In this paper, we analyze an M / M / 1 queueing system where there are incentive conflicts among customers. Self-interested customers' decisions whether to join the system or not may not necessarily induce a socially optimal congestion level. As a way to alleviate the over-congestion, toll imposition was used in Naor's paper [3]. Instead of using a toll mechanism, we study the usefulness of imperfect information on system state (queue size, for example) as a way to reduce the over-congestion by self-interested customers. The main conclusion of this paper is that by purposefully giving fuzzy or imperfect information on the current queue size we can improve the congestion in the system. This result might look contradictory to rough intuition since perfect information should give better performance than imperfect information. We show how this idea is verified. In deriving this result, we use the concept of Nash equilibrium (pure and mixed strategy) as introduced in game theory. In some real situations, using imperfect information is easier to apply than imposing a toll, and thus the result of this paper has practical implications.

This paper suggests a procedure of decomposing a multi-stage dynamic location problem into stages with respect stage. The problem can be formulated as a mixed integer programming problem, which is difficult to be solved directly. We perform a series of transformations in order to divide the problem into stages. In the process, the assumption of PSO (production-system-only) plays a critical role. The resulting subproblem becomes a typical single-stage dynamic location problem, whose efficient algorithms have been developed efficiently. An extension of this study is to find a method to integrate the solutions of subproblems for a final solution of the problem.

This article presents a new model called the periodic square wave(PSW) to describe the material flow of periodic processes involving an intermediate buffer. The material flows into and out of the intermediate buffer are assumed to be periodic square shaped. By using this model, It is proved that the classical economic lot size model with finite supply rate, the so-called EPQ model, can be applicable to the arbitrary periodic demand case. This new model relaxes the original assumption of the constant demand. It is shown, as a unique application example, that the explicit solution for determining both upstream and downstream economic lot size can be obtained with the aid of the PSW model. The PSW model provides more accurate information on analyzing the inventory and production system than the classical approach, without losing simplicity and increasing the computational burden.

In planning an assembly system, choosing the proper assembly sequence is one of the most important decisions because it significantly affects the costs associated with the assembly process. This paper deals with the selection of assembly sequences in flexible assembly systems. The selection criterion is the minimization of makespan to complete all assembly products. This problem is formulated as a "modified FAS scheduling problem" (MFASSP) and its scheduling procedure is described. The experimental results show that the procedure is very efficient for both quality of solution and computation time.