Today, improving machine availability is vital for industries to compete in the global market. Spare parts play an essential role in the maintenance and repair of equipment, but planning an extensive network in strategic industries with various spare parts can be very challenging due to the existence of different decision factors. The spare parts supply chain deals with inventory management issues, which necessitates considering the related decisions such as determining the stock level and order quantity. Moreover, demand uncertainty and long supply time make decision-making more complex. This paper presents a repair and supply planning model for repairable spare parts while considering a modified formulation of demand uncertainty to minimize costs. The model determines the optimal stock level, lateral transshipment, assignment of spare part orders to suppliers, equipment to repair centers, and the number of intervals over the planning horizon used in demand estimation. This research contributes to the literature by integrating recent decisions, using demand approximation by piecewise linearization, and considering backorder in warehouses evaluated by queuing models. A hybrid approach, including heuristic and genetic algorithms, is used to optimize the model using data from an oil company. The results show that using piecewise linearization and integrated repair and supply planning decisions optimizes costs and improves performance. Also, the availability is affected by the demand estimation, which necessitates precision prediction.

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of affective and cognitive trust in bank advertising toward its potential customers. An advertising experiment was conducted by creating two bank advertisements focusing on affective and cognitive trust in bank advertising. SEM analysis is conducted with a sample of 254 customers who banked with the Central Bank of Ghana using STATA 14.1. Results showed that customers of a bank are more drawn to affective advertising than cognitive advertising. Results also showed that cognitive trust is a stronger predictor of anticipation towards future interactions with a bank than affective trust. Uncertainty and commitment had insignificant relationships with affective trust. Cognitive trust had a positive relationship with commitment, while affective trust had no significant relationship with commitment. Managerial implications and future research of the findings are discussed.

The main purpose of this paper is to study the vehicle routing problem with hard time windows where the main challenges is to include both sources of uncertainties, namely the travel and the service time that can arise due to multiple causes. We propose a new approach for the robust problem based on the implementation of an adaptive large neighborhood search algorithm and the use of efficient mechanisms to derive the best robust solution that responds to all uncertainties with reduced running times. The computational experiments are performed and improve the objective function of a set of instances with different levels of the uncertainty polytope to obtain the best robust solutions that protect from the violation of time windows for different scenarios.

This study investigated the impact of supply chain ambidexterity on supply chain performance (SCP) under uncertainties. The dynamic capability theory of firms was adopted in the supply chain to design a research framework that recommends a supply chain strategy under uncertainties pertaining to inter-island logistics in Indonesia. This study involved the survey of 140 large-scale companies delivering products across the Indonesian islands to identify the supply chain uncertainties by analyzing data using SmartPLS. The supply chain ambidexterity (SAM) was identified to exhibit no direct correlation with SCP; however, agile supply chain (ASC) and lean supply chain (LSC) could indirectly relate the SAM and SCP. For supply chain professionals, the results indicated that SCP cannot be achieved solely through SAM, thereby necessitating the development of LSCs and/or ASCs, driven from SAM, to achieve SCP. Thus, this study empirically confirmed ASC and LSC to be effective practices for mitigating supply chain uncertainties by mediating supply chain ambidexterity on SCP.

This work is devoted to the study of the Uncertain Quay Crane Scheduling Problem (QCSP), where the loading /unloading times of containers and travel time of quay cranes are considered uncertain. The problem is solved with a Simulation Optimization approach which takes advantage of the great possibilities offered by the simulation to model the real details of the problem and the capacity of the optimization to find solutions with good quality. An Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) meta-heuristic hybridized with a Variable Neighborhood Descent (VND) local search is proposed to determine the assignments of tasks to quay cranes and the sequences of executions of tasks on each crane. Simulation is used inside the optimization algorithm to generate scenarios in agreement with the probabilities of the distributions of the uncertain parameters, thus, we carry out stochastic evaluations of the solutions found by each ant. The proposed optimization algorithm is tested first for the deterministic case on several well-known benchmark instances. Then, in the stochastic case, since no other work studied exactly the same problem with the same assumptions, the Simulation Optimization approach is compared with the deterministic version. The experimental results show that the optimization algorithm is competitive as compared to the existing methods and that the solutions found by the Simulation Optimization approach are more robust than those found by the optimization algorithm.

Designing a production process normally is involved with some important constraints such as uncertainty, trade-off between production costs and quality, customer’s expectations and production tolerances. In this paper, a novel multi-objective robust optimization model is introduced to investigate the best levels of design variables. The primary objective is to minimize the production cost while increasing robustness and performance. The response surface methodology is utilized as a common approximation model to fit the relationship between responses and design variables in the worst-case scenario of uncertainties. The target mean ratio α is applied to ensure the quality of the process by providing the robustness for all types of quality characteristics and with a trade-off between variability and deviance from the ideal point. The Lp metric method is used to integrate all objectives in one overall function. In order to estimate target value of the quality loss by considering production tolerances, the process capability ratio (Cpm) is applied. At the end, a numerical chemical mixture problem is served to show the applicability of the proposed method.

Nowadays, process optimization has been an interest in engineering design for improving the performance and reducing cost. In practice, in addition to uncertainty or noise parameters, a comprehensive optimization model must be able to attend other circumstances which might be imposed in problems under real operational conditions such as dynamic objectives, multi-responses, various probabilistic distribution, discrete and continuous data, physical constraints to design parameters, performance cost, computational complexity and multi-process environment. The main goal of this paper is to give a general overview on topics with brief systematic review and concise discussions about the recent development on comprehensive robust design optimization methods under hybrid aforesaid circumstances. Both optimization methods of mathematical programming based on Taguchi approach and robust optimization based on scenario sets are briefly described. Metamodels hybrid robust design is discussed as an appropriate methodology to decrease computational complexity in problems under uncertainty. In this context, the authors’ policy is to choose important topics for giving a systematic picture to those who wish to be more familiar with recent studies about robust design optimization hybrid metamodels, also by attending real circumstances in practice. In particular, production and project management are considered as two important methodologies that could be improved by applications of advanced robust design combining with metamodel methods.

The geographical constrain of small islands associated with fisheries commodities, is due to the lack of insufficient infrastructure and socio-economy characteristics, in addition to the nature of fisheries commodities where the durability and inconsistency of quality and quantity of the particular region become very vulnerable to uncertainty of supply chain. This study aims to formulate a strategy to mitigate the existing effect of uncertainty supply chain in Southeast Maluku Regency. The data mining approach with naïve bayes was used to determine the clusters of areas with high to low interdependency in villages and sub-districts. In addition, the House of Risk (HOR) was used to identify the cause of risks and provided the most effective and efficient alternative strategy to mitigate the uncertainty of the fisheries' supply chain sector. Data were collected from 28 villages to obtain 322 datasets by using the purposive sampling technique and expert assessment method for the data mining process, and HOR, respectively. The result show that the village location, resources, and fishermen's ability to sell and buy their gear were the main determinant factors of interdependency. Furthermore, there were, at least, three clusters of interdependencies with the integration of a web-based system to help spread information to fishermen and aquaculture farmers. In conclusion, policymakers need to be more adaptable to the use of information technology to efficiently improve the welfare and performance of coastal communities, aside from constantly enhancing the region's infrastructure.

The uncertainty in the supply chains (SCs) for manufacturing and services firms is going to be, over the coming decades, more important for the companies that are called to compete in a new globalized economy. Risky situations for manufacturing are considered in trying to individuate the optimal positioning of the order penetration point (OPP). It aims at defining the best level of information of the client’s order going back through the several supply chain (SC) phases, i.e. engineering, procurement, production and distribution. This work aims at defining a system dynamics model to assess competitiveness coming from the positioning of the order in different SC locations. A Taguchi analysis has been implemented to create a decision map for identifying possible strategic decisions under different scenarios and with alternatives for order location in the SC levels. Centralized and decentralized strategies for SC integration are discussed. In the model proposed, the location of OPP is influenced by the demand variation, production time, stock-outs and stock amount. Results of this research are as follows: (i) customer-oriented strategies are preferable under high volatility of demand, (ii) production-focused strategies are suggested when the probability of stock-outs is high, (iii) no specific location is preferable if a centralized control architecture is implemented, (iv) centralization requires cooperation among partners to achieve the SC optimum point, (v) the producer must not prefer the OPP location at the Retailer level when the general strategy is focused on a decentralized approach.

Airport Collaborative Decision Making (ACDM) flight scheduling plans rely on accurate predictions of both optimal and reliable aircraft turnaround times, which is one of the most difficult things to complete. In order to account for the effects of randomness and fuzziness on the turnaround process duration, this paper deals with transforming the probability distribution of well-fitted sub-processes into a cumulative density function, which is equivalent to the fuzzy membership function (FMF), and then using goodness-of-fit to determine the fuzzy membership grade of each turnaround sub-process. The turnaround time is calculated using the fuzzy critical path method (FCPM), which is a combination of the Critical Path Method (CPM) and fuzzy set theory. In order to verify this estimate, we created the FMF using historical data and compared it to turnaround times based on FCPM. A linear regression model is used to examine the relationship between arrival delays and the FCPM-based turnaround process. We also use historical data to generate fuzzy sets of different arrival delays using Frankfurt airport data from the summer of 2017 and conclude that delays are positively correlated with the FCPM-based turnaround process.