Crisis performance predictability in supply chains

It is widely acknowledged that supply chain ‘glitches’ may have detrimental effects on company per

Polynomial-time approximation schemes for scheduling problems with time lags

We identify two classes of machine scheduling problems with time lags that possess Polynomial-Time Approximation Schemes (PTASs). These classes together, one for minimizing makespan and one for minimizing total completion time, include many well-studied time lag scheduling problems. The running times of these approximation schemes are polynomial in the number of jobs, but exponential in the number of machines and the ratio between the largest time lag and the smallest positive operation time. These classes constitute the first PTAS results for scheduling problems with time lags

007 to the Rescue – Cognitive Fit of Operations Research and Agent-based Decision Support

Adoption rates of traditional Operations Research (OR) based decision support systems (DSS) suffer from perceived complexity of the underlying model and its detrimental effect on user-friendliness. The mental effort required to understand abstract models can hinder adoption. This barrier may seem even greater to people with low analytic capabilities. Unfortunately it is often this user group that could benefit the most from using OR based DSS. Agent based approaches on the other hand typically model negotiations between real-world counterparts. Extending cognitive fit theory we argue that presenting DSS in an agent based fashion allows for a closer match between the model presented on screen and the mental model of the user. We tested the impact of DSS presentation on perceived usefulness in a lab experiment (n=118). Our data suggests that an agent presentation outperforms an OR based DSS for perceived usefulness for low analytic users