This study analyzed the structure of pricing in the automobile auction market by using real trade data. We focused on the bidding behavior of bidders and the contract price of exhibits. First, we proposed a relational framework among exhibits, number of bidders, and the contract price. Next, we utilized a neural network model to estimate the number of bidders and the contract price. Subsequently, we investigated the relationship between the number of bidders and the contact price, and evaluated our method through an analysis that employed verifying data. Lastly, we listed our suggestions for bidding in auction markets.

A revenue sharing contract is one of the mechanisms that coordinate decision makers in a decentralized supply chain toward the consensual goal. The transfer prices between different echelons in the supply chain influence the total supply chain profits. The study aims to explore various transfer pricing heuristics on the supply chain coordination in terms of the supply chain profits and their interactions with the revenue sharing rate. A model is proposed for formulating the collaborative production and distribution planning in a decentralized supply chain with the revenue sharing mechanism. Experiment results indicate that the transfer price and the revenue sharing rate affect significantly the coordination. Among the studied pricing heuristics, the variable-cost pricing method led to the best SC profits. Raising the revenue sharing rate reduced the SC profits no matter what heuristics were employed. Furthermore, the experiments provide us clues for finding the optimal transfer price for the supply chain.

There are customer services jointly provided by two facilities so that each customer will complete the course made up of both facilities' sub-services. The two facilities are assumed invested respectively by an infrastructure owner and one subordinate facility owner, whose partnership is built on their capital investments. This paper presents a mathematical model of Stackelberg competition between the two facility owners to derive their optimal Nash equilibrium. In this study, each facility owner's profit is consisted of fixed revenue fractions of sold services, operating costs (including depreciation cost) and maintenance costs of her facility. The maintenance costs of one facility are incurred both by failures and deterioration due to usage. Moreover, for both facilities, failures are rectified immediately by minimal repairs and preventive maintenance is carried out at a fixed time epoch. Additional assumptions are also employed to develop the model such as customer arrivals are manipulated to follow a Poisson process, and each facility's lifetime is independently Weibull-distributed. The Stackelberg game proceeds as follows. At the first stage of decision making process, the infrastructure owner (acting as a leader) decides the allocation of revenue shares based on her self-interest. After observing the allocation of revenue shares, the subordinate facility owner determines her own optimal price of services. This paper investigates actions and reactions of the two partners in the system. Then analytical conditions are proposed to achieve a unique optimal Nash equilibrium. Finally, some suggestions for further research are discussed.

This paper first presents two supply chain design problems: 1) a factory location setting and factory selection problem, and 2) a factory location setting and factory/supplier selection problem. The first involves a number of location known retailers choosing one factory to supply their demands from a number of factories whose locations are to be determined. The goal is to minimize the transportation and manufacturing cost to satisfy the demands. The problem is then augmented into the second problem, where the procurement cost of the raw materials from a chosen material supplier (from a number of suppliers) is considered for each factory. Economic beneficial is taken into account in the cost evaluation. Therefore, the partner selections will influence the cost of the supply chain significantly. To solve these problems, an agent gaming and genetic algorithm hybrid method (AGGAHM) is proposed. The AGGAHM consecutively and alternatively enable and disable the advancement of agent gaming and the evolution of genetic computation. Computation results on solving a number of examples by the AGGAHM were compared with those from methods of a general genetic algorithm and a mutual frozen genetic algorithm. Results showed that the AGGAHM outperforms the methods solely using genetic algorithms. In addition, various parameter settings are tested and discussed to facilitate the supply chain designs.

This paper deals with the makespan minimization problem of job shops. The problem is known as one of hard problems to optimize, and therefore, many heuristic methods have been proposed by many researchers. The aim of this study is also to propose a heuristic scheduling method for the problem. However, the difference between the proposed method and many other heuristics is that the proposed method is based on depth-first branch and bound, and thus it is possible to find an optimal solution at least in principle. To accelerate the search, when a node is judged hopeless in the search tree, the proposed flexible branch and bound method can indicate a higher backtracking node. The unexplored nodes are stored and may be explored later to realize the strict optimization. Two methods are proposed to generate the backtracking point based on the critical path of the current best feasible schedule, and the minimum lower bound for the makespan in the unexplored sub-problems. Schedules are generated based on Giffler and Thompson's active schedule generation algorithm. Acceleration of the search by the flexible branch and bound is confirmed by numerical experiment.

In mass production industries such as steel making that have large equipment, sudden stops of production process due to machine failure can cause severe problems. To prevent such situations, machine diagnosis techniques play important roles. Many methods have been developed focusing on this subject. In this paper, we propose a method for the early detection of the failure on rotating machine, which is the most common theme in the machine failure detection field. A simplified method of calculating autocorrelation function is introduced and is utilized for ARMA model identification. Furthermore, an absolute deterioration factor such as Bicoherence is introduced. Machine diagnosis can be executed by this simplified calculation method of system parameter distance with weight. Proposed method proved to be a practical index for machine diagnosis by numerical examples.

Focusing on the idea that the equation of exponential smoothing method (ESM) is equivalent to (1, 1) order ARMA model equation, new method of estimation of smoothing constant in exponential smoothing method is proposed before by us which satisfies minimum variance of forecasting error. Theoretical solution was derived in a simple way. Mere application of ESM does not make good forecasting accuracy for the time series which has non-linear trend and/or trend by month. A new method to cope with this issue is required. In this paper, combining the trend removal method with this method, we aim to improve forecasting accuracy. An approach to this method is executed in the following method. Trend removal by a linear function is applied to the original shipping data of consumer goods. The combination of linear and non-linear function is also introduced in trend removal. For the comparison, monthly trend is removed after that. Theoretical solution of smoothing constant of ESM is calculated for both of the monthly trend removing data and the non monthly trend removing data. Then forecasting is executed on these data. The new method shows that it is useful especially for the time series that has stable characteristics and has rather strong seasonal trend and also the case that has non-linear trend. The effectiveness of this method should be examined in various cases.