• Journal of Construction Engineering and Project Management
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.33-40
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• 2014

Maximizing the profitability and minimizing the duration of construction projects in extreme weather regions is a challenging objective that is essential for project success. An optimization model is presented herein for the time-profit trade-off analysis of construction projects under extreme weather conditions. The model generates optimal/near optimal schedules that maximize profit and minimize the duration of construction projects in extreme weather regions. The computations in the model are organized into: (1) a scheduling module that develops practical schedules for construction projects, (2) a profit module that computes project costs (direct, indirect, and total) and project profit, and (3) a multi-objective module that determines optimal/near optimal trade-offs between project duration and profit. One example is used to show the impact of extreme weather on construction time and profit. Another example is used to show the model's ability to generate optimal trade-offs between the time and profit of construction projects under extreme weather conditions.

• Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.144-151
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• 1993

This Paper shows a special case of the optimization criterion is to make the maximum profit in the system reliability of the k out of n open & close structure. Especially, the number of the optimal k is determined for the profit maximization in system reliability by deriving several properties of the optimal k out of n systems in one of four possible styles(closed & opened).

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.15 no.11
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• pp.73-82
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• 2017

Purpose - This paper aims to investigate a profit maximizing incentive of foreign traders in distributing the KOSPI 200 Futures. Such an incentive may induce unsophisticated retail traders to suffer loss from speculative trading. Since Korean government increased the entry barriers of the market to protect unsophisticated traders, the market size has been decreasing while the proportion of the contract held by foreign traders has been increasing. These on going changes make the market imperfectly competitive, where a profit maximization incentives of foreign traders are expected to grow. In this paper, we attempt to find any evidence of such behavior, thereby providing implications regarding market policy and market efficiency. Research design, data, and methodology - According to Kyle(1985), an informed trader exploits his/her monopoly power optimally in a dynamic context so that he/she makes positive profit, where he/she could conceal his/her trading utilizing noise trading as camouflage. We apply the KOSPI 200 Futures market to the Kyle's model: foreign traders who take into account the effect of his/her trading to maximize expected profits as an informed trader, retail investors as noise traders, and financial institutions as market makers. To find any evidence of monopolistic behavior, we test the variants of trading volume and price data of the KOSPI 200 Futures over the period of 2009 and 2017. Results - First, we find that the price of the KOSPI 200 Futures are more volatile than the price of underlying asset. Second, we find that monopolistic foreign trader's trading order flows are consistent with exploiting his/her monopoly power to maximize profit. Finally, we find that retail investors' trading order flows are inversely consistent with maximizing profit, that is, uninformed retail investors suffer loss continuously in speculative trading against informed traders. Conclusions - Our results show that the quantity of strategic order flows may have a large effect on the price, therefore, resulting the market inefficiency. The results also imply that, in implementing regulations, the depth of the market must be considered to maintain market liquidity, and suggesting interesting research topics regarding the market structure.

• IE interfaces
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.186-194
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• 2007

Recent deregulation of Korean electricity industry has made each power generation company pay more attention to maximizing its own profit instead of minimizing the overall system operation cost while guaranteeing system security. Electricity power generation problem is typically defined as the problem of determining both the on and off status and the power generation level of each generator under the given fuel constraints, which has been known as Profit-Based Unit Commitment (PBUC) problem. To solve the PBUC problem, the previous research mostly focused on devising Lagrangian Relaxation (LR) based heuristic algorithms due to the complexity of the problem and the nonlinearity of constraints and objectives. However, these heuristic approaches have been reported as less practical in real world applications since the computational run time is usually quite high and it may take a while to implement the devised heuristic algorithms as software applications. Especially when considering long-term planning problem which spans at least one year, the complexity becomes higher. Therefore, this paper proposes an explicit column generation algorithm using power generation patterns and the proposed algorithm is successfully applied to a Korean power generation company. The proposed scheme has a robust structure so that it is expected to extend general PBUC problems.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.12
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• pp.4950-4966
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• 2015

Cloud providers now face the problem of estimating the amount of computing resources required to satisfy a future workload. In this paper, a virtual machine provisioning (VMP) mechanism is designed to adapt workload fluctuation. The arrival rate of forthcoming jobs is predicted for acquiring the proper service rate by adopting an exponential smoothing (ES) method. The proper service rate is estimated to guarantee the service level agreement (SLA) constraints by using a diffusion approximation statistical model. The VMP problem is formulated as a facility location problem. Furthermore, it is characterized as the maximization of submodular function subject to the matroid constraints. A greedy-based VMP algorithm is designed to obtain the optimal virtual machine provision pattern. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed mechanism could increase the average profit efficiently without incurring significant quality of service (QoS) violations.

• Management Science and Financial Engineering
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.35-63
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• 2008

We discuss the problem of selecting profitable customer orders arriving at a company providing two classes of services. For an arriving customer order for the first class, the company 1) makes a decision whether to accept or reject it (admission control), or 2) decides a price of the order to offer to an arriving customer (pricing control). The customer order undergoing processing in the system may be cancelled owing to unavoidable circumstances with the customer. The second class of service is provided as a sideline, which prevents the server from being idle when all the customer orders for the first class are completed and delivered. This yields the sideline profit. We discuss both admission control and pricing control problems in an identical framework as well as examine the structure of the optimal policies maximizing the total expected present discounted net profit gained over an infinite planning horizon.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.21 no.45
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• pp.201-213
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• 1998

We address the problem of choosing the most economic mean value for an automatic filling operation on a production line through the sampling inspection. If quality characteristic of a unit is less than inspection specification then the goods is not accepted. Otherwise, it is accepted. The lots that the numbers of non-conforming units in a sample are larger than the allowable number of non-conforming units are rejected. The non-conforming units in the rejected lots are separated by the screening inspection. The non-conforming units separated are sold in discount price. We assume that quality characteristic is larger-the-better characteristic, the distribution of quality characteristic is normal distribution, and the standard deviation of the distribution is known. This paper presents total expected profit function model considering sales revenue, inspection costs, and material costs. The manufacturing process mean value maximizing total expected profit is determined, and the results of the process target value and total expected profit is analyzed as coefficients change.

• Proceedings of the Korean Operations and Management Science Society Conference
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• 2005.05a
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• pp.506-516
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• 2005

This paper deals with an investment scheduling problem of maximizing net present value of dividend with reinvestment allowed, where each investment has certain capital requirement and generates deterministic profit. Such deterministic profit is calculated at completion of each investment and then allocated into two parts, including dividend and reinvestment, at each predetermined reinvestment time point. The objective is to make optimal scheduling of investments over a fixed planning horizon which maximizes total sum of the net present values of dividends subject to investment precedence relations and capital limit but with reinvestment allowed. In the analysis, the scheduling problem is transformed to a kind of parallel machine scheduling problem and formulated as an integer programming which is proven to be NP-complete. Thereupon, a depth-first branch-and-bound algorithm is derived. To test the effectiveness and efficiency of the derived algorithm, computational experiments are performed with some numerical instances. The experimental results show that the algorithm solves the problem relatively faster than the commercial software package (CPLEX 8.1), and optimally solves the instances with up to 30 investments within a reasonable time limit.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.41 no.2
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• pp.159-166
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• 2018

The proliferation of information technologies made it possible to produce information products of different versions at much lower cost comparing to traditional physical products. Thus it is common for information product manufacturers to consider vertically differentiated product line for more profit through improved market coverage. Another salient characteristic of most information product is network externality. Existing researches dealing with vertical differentiation and network externality usually assumed oligopolistic market where vertically differentiated products are provided by competing companies, respectively. Moreover, they analyzed the essentially dynamic characteristic of network externality statically. In this study, different from the previous researches, the vertical differentiation strategy of a monopolistic company under network externality is dynamically analyzed. We used a two-period model to accommodate the dynamic feature of network externality. Based on the two-period model, the profit maximizing solutions are analyzed. The results showed that a monopolistic company has no incentive to differentiate products vertically when the network externality is absent. On the contrary, when the network externality exists, the monopolistic company can derive more profit by vertically differentiating the product line. It is also shown that, for more profit, the monopolistic company should keep the quality difference between the high quality product and the low quality product as greater as possible.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.60 no.3
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• pp.509-516
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• 2011

This paper studies a novel method to find the profit-maximizing Nash Equilibriums in allocating generation quantities with consideration of ramp-rates under competitive market environment. Each GenCo in a market participates in a game to maximize its profit through competitions and play a game with bidding strategies. In order to find the Nash equilibriums it is necessary to search the feasible combinations of GenCos' strategies which satisfy every participant's profit and no one wants various constraints. During the procedure to find Nash equilibriums, the payoff matrix can be simplified as eliminating the dominated strategies. in each time interval. Because of the ramp-rate, generator's physically or technically limits to increase or decrease outputs in its range, it can restrict the number of bidding strategies of each generator at the next stage. So in this paper, we found the Nash Equilibriums for multi-stage generation allocation game considering the ramp-rate limits of generators. In the case studies, we analyzed the generation allocation game for a 12-hour multi-stage and compared it with the results of dynamic economic dispatch. Both of the two cases were considered generator's ramp-rate effects.