Graphs, charts, business table

Investment in Production Resource Flexibility: An Empirical Investigation of Methods for Planning under Uncertainty

Bill Tarantino Decision Analysis, Decision Support, Resource Planning

We examine several methods for evaluating resource acquisition decisions under uncertainty. Traditional methods may underestimate equipment benefit when part of this benefit comes from decision flexibility. We develop a new, practical method for resource planning under uncertainty, and show that this approach is more accurate than several commonly used methods. We successfully applied our approach to an investment problem faced …

Airplane view from the front cockpit fuselage

Improving Performance and Flexibility at Jeppesen: The World’s Leading Aviation-Information Company

Bill Tarantino Decision Support, Operations Research, Optimization

Jeppesen Sanderson, Inc. maintains, manufactures, and distributes flight manuals containing safety information for over 300,000 pilots and 400 airlines worldwide. Its service deteriorated when a growing line of over 100,000 aviation charts overwhelmed its production system. We developed optimization-based decision support tools that improved production planning. Concurrently, we developed a method for evaluating investments in production technology. Our work reduced …

Warehouse storage

Jeppesen Uses a Dynamic-Programming-Based DSS to Manage Inventory

Bill Tarantino Decision Support, Inventory Management

We developed a system for managing inventory at Jeppesen Sanderson, Inc., a major provider of aviation-information products. The system determines order quantities for charts used in flight manuals. These charts contain essential safety information that changes frequently, making standard methods for inventory management ineffective. We formulated the problem as a dynamic programming model and developed a simple heuristic-solution procedure for …