Related papers: A business dinner problem
We consider a capacitated job shop problem with order acceptance. This research is motivated by the management of a research and development project pipeline for a company in the agricultural industry whose success depends on regularly…
When delivering items to a set of destinations, one can save time and cost by passing a subset to a sub-contractor at any point en route. We consider a model where a set of items are initially loaded in one vehicle and should be distributed…
We consider the distributed control synthesis problem for systems with locks. The goal is to find local controllers so that the global system does not deadlock. With no restriction this problem is undecidable even for three processes each…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of a last-mile delivery service that selects up to $N$ available vehicles to deliver $M$ packages from a centralized depot to $M$ delivery locations. The objective of the last-mile delivery service…
This paper considers two-sided matching with budget constraints where one side (firm or hospital) can make monetary transfers (offer wages) to the other (worker or doctor). In a standard model, while multiple doctors can be matched to a…
Assortment optimization concerns the problem of selling items with fixed prices to a buyer who will purchase at most one. Typically, retailers select a subset of items, corresponding to an "assortment" of brands to carry, and make each…
Paper cutting is a simple process of slicing large rolls of paper, jumbo-reels, into various sub-rolls with variable widths based on demands risen by customers. Since the variability is high due to collected various orders into a pool, the…
Consider a trade market with one seller and multiple buyers. The seller aims to sell an indivisible item and maximize their revenue. This paper focuses on a simple and popular mechanism--the fixed-price mechanism. Unlike the standard…
In this paper we introduce the notion of optimization under control and communication constraint in a robotic network. Starting from a general setup, we focus our attention on the problem of achieving rendezvous in minimum time for a…
I recently came across a combinatorial design problem involving progressive dinner parties (also known as safari suppers). In this note, I provide some elementary methods of designing schedules for these kinds of dinner parties.
We study a robust selling problem where a seller attempts to sell one item to a buyer but is uncertain about the buyer's valuation distribution. Existing literature shows that robust screening provides a stronger theoretical guarantee than…
This paper proposes a mathematical model for the design of a two-echelon supply chain where a set of suppliers serve a set of terminal facilities that receive uncertain customer demands. This model integrates a number of system decisions in…
Consider a customer who needs to fulfill a shopping list, and also a personal shopper who is willing to buy and resell to customers the goods in their shopping lists. It is in the personal shopper's best interest to find (shopping) routes…
Goods can exhibit positive externalities impacting decisions of customers in socials networks. Suppliers can integrate these externalities in their pricing strategies to increase their revenue. Besides optimizing the prize, suppliers also…
In this paper we study the problem of the Malicious Maitre d', as described in Peter Winkler's book Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection. This problem, attributed to computer scientist Rob Pike, involves seating diners around a…
We formalize the problem of selecting the optimal set of options for planning as that of computing the smallest set of options so that planning converges in less than a given maximum of value-iteration passes. We first show that the problem…
Two mobile agents, starting from different nodes of an $n$-node network at possibly different times, have to meet at the same node. This problem is known as rendezvous. Agents move in synchronous rounds using a deterministic algorithm. In…
With the increase of order fulfillment options and business objectives taken into consideration in the deciding process, order fulfillment deciding is becoming more and more complex. For example, with the advent of ship from store retailers…
We study a two-level uncapacitated lot-sizing problem with inventory bounds that occurs in a supply chain composed of a supplier and a retailer. The first level with the demands is the retailer level and the second one is the supplier…
This paper studies a class of source coding problems that combines elements of the CEO problem with the multiple description problem. In this setting, noisy versions of one remote source are observed by two nodes with encoders (which is…