Operations & Supply Chain Management

Revenue management (RM), refers to the collection of strategies and tactics by which airlines (and other transportation providers) manage demand for their services. This chapter surveys the method used to perform this demand management function. While revenue management today is applied in a wide range of industries, our focus here is on airline and other transportation RM problems. The chapter is based on excerpted material from our book The Theory and Practice of Revenue Management.

We consider a two-echelon distribution system in which a supplier distributes a product to N competing retailers. The demand rate of each retailer depends on all of the retailers' prices, or alternatively, the price each retailer can charge for its product depends on the sales volumes targeted by all of the retailers. The supplier replenishes his inventory through orders (purchases, production runs) from an outside source with ample supply. From there, the goods are transferred to the retailers.

The Pfaat protein family alignment annotation tool is a Java-based multiple sequence alignment editor and viewer designed for protein family analysis. The application merges display features such as dendrograms, secondary and tertiary protein structure with SRS retrieval, subgroup comparison, and extensive user-annotation capabilities.

This paper is concerned with dynamic control of stochastic processing networks. Specifically, it follows the so called heavy traffic approach, where a Brownian approximating model is formulated, an associated Brownian optimal control problem is solved, the solution of which is then used to define an implementable policy for the original system. A major challenge is the step of policy translation from the Brownian to the discrete network. This paper addresses this problem by defining a general and easily implementable family of continuous-review tracking policies.

In 1995 The Boundaryless Organization showed companies how to sweep away the artificial obstacles — such as hierarchy, turf, and geography — that get in the way of outstanding business performance. Now, in this completely revised edition of their groundbreaking work, management experts Ron Ashkenas, Dave Ulrich, Todd Jick, and Steve Kerr offer an up-to-date version of their comprehensive guide to help any organization go "boundaryless" — and become a company with the ability to quickly, proactively, and creatively adjust to changes in the environment.

We investigate the security of quantum key distribution with entangled photons, focusing on the two-photon variation of the Bennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) protocol proposed in 1992 by Bennett, Brasard, and Mermin (BBM92). We present a proof of security which applies to realistic sources, and to untrustable sources which can be placed outside the labs of the two receivers. The proof is restricted to individual eavesdropping attacks, and assumes that the detection apparatus is trustable.

We analyze a dynamic auction, in which a seller with C units to sell faces a sequence of buyers separated into T time periods. Each group of buyers has independent, private values for a single unit. Buyers compete directly against each other within a period, as in a traditional auction, and indirectly with buyers in other periods through the opportunity cost of capacity assessed by the seller. The number of buyers in each period, as well as the individual buyers' valuations, are random.

The results of an analysis of sales and price data from a speciality retailer of women's apparel are reported. The data set contains 184 styles sold during the Spring 1993 season. A demand model similar to those in the existing literature is hypothesised, fit to the data, and then analysed to obtain estimates of revenues under various pricing policies. Both full information and adaptive policies are considered. The optimal prices suggested by the models are compared with those of the study company and the revenues generated by various policies are estimated.