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Both public and private organizations spend millions of dollars each year developing requests for proposal (RFPs). Too often, these requests are poorly written, incomplete--and ineffective. The Request for Proposal Handbook is today's only comprehensive source of information on writing effective RFPs. Updated and greatly expanded to provide current laws, regulations, and examples of effective RFPs, it now also includes two disks to give readers easy access to more than 600 pages of actual refere...

Although the majority of the world’s forest ecosystems are dominated by uneven-sized multi-species stands, forest management practice and theory has focused on the development of plantation monocultures to maximize the supply of timber at low cost. Societal expectations are changing, however, and uneven-aged multi-species ecosystems, selectively managed as Continuous Cover Forestry (CCF), are often believed to be superior to monocultures in addressing a wide range of expectations. This book pres...

The book brings together an overview of standard concepts in cooperative game theory with applications to the analysis of social networks and hierarchical authority organizations. The standard concepts covered include the multi-linear extension, the Core, the Shapley value, and the cooperative potential. Also discussed are the Core for a restricted collection of formable coalitions, various Core covers, the Myerson value, value-based potentials, and share potentials. Within the context of social...

Presents strategies with reachability graph analysis for optimizing resource allocation systems Supervisory Control and Scheduling of Resource Allocation Systems offers an important guide to Petri net (PN) models and methods for supervisory control and system scheduling of resource allocation systems (RASs). Resource allocation systems are common in automated manufacturing systems, project management systems, cloud data centers, and software engineering systems. The authors-two experts on the to...

This book provides an accessible one-volume introduction to Lean Six Sigma and statistics in engineering for students and industry practitioners. Lean production has long been regarded as critical to business success in many industries. Over the last ten years, instruction in Six Sigma has been linked more and more with learning about the elements of lean production. Building on the success of the first and second editions, this book expands substantially on major topics of increasing relevanc...

Give Your Students the Proper Groundwork for Future Studies in Optimization A First Course in Optimization is designed for a one-semester course in optimization taken by advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students in the mathematical sciences and engineering. It teaches students the basics of continuous optimization and helps them better understand the mathematics from previous courses. The book focuses on general problems and the underlying theory. It introduces all the necessary ma...

"Mathematical Optimization and Economic Analysis" is a self-contained introduction to various optimization techniques used in economic modeling and analysis such as geometric, linear, and convex programming and data envelopment analysis. Through a systematic approach, this book demonstrates the usefulness of these mathematical tools in quantitative and qualitative economic analysis. The book presents specific examples to demonstrate each technique's advantages and applicability as well as numero...

This book presents the essential concepts of operations research and engineering management in a structured manner. Starting with the basic functions of management – planning, organizing, leading and controlling – it introduces the reader to the process of strategic decision-making, covering the essentials of technological invention management, innovation and entrepreneurship, with ample examples of decision-making under certainty, uncertainty and risk conditions. It also exposes the reader to t...

This book addresses the challenges companies face when different customer value propositions require them to pursue a differentiated supply chain strategy. It provides practical insights on how to achieve successful supply chain segmentation and presents the benefits this can yield for companies on the basis of best-in-class industry case studies from Gardena, Philips Luminaire, Siemens Healthcare and Volvo Construction Equipment. Drawing on these examples, it provides recommendations and soluti...

The book offers a comprehensive and timely overview of advanced mathematical tools for both uncertainty analysis and modeling of parallel processes, with a special emphasis on intuitionistic fuzzy sets and generalized nets. The different chapters, written by active researchers in their respective areas, are structured to provide a coherent picture of this interdisciplinary yet still evolving field of science. They describe key tools and give practical insights into and research perspectives on t...

A brief introduction to business research methods designed for undergraduate and postgraduate subjects in that area. The book is written in an easy-to-read style and assumes the reader has no prior research or statistics knowledge. It provides a broad overview of a range of contemporary business research methods.

The structure of approximate solutions of autonomous discrete-time optimal control problems and individual turnpike results for optimal control problems without convexity (concavity) assumptions are examined in this book. In particular, the book focuses on the properties of approximate solutions which are independent of the length of the interval, for all sufficiently large intervals; these results apply to the so-called turnpike property of the optimal control problems. By encompassing the so-c...

The offsite and modular market is continuing to grow. This book builds on the success of a number of initiatives, including formative findings from literature, research and development and practice-based evidence (success stories). It presents new thinking and direction from leading experts in the fields of: design, process, construction, engineering, manufacturing, logistics, robotics, delivery platforms, business and transformational strategies, change management, legislation, organisational l...

This book describes Python3 programming resources for implementing decision aiding algorithms in the context of a bipolar-valued outranking approach. These computing resources, made available under the name Digraph3, are useful in the field of Algorithmic Decision Theory and more specifically in outranking-based Multiple-Criteria Decision Aiding (MCDA). The first part of the book presents a set of tutorials introducing the Digraph3 collection of Python3 modules and its main objects, such as bip...

This book highlights state-of-the-art developments in metaheuristics research. It examines all aspects of metaheuristic research including new algorithmic developments, applications, new research challenges, theoretical developments, implementation issues, in-depth experimental studies. The book is divided into two sections. Part I is focused on new optimization and modeling techniques based on metaheuristics. The chapters in this section cover topics from multi-objective problems with fuzzy dat...

Stochastic processes are necessary ingredients for building models of a wide variety of phenomena exhibiting time varying randomness. This text offers easy access to this fundamental topic for many students of applied sciences at many levels. It includes examples, exercises, applications, and computational procedures. It is uniquely useful for beginners and non-beginners in the field. No knowledge of measure theory is presumed.

This book is focused on quality management, and four different lenses which can be used to explore the phenomenon. It introduces emergence as a paradigm in thinking about quality, and explores conditions which are beneficial to radical innovation. The Emergence Paradigm in Quality Management provides an overview of the existing movements in thinking about quality, and discusses why these movements in fact represent paradigms. Three paradigms, the Empirical Paradigm, the Reference Paradigm and t...

Over the last two decades, the field of public administration has witnessed theoretical and practical changes that have innovated the relationships between public administration and performance management.Dealing with the rising complexity of performance regimes in contemporary public administration requires that policy-makers and their organizations are able to face unpredictable problems impacting on a community’s quality of life. Complex policy issues – such as immigration, pandemics, societa...

This research monograph summarizes a line of research that maps certain classical problems of discrete mathematics and operations research - such as the Hamiltonian Cycle and the Travelling Salesman Problems - into convex domains where continuum analysis can be carried out. Arguably, the inherent difficulty of these, now classical, problems stems precisely from the discrete nature of domains in which these problems are posed. The convexification of domains underpinning these results is achieved...