reduce the morbid effects of grief among families at risk of poor psychosocial outcome. It commences during palliative care of terminally ill patients and continues into bereavement. The authors report a randomized, controlled trial. METHOD Using the Family Relationships Index, the authors screened 257 families of patients dying from can...

We consider the problem of minimizing the overall cost of a supply chain, over a possibility long horizon, under demand uncertainly which is known only crudely. Under such circumstances, the method of choice is Robust Optimization, in particular the Affinely Adjustable Robust Counterpart (AARC) method which leads to tractable deterministic optimization problems. The latter is due to a recent re...

Joint managed inventory is an advanced supply chain inventory management tool, which will effectively tackle the complicated problem between the inventory cost of supply chain and service level. The research on inventory model and its’ control under JMI environment is a hot issue at present. In this paper, the authors deeply discuss the question of the inventory time costs about the multi-produ...

Inventory or material balance control is an important part of process control. In the literature, many rules have been proposed to help in designing such systems, but their justification is often unclear. The main contribution of this paper is to propose the more general localconsistency rule for evaluating inventory control systems. Consistency means that the steadystate mass balances (total, ...