Editorial Service Optimization and Controldownloads.hindawi.com/journals/mpe/2014/951376.pdf · 2019. 7. 31. · Pig game, and the Prisoner s Dilemma game. For each game, they derive

EditorialService Optimization and Control

Tsan-Ming Choi,1 Pui-Sze Chow,1 and Kannan Govindan2

1 Institute of Textiles and Clothing, Faculty of Applied Science and Textiles, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University,Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong

2Department of Business and Economics, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

Correspondence should be addressed to Tsan-Ming Choi; [email protected]

Received 22 October 2013; Accepted 22 October 2013; Published 20 January 2014

Copyright © 2014 Tsan-Ming Choi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons AttributionLicense, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properlycited.

Service operations are critical in modern business. Serviceproviders, such as those in the telecommunication industryand other retailing sectors, are providing services to themarket with a goal of optimizing their own profit. How-ever, a service operation is different from the operationswhich manage the “physical products.” For example, manytraditionally critical decisions such as the optimal “physicalproduct” production quantity and optimal “product” qualitycontrol are no longer relevant [1, 2].This calls for a totally newengineering mindset and novel analytical models in order tooptimize the performance of the respective service systems.

This special issue is devoted to publishing the latest andsignificant results on scientific research in service optimiza-tion and control.This special issue puts high emphasis on theadvance of optimizationmethods and real world applicationsfrom a systems engineering perspective. Thus, there are bothanalytically focused studies as well as empirical analyses.It is also interesting to note that a couple of papers areadopting both the analytical and the quantitative empiricalapproaches. Thus, we can see the multidisciplinary as wellas multimethodological nature of the service optimizationrelated research.

After conducting rigorous peer review, this special issuehas accepted 14 technical papers related to service optimiza-tion and control. We describe each one of them concisely asfollows.

In “A capacitated location-allocationmodel for flood disas-ter service operations with border crossing passages and prob-abilistic demand locations,” motivated by the consequencesof flood disasters, S. A. Mirzapour et al. explore the properlocations of relief rooms to provide the needed service.

They formulate the problem as a p-center location problem.They model the problem as a mixed integer nonlinearoptimization problem with the capacitated facility location-allocation consideration. They simultaneously consider theprobabilistic distribution of demand locations and the linebarrier in the given region. They try to minimize the max-imum expected weighted distance from the relief rooms toall the demand regions. This optimization objective helps todecrease the evacuation time of people from the affected areasbefore flood occurrence. To illustrate the applicability of theirmodel, they present a real case study.

In “Service quality of online shopping platforms: a casebased empirical and analytical study,” T. M. Choi et al. studythe service business model of online shopping platforms(OSPs). They focus on customer service aspect of OSPs andexamine the specific case on http://www.taobao.com/indexglobal.php. They identify the customer perceptions of theservice quality associated with Taobao’s functions. Theyalso explore these functions’ impacts on customer loyalty.From an empirical study, they find that the “fulfillment andresponsiveness” function is most significantly related to thecustomer loyalty. Based on this empirical finding, they con-duct an analytical study and derive the optimal service levelon this most critical function. By employing the safety firstoptimization objective, they prove that the optimal servicelevel uniquely exists. Their further analysis reveals that abigger optimal service level results if the customer loyalty ispositively correlated to the service level. In addition, they findthat the optimal service level is independent of the respectiveprofit target under the safety first objective, the source ofuncertainty, and the risk preference of the OSP company.

Hindawi Publishing CorporationMathematical Problems in EngineeringVolume 2014, Article ID 951376, 3 pageshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/951376

2 Mathematical Problems in Engineering

In “Performance analysis and optimization of an adap-tive admission control scheme in cognitive radio networks,”S. Jin et al. study the cognitive radio networks with thesecondary user (SU) packets. To be specific, they proposean adaptive admission control method with a system accessprobability for the SU packets. They introduce an adaptivefactor which helps to adjust the system access probability.By building a discrete-time preemptive queueing model withadjustable joining rate, they conduct analytical exploration.To derive the steady-state distribution of the queueingmodel,they construct a two-dimensional Markov chain model.They conduct a computational study and present numericalfindings on the impacts brought by the adaptive factor. Theyfurther derive an optimal pricing mechanism for the system.

In “Emergency department staffing: a separated continuouslinear programming approach,” X. Wang explores overcrowd-ing problem in the emergency department of hospital. Sheargues that the shortage of staff members in the emergencydepartment is the root problem. Based on this argument, sheconstructs a new analytical model to address the emergencydepartment staffing problem. To be specific, she modelsthe problem as a separated continuous linear programmingproblem. She develops an efficient algorithm to determine theoptimal emergency department staffing level under the totalcost minimization objective.

In “A model for assessing the service quality of universitylibrary websites,” C. M. Wu et al. explore the criteria forassessing the service quality of librarywebsites.They examinethe problem from university students’ viewpoints. Based onthe fuzzy Delphi method, they employ the ANP approachto generate the priority weights of criteria. In total, a listof 12 web-based service criteria is identified according tothe empirical inputs from over 3000 university students.These criteria include choices for searching for information,protection of personal information, website availability, andso forth. Different from prior research which ignores theimportant interdependence among criteria, C. M. Wu et al.propose the ANP approach which can capture this interde-pendence and they argue that their proposed results are moreaccurate.

In “Crowdsourcing new product design on theweb: an anal-ysis of online designer platform service,” X. Dai et al. study thebusiness model called the Designer Platform Service (DPS).In fact, DPS is a combined mechanism of crowdsourcingand group buying on the web. It helps boost the growth ofentrant fashion designers and links designing tasks with thereal world market. They conduct an analytical optimizationstudy on how the optimal pricing and minimum productionquantity decisions aremade in theDPS.They consider factorssuch as the entrant designer’s objective, the specific decisionsequences, and the structures of demand.They investigate theproblem by developing the model as a Stackelberg game andderive the respective equilibrium solutions.

In “Review on the research for separated continuouslinear programming: with applications on service operations,”X. Wang conducts a technical review on the research forSeparated Continuous Linear Programming (SCLP). Sheexamines several important formulations of SCLP. She dis-cusses the SCLP related duality theory and solution method.

She argues that most results on duality theory can providethe analytical conditions for SCLP to exhibit strong duality.She further reveals that most solution approaches for SCLPbelong to either the simplex-like or the discretization-basedcategory. She finds that the simplex-like approach helps to getthe exact optimal solution but is computationally very time-consumingwhereas the discretization-basedmethods are fastbut can only lead to the approximate solutions.

In “Cooperative advertising in a supply chain with horizon-tal competition,” Y.He et al. examine the advertising strategiesfor a supply chain with two suppliers and one buyer. Theystudy the supply chain system in three different cases: (i) eachsupply chain agentmakes individual decisions independently,(ii) the retail buyer is integrated with one manufacturer, and(iii) both manufacturers are horizontally integrated. Theyanalytically find that the manufacturer’s optimal advertisingefforts are independent of the participation rates offered tothe retail buyer in all three cases. They argue that whenthe retail buyer is integrated with one manufacturer, theother manufacturer’s optimal advertising efforts will not beaffected. For the case when both manufacturers are hori-zontally integrated, they reveal that these two manufacturerswould reduce the advertising efforts to avoid conflict.

Incentive alignment contracting is an important measurein supply chain management. In “Contract strategies incompeting supply chains with risk-averse suppliers,” B. Li et al.study analytically the equilibrium contracting strategies inthe presence of two competing supply chains. In their model,each supply chain includes one risk-averse supplier and onerisk-neutral retailer. The supplier in each supply chain acts asthe Stackelberg leader and can choose either the wholesalepricing contract or the revenue sharing contract to offerto the retailer. They study the impacts brought by factorssuch as competition density and degree of risk aversionon the suppliers on the equilibrium contract choices. Theyinterestingly find that it is always an optimal decision for thefirst-moving supplier to choose the revenue sharing contractif the second-moving supplier chooses the wholesale pricingcontract. They further reveal that the optimal retail priceunder the revenue sharing contract is lower than the oneunder the wholesale pricing contract. They also find thatthere is a threshold policy on the degree of risk aversionfor the suppliers which influences their optimal choice onthe individual contract types. These ultimately would affectthe contract strategies under the competing supply chainsscenario.

In “Congestion service facilities location problem withpromise of response time,” D. Hu et al. study the congestionservice facilities location problem inwhich there is a responsetime promise.They explore the problemvia a queueingmodelwhich assumes the customer demands are generated at eachnode and requests for service arrive as a random variablefollowing the Poisson process. They consider the responsetime to include sojourn time and travel time. They proposea mixed integer nonlinear programming model for locatingservice facility with the promise of response time. Theytake the locations of the service facilities and the numberof servers at each facility as the control variables. In theiroptimization model, the objective function is to maximize

Mathematical Problems in Engineering 3

the demand being served within the promised responsetime. They propose a hybrid algorithm which combinesgreedy and genetic algorithms to solve the problem. Theyconduct a number of computational experiments to test theperformance of the algorithm and propose that the responsetime promise has a critical effect on the optimal locationdecision.

In “On advertising games and spillover in service systems,”L. Xu et al. analytically model the advertising competitiongame between a dominant service provider and some smallerservice providers. They consider the scenario when thedominant service provider enjoys a larger market share, andthe other smaller service providers only share the remaining“smaller”market share equally.They explore three advertisinggamemodels, which include the cooperative game, the BoxedPig game, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma game. For each game,they derive the conditions for having an equilibrium. Theyreveal that the advertising spillover and the number of thesmaller service providers affect substantially the equilibria.They also discuss the research implications.

In “Order allocation research of logistics service supplychain with mass customization logistics service,” W. Liu et al.observe that customers have a high demand for specializedand customized logistics services.Motivated by the industrialpractice in logistics service supply chain (LSSC) manage-ment, they study the order allocation between a logistics ser-vice integrator (LSI) and several functional logistics serviceproviders (FLSPs). They focus on the logistics service undermass customization. They formulate a multiobjective orderallocation model of LSSC. The problem is constrained withrespect to factors such as customer demand, customer orderdecoupling point, and order difference tolerance coefficient.Their analysis reveals that the LSI prefers FLSPs in thepresence of a higher scale effect coefficient. They also showthat setting a high relationship cost coefficient does notnecessarily yield enhanced results. They further demonstratethat for the FLSPs, a continuous improvement of large-scaleoperational capacity is desirable. Moreover, they argue thatif the LSSC’s comprehensive order allocation performance ishigh, then the LSI will offer cost compensation in order toimprove the LSSC’s level of satisfaction.

Motivated by industrial practices price comparison ser-vice (PCS)websites, in “The impact of price comparison serviceon pricing strategy in a dual-channel supply chain,” Q. Xu et al.examine the pricing strategies of retailers and supplier ina dual-channel supply chain influenced by the presence ofPCS. They categorize the problem with respect to the signalavailability of PCS and formulate three specific cases. Foreach case, they analytically derive the corresponding optimalpricing strategy. They further conduct a numerical analysis.Their study shows several important insights, which includethe following: when the retailers are all affected by the PCS,the supplier is more willing to reduce the availability of priceinformation.

In “Sales forecasting for fashion retailing service industry:a review,” N. Liu et al. conduct a comprehensive literaturereview on the topic of fashion retail sales forecasting. Theyfocus on exploring the advantages and the disadvantages ofdifferent kinds of fashion retail sales forecastingmodels.They

also study the real world applications of the fashion retailsales forecasting models. From the reviewed literature, theycomment that, over the past 15 years, the pure statisticalmethods are not popularly examined in the literature. Infact, most studies are focusing on the deployment of artificialintelligence methods and some hybrid models. They arguethat the use of hybrid methods for fashion retail salesforecasting is trendy and timely, and it is still a promising areafor further explorations.

We believe that this special issue presents many inter-esting and innovative research on service optimization andcontrol related problems. We hope the published paperswill provide a good foundation for future scientific researchrelated to service optimization and control.

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our hearty thanks to all the authorsfor contributing their good research works to this specialissue and the anonymous reviewers for their time and effortin providing constructive and timely reviews.

Tsan-Ming ChoiPui-Sze Chow

Kannan Govindan

References

[1] T. L. Huang, G. Allon, and A. Bassamboo, “Bounded rationalityin service systems,” Manufacturing & Service Operations Man-agement, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 263–279, 2013.

[2] M. Yang,M. J. Fry,W. David Kelton, and T. T. Allen, “Improvingvoting systems through service-operations management,” Pro-duction and Operations Management, 2013.

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Editorial Service Optimization and Controldownloads.hindawi.com/journals/mpe/2014/951376.pdf · 2019. 7. 31. · Pig game, and the Prisoner s Dilemma game. For each game, they derive