this study aims to minimize the total cost of a four-echelon supply chain including suppliers, an assembler, distributers, and retailers. the total cost consists of purchasing raw materials from the suppliers by the assembler, assembling the final product, materials transportation from the suppliers to the assembler, product transportation from the assembler to the distributors, product transpo...

This paper develops optimal inventory models for a firm with multiple items and multiple branches by taking into account the price discount of sizable procurement and the scale economies of centralized warehousing and consolidated transportation. Four inventory strategies are proposed: independent ordering and decentralized warehousing, independent ordering and centralized warehousing, joint or...

As the third party logistics partners (carriers) taking a more and more significant role in supply chain practices and customer service performance improvement, there is an emerging need for the studies on optimal channel coordination policies for business processes involving not only supplier and buyer, but also transportation partners. In this paper, we explicitly add a transportation partner...

OBJECTIVE Assessing the cost-effectiveness of open or thoracoscopic thymectomy compared to medical therapy in managing myasthenia gravis not associated with thymoma. METHODS A Markov model was designed for evaluating three strategies' cost-effectiveness. Transition probabilities were taken from the pertinent literature; the costs were estimated from official tariff manuals. Incremental cost-e...

Time preferences are a dominant influence in cost-benefit analyses of long-term issues such as climate change. FUND, a model for optimal emission control, is used to spell out this influence. Classic discounting at various rates is contrasted with Heal discounting where the discount factor depends logarithmically on the time distance (it does linearly in the classic case), and Rabl discounting ...

The single-vendor single-buyer integrated production inventory system has been an object of study for a long time, but little is known about the effect of investing in reducing ordering cost on the integrated inventory models with backorder price discount and variable lead time. The purpose of this article is to investigate in the continuous review model with backorder price discount and variab...

Structural snow fences are known as a cost-effective way to enhance road safety on highways, which, however, only used during winter, making them “useless” summer. To increase their cost-effectiveness, Photovoltaics Snow Fences (PVSF) were developed by integrating PV panels with conventional structural fences. As part of the feasibility study supported Minnesota Department Transportation (MnDOT...

We analyzed the financial impacts of intensive loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) plantation establishment in the southern United States using projected growth data. Optimized management yielded positive net present values (NPVs) at all combinations of management intensity and discount rate except for the most intensive management at the highest discount rate. Cost-share payments for site preparation ...