This paper considers the design and analysis of algorithms for vehicle routing and scheduling problems with time window constraints. Given the intrinsic difficulty of this problem class, approximation methods seem to offer the most promise for practical size problems. After describing a variety of heuristics, we conduct an extensive computational study of their performance. The problem set includes routing and scheduling environments that differ in terms of the type of data used to generate the problems, the percentage of customers with time windows, their tightness and positioning, and the scheduling horizon. We found that several heuristics performed well in different problem environments; in particular an insertion-type heuristic consistently gave very good results.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/170697.pdf

Algorithms for the vehicle routing and scheduling problems with time window constraints

Estimation and inference in two-stage, semi-parametric models of production processes

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) - Thirty years on

Efficiency decomposition in two-stage data envelopment analysis: an application to non-life insurance companies in taiwan

https://www.grips.ac.jp/r-center/wp-content/uploads/07-08.pdf

Network DEA: A slacks-based measure approach

Governments at all levels face budget shortfalls, and consequently public transit systems in the U.S. must compete with other public services for financial support. In order to depend less on public funding, it is critical that public transit systems focus on their operational performance and identify any sources of inefficiency. In this chapter, we present an unoriented network DEA methodology that measures a public transit system’s performance relative to its peer systems, compares its performance to an appropriate efficient benchmark system, and identifies the sources of its inefficiency.

Measuring and Managing the Productivity of U.S. Public Transit Systems: An Unoriented Network DEA

This chapter introduces linguistic delivery style to auditing research, demonstrates how linguistic delivery style relates to client credibility, and shows how linguistic delivery style and client credibility influences auditors’ judgment. Two hundred auditors participated in an analytical procedures task. The results indicate that high client credibility and powerful linguistic delivery style increase the auditor's assessed likelihood that the explanation accounts for the fluctuation and decrease their intent to perform additional testing. Moreover, powerless linguistic delivery style from an otherwise high credibility client leads to auditor judgments and intentions that are indistinguishable from those that arise from a low credibility client. Finally, evidence indicates that linguistic delivery style is a fourth component of credibility.

Linguistic Delivery Style, Client Credibility, and Auditor Judgment

On the tour partitioning heuristic for the unit demand capacitated vehicle routing problem

We develop a new DEA model that measures organizational efficiency in the presence of head-to-head competition. Our model differs from existing DEA models that ignore competition (or any other form of interaction) among the organizations under analysis. The model assumes that organizations deploy inputs for the explicit purpose of increasing its own outputs while reducing the outputs of its competitors. We apply this model to the 2002, 2004, and 2006 political campaigns in New York State for the US. House of Representatives in which candidates spent money to increase the number of votes that they received and decrease the number of votes that their opponents received. We show that campaign inefficiency can alter the outcome of an election. Specifically, a loser would have won in six of the 57 races had he or she been efficient. We also show that incumbents are more likely to spend inefficiently than are challengers. Overall, inefficiency accounts for less than 5% of campaign funding but a loss of about 9% in votes received. We find evidence that campaign efficiency has increased since the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, known widely as the McCain-Feingold Act.

Measuring efficiency in the presence of head-to-head competition

Conflicts among nations can often be understood as games in which players (nations) possessing strategies (the sets of actions they may take) face alternative consequences (loss or gain of territory or prestige) determined by their choices of action. Amenable to this type of analysis is the recent Falkland Islands crisis involving Argentina and Great Britain. The events in this case provide an illustration of the way “three-stage, two-person sequential game tree models” can explain the outcome of a crisis situation, whether the parties involved possess perfect information regarding the likely actions of their opponents or are subject to misperceptions about them. When misperceptions occur, the effects can be severely detrimental to both players. Under certain conditions a single misperception by a player of an opponent's preferences can lead to conflict even though both players would have preferred another outcome, one that would in fact have resulted if the error in perception had not occurred. Thus, the outcome of such a “game” is highly sensitive not only to the players' actual preferences but to mutual perceptions of those preferences.

Thomas R. Sexton

Papers

Measuring and Managing the Productivity of U.S. Public Transit Systems: An Unoriented Network DEA

Linguistic Delivery Style, Client Credibility, and Auditor Judgment

On the tour partitioning heuristic for the unit demand capacitated vehicle routing problem

Measuring efficiency in the presence of head-to-head competition

Game tree analysis of international crises