The paper studies generalization of the secretary problem, where decisions do not have to be made immediately upon applicants’ arrivals. After arriving, each applicant stays in the system for some (random) amount of time and then leaves, whereupon the ...

We study a generalization of the secretary problem, where decisions do not have to be made immediately upon applicants’ arrivals. After arriving, each applicant stays in the system for some (random) amount of time and then leaves, whereupon the algorithm ...

Decision-making under simultaneous competition

Hardly any decision is made in isolation and most decision makers are dealing with fierce competition when trying to find the optimal decision for their problem. The expected outcome of such a competitive ...

Finite games provide a framework to model simultaneous competitive decisions among a finite set of players (competitors), each choosing from a finite set of strategies. Potential applications include decisions on competitive production volumes, over ...

Multimarket Multireservoir Hydro Scheduling

Peak/off-peak spreads on European electricity forward and spot markets are eroding due to the ongoing nuclear phaseout in Germany and the steady growth in photovoltaic capacity. The reduced profitability of peak/...

Peak/off-peak spreads on European electricity forward and spot markets are eroding due to the ongoing nuclear phaseout in Germany and the steady growth in photovoltaic capacity. The reduced profitability of peak/off-peak arbitrage forces hydropower ...

In large distributed systems, ensuring the efficient utilization of the available resources is a very challenging task. Given limited information regarding the state of the system and no centralized control over the outcome, decentralized scheduling ...

We study the performance of cost-sharing methods in a selfish scheduling setting where a group of users schedule their jobs on machines with load-dependent cost functions, aiming to minimize their own cost. Anticipating this user behavior, the system ...

Adaptive Patient Flow Management

Appointment scheduling has significant clinical, operational, and economical impact on healthcare systems. An informed scheduling strategy that can effectively match patient demand and service capacity dynamically is vital ...

The simultaneous consideration of appointment day (interday scheduling) and time of day (intraday scheduling) in dynamic scheduling decisions is a theoretical and practical problem that has remained open. We introduce a novel dynamic programming framework ...

In “Sequential Competitive Facility Location: Exact and Approximate Algorithms,” Qi et al. consider a competitive facility location problem (CFLP), where two firms sequentially open new facilities within their budgets and maximize their market shares of ...

We study a competitive facility location problem (CFLP), where two firms sequentially open new facilities within their budgets, in order to maximize their market shares of demand that follows a probabilistic choice model. This process is a Stackelberg ...

Scheduling Advertising on Cable Television

Advertisement scheduling is a daily essential operational process in the television business. Efficient distribution of viewers among advertisers allows the television network to satisfy contracts and increase ad ...

Advertisement scheduling is a daily essential operational process in the television business. Efficient distribution of viewers among advertisers allows the television network to satisfy contracts and increase ad sale revenues. Ad scheduling is a ...

There are a variety of revenue management systems that require making pricing or availability decisions for unique resources. For example, lodging marketplaces, boutique hotels, and bed-and-breakfasts offer unique rooms, apartments, or houses. Matching ...

We study revenue management problems with heterogeneous resources, each with unit capacity. An arriving customer makes a booking request for a particular interval of days in the future. We offer an assortment of resources in response to each booking ...

In project scheduling, the durations of activities are often uncertain. Delays may cause a massive disorganization if a large number of activities must be rescheduled. In “The Anchor-Robust Project Scheduling Problem,” Bendotti, Chrétienne, Fouilhoux, and ...

In project scheduling with uncertain processing times, the decision maker often needs to compute a baseline schedule in advance while guaranteeing that some jobs will not be rescheduled later. Standard robust approaches either produce a schedule with a ...

Algorithms to schedule medical appointments

This paper was inspired by a field collaboration effort to develop and disseminate a real-time appointment scheduling decision support tool for an outpatient cancer infusion center in a large healthcare system. ...

This paper describes a fundamental online scheduling problem called the minimum peak job scheduling (MPJS) problem. In this problem, there is a sequence of arriving jobs, each with a specified required scheduled time for one unit of a scarce and reusable ...

Call Center Staffing: On-Demand Is in Demand

Traditional call centers face challenges in quickly adapting their service capacity to meet fluctuations in demand, even with short staffing periods. In their research article “Expanding Service Capabilities ...

An on-demand workforce can greatly benefit a traditional call center by allowing it to adjust its service capacity on demand quickly. Despite its conceptual elegance, the operationalization of this process is challenging due to the various sources of ...

A Novel Class of Robust and Fast Algorithms for Online Allocation Problems

A central problem in operations research is allocating limited resources sequentially to maximize cumulative rewards. Applications abound and include network revenue management and ...

Online allocation problems with resource constraints are central problems in revenue management and online advertising. In these problems, requests arrive sequentially during a finite horizon and, for each request, a decision maker needs to choose an ...

Title: Constant Regret Resolving Heuristics for Price-Based Revenue Management

Network revenue management (NRM) and its corresponding pricing question is one of the most fundamental problems in operations management. To alleviate the curse of ...

Price-based revenue management is an important problem in operations management with many practical applications. The problem considers a seller who sells one or multiple products over T consecutive periods and is subject to constraints on the initial ...

Jobs in modern parallel-computing frameworks, such as Hadoop and Spark, are subject to several constraints. In these frameworks, the data are typically distributed across a cluster of machines and is processed in multiple stages. Therefore, tasks that ...

Motivated by modern parallel computing applications, we consider the problem of scheduling parallel-task jobs with heterogeneous resource requirements in a cluster of machines. Each job consists of a set of tasks that can be processed in parallel; however,...

The paper “An Optimal Control Framework for Online Job Scheduling with General Cost Functions,” by Etesami devises online speed-augmented competitive algorithms for minimizing the generalized completion time on a single and multiple unrelated machines for ...

We consider the problem of online job scheduling on a single machine or multiple unrelated machines with general job and machine-dependent cost functions. In this model, each job has a processing requirement and arrives with a nonnegative nondecreasing ...

Sample Average Approximation in Data-Driven Newsvendor

In the data-driven newsvendor problem, the manager makes sequential inventory decisions while learning the unknown demand distribution based on past demand samples. How does the widely used sample ...

We consider the data-driven newsvendor problem in which a manager makes inventory decisions sequentially and learns the unknown demand distribution based on observed samples of continuous demand (no truncation). We study the widely used sample average ...

In a railway network, a deadlock occurs when two or more trains are preventing each other from moving forward by each occupying the tracks required by the other. Deadlocks are rare but pernicious events in railroad operations, and, in most cases, they are ...

A deadlock occurs when two or more trains are preventing each other from moving forward by occupying the required tracks. Deadlocks are rare but pernicious events in railroad operations and, in most cases, are caused by human errors. Recovering is a time-...

The shift in the restaurant industry toward digital ordering argues for major changes in how orders are managed. The main difficulty in managing queues in online food-ordering services arises from the fact that, as opposed to dine-in customers, online ...

We study the problem of managing queues in online food-ordering services where customers, who place orders online and pick up at the store, are offered a common quote time, that is, the promised pick-up time minus the time the order is placed. The ...

In “A Repeated Route-then-Schedule Approach to Coordinated Vehicle Platooning: Algorithms, Valid Inequalities and Computation,” Luo and Larson propose a novel repeated route-then-schedule algorithmic framework to efficiently solve a complex vehicle ...

Platooning of vehicles is a promising approach for reducing fuel consumption, increasing vehicle safety, and using road space more efficiently. We consider the important, but difficult, problem of assigning optimal routes and departure schedules to a ...

A key challenge in the resource allocation problem is to find near-optimal policies to serve different customers with random demands/revenues, using a fixed pool of capacity (properly configured). Three classes of allocation policies, responsive (with ...

A key challenge in the resource allocation problem is to find near-optimal policies to serve different customers with random demands/revenues, using a fixed pool of capacity (properly configured). In this paper, we study the properties of three classes of ...