In this paper, we report a case study on the common due-date assignment and scheduling problem in a paper remanufacturing system that produces corrugated cardboards using collected waste papers for a given set of orders under the make-to-order (MTO) environment. Since the system produces corrugated cardboards in an integrated process and has sequence-dependent setups, the problem considered here can be regarded as common due-date assignment and sequencing on a single machine with sequence-dependent setup times. The objective is to minimize the sum of the penalties associated with due-date assignment, earliness, and tardiness. In the study, the earliness and tardiness penalties were obtained from inventory holding and backorder costs, respectively. To solve the problem, we adopted two types of algorithms: (a) branch and bound algorithm that gives the optimal solutions; and (b) heuristic algorithms. Computational experiments were done on the data generated from the case and the results show that both types of algorithms work well for the case data. In particular, the branch and bound algorithm gave the optimal solutions quickly. However, it is recommended to use the heuristic algorithms for large-sized instances, especially when the solution time is very critical.

This paper considers a revenue maximization problem on a single processor. Each job is identified as its processing time, initial reward, reward decreasing rate, and preferred start time. If the processor starts a job at time zero, revenue of the job is its initial reward. However, the revenue decreases linearly with the reward decreasing rate according to its processing start time till its preferred start time and finally its revenue is zero if it is started the processing after the preferred time. Our objective is to find the optimal sequence which maximizes the total revenue. For the problem, we characterize the optimal solution properties and prove the NP-hardness. Based upon the characterization, we develop a branch-and-bound algorithm for the optimal sequence and suggest five heuristic algorithms for efficient solutions. The numerical tests show that the characterized properties are useful for effective and efficient algorithms.

Two previous studies that attempted to generalize the deterministic joint pricing-inventory decision model are reevaluated. We prove analytically that even in a single-product environment, the EOQ model with constant priceelastic demand cannot find optimal solutions unless two optimality conditions associated with price elasticity and demand magnitude are satisfied. Due to the inexistence of the general optimality for the problem, demand function and price elasticity must be evaluated and bounded properly to use the methods proposed in the previous studies.

This paper is motivated by a military cargo-plane routing problem which is a pickup-and-delivery problem in which load splits and node revisits are allowed (PDPLS). Although this recent evolution of a VRP-model enhances the efficiency of routing, a solution method is more of a challenge since the node revisits entail closed walks in modeling vehicle routes. For such a case, even a compact IP-formulation is not available and an effective method had been lacking until Nowak et al. (2008b) proposed a heuristic based on a tabu search. Their method provides very reasonable solu-tions as demonstrated by the experiments not only in their paper (Nowak et al., 2008b) but also in ours. However, the computation time seems intensive especially for the class of problems with dynamic transportation requests, including the military cargo-plane routing problem. This paper proposes a more scalable algorithm hybridizing a tabu search for pricing subproblem paused as a single-vehicle routing problem, with a column generation approach based on Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition. As tested on a wide variety of instances, our algorithm produces, in average, a solution of an equiva-lent quality in 10~20% of the computation time of the previous method.

This article presents a way of tackling a special class of space optimization problems that arise in a number of practical applications in industry and elsewhere. It presents an elegant solution to a problem that was considered by (Das, 2005) in optimizing storage space in warehouse of a footwear manufacturing company. In (Das, 2005), the problem was formulated as a nonlinear programming problem. In this article, it is shown that the problem can be formulated as a generalized transportation problem which is a special case of generalized network flow problems. Further, an elegant scheme is devised to handle the dynamic situation of warehousing problem which can be easily translated into a decision support system for the warehouse management system. Also, the article points out certain obscurities and gaps in (Das, 2005).

A novel method of transient stability analysis is presented in this paper. The proposed method extracts data points near the basin-of-attraction boundary and then builds a support vector machine (SVM) model learned from the generated data. The constructed SVM classifier has been shown to reduce dramatically the conservativeness of the estimated basin of attraction.