Showing papers by "J. Michael Harrison published in 2002"

Stochastic Networks and Activity Analysis

Abstract: For a vast array of business processes, with functions ranging from production and distribution to customer service and product development, managers strive to create coherent system behavior through intelligent design and control. An ideal theory of stochastic networks would describe the potential for such coherence and characterize the control strategies that achieve it. Given the broad spectrum of potential applications to be addressed in the theory, what is its proper mathematical setting? The general notion of a stochastic processing network, developed in earlier work and discussed more completely here, is attractive in that regard. It extends in a natural way the general linear model of an operating enterprise that was developed about fifty years ago by mathematicians and economists working in the area that T. C. Koopmans called “activity analysis.”