This study explores several donor location strategies and discusses experiment results, which contributes to the saving of time and effort required in designing data fusion processes. In particular, three concepts are introduced. The Mahalanobis distance is applied to locate the nearest neighbors more effectively; which incorporates the covariance structure of attributes. The ideal point helps reduce the dimensionality problem that arises in conjoint-type experiments. The correspondence analysis is used to derive the coordinates from non-metric attributes. The Monte Carlo simulation results show that the proposed donor location strategies provide better fusion performance, compared to the currently-in-use methods.

The pricing/lot-sizing problem of determining the robust optimal order quantity and selling price is discussed. The uncertainty of parameters characterized by an ellipsoid is explicitly incorporated into the problem. An approximation scheme is proposed to transform the problem into a geometric program, which can be efficiently and reliably solved using interior-point methods.

This paper concentrates on reduction of a Quadratic Fractional Integer Programming Problem (QFIP) to a 0-1 Mixed Linear Programming Problem (0-1 MLP). The solution technique is based on converting the integer variables to binary variables and then the resulting Quadratic Fractional 0-1 Programming Problem is linearized to a 0-1 Mixed Linear Programming problem. It is illustrated with the help of a numerical example and is solved using the LINDO software.

Refuse collection, one of important elements in reverse logistics, is an activity rendering recyclables or wastes and moving them to some points where further treatment is required. Among various decisions in the collection activity, we focus on network design, which is the problem of locating collection points as well as allocating refuses at demand points to collection points while satisfying the capacity restriction at each collection point. Here, the collection point is the place where recyclables or wastes near the point are gathered, and locating the collection points is done by selecting them from a given set of potential sites. The objective is to minimize the sum of fixed costs to open collection points and transportation costs to move refuses from demand points to collection points. An integer programming model is developed to represent the problem mathematically and due to the complexity of the problem, two types of heuristics, one with simultaneous and the others with separate location and allocation, are suggested. Computational experiments were done on test problems up to 500 potential sites, and the results are reported. In particular, some heuristics gave near optimal solutions for small-size test problems, i.e., 2% gaps in average from the optimal solution values.

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has proven to be a useful tool for assessing efficiency or productivity of organizations which is of vital practical importance in managerial decision making. While DEA assumes exact input and output data, the development of imprecise DEA (IDEA) broadens the scope of applications to efficiency evaluations involving imprecise information which implies various forms of ordinal and bounded data possibly or often occurring in practice. The primary purpose of this article is to characterize the variable efficiency in IDEA. Since DEA describes a pair of primal and dual models, also called envelopment and multiplier models, we can basically consider two IDEA models: One incorporates imprecise data into envelopment model and the other includes the same imprecise data in multiplier model. The issues of rising importance are thus the relationships between the two models and how to solve them. The groundwork we will make includes a duality study which makes it possible to characterize the efficiency solutions from the two models. This also relates to why we take into account the variable efficiency and its bounds in IDEA that some of the published IDEA studies have made. We also present computational aspects of the efficiency bounds and how to interpret the efficiency solutions.

Growth curves including Bass, Logistic and Gompertz functions are widely used in forecasting the market demand. Nonlinear least square method is often adopted for estimating the model parameters but it is difficult to set up the starting value for each parameter. If a wrong starting point is selected, the result may lead to erroneous forecasts. This paper proposes a method of selecting starting values for model parameters in estimating some growth curves by nonlinear least square method through grid search and transformation into linear regression model. Resealing the market data using the national economic index makes it possible to figure out the range of parameters and to utilize the grid search method. Application to some real data is also included, where the performance of our method is demonstrated.

There are many debates on the topic of the relationship between oil prices and economic growth. Through the repeated processes of conformations and contractions on the subject, two main issues are developed; one is how to define and drive oil shocks from oil prices, and the other is how to specify an econometric model to reflect the asymmetric relations between oil prices and output growth. The study, thus, introduces the unobserved component model to pick up the oil shocks and a first-order Markov switching model to reflect the asymmetric features. We finally employ unique oil shock variables from the stochastic trend components of oil prices and adapt four lags of the mean growth Markov Switching model. The results indicate that oil shocks exert more impact to recessionary state than expansionary state and the supply-side oil shocks are more persistent and significant than the demand-side shocks.