Knowledge that Transforms

We define a qualitative property, called monotonicity, for a closed queueing network. This property is defined both for a station in the network and for the network as a whole. Several results in this paper relate monotonic behavior to the known parameters of a network and allow us to state a priori, for many practical systems, whether the monotonicity property will apply for a network or a station. Monotonicity thus ensures that the system is well-behaved with respect to a number of parameters. We present diverse examples that demonstrate how knowledge of this property can be useful in network design and performance evaluation.

A method is presented for ranking multiattributed alternatives using a weighted-additive evaluation function with partial information about the weighting (scaling) constants, the method is applied to evaluate materials for use in nuclear waste containment. The paper derives conditions to determine whether a pair of alternatives can be ranked given the partial information about weighting constants, and presents an algorithm that partially rank-orders the complete set of alternatives based on the pairwise ranking information.

The familiar model for determining the optimal ordering strategy, given an announced price increase, assumes that the buyer has an opportunity to place an order at the end of the next economic order quantity cycle before the price increase takes effect. This paper extends the price increase model by relaxing the requirement on the timing of the price increase. Specifically, we develop optimal ordering strategies for situations where the price increase becomes effective at any future specified time. We also calculate savings for alternate ordering strategies.