Systems Research and Behavioral Science

Syst. Res. 30, 300–353 (2013)

Published online 18 April 2013 in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/sres.2185

■ Research Paper

Operations Research (OR) in Service

Industries: A Comprehensive Review
Yiting Xing1, Ling Li2, Zhuming Bi3, Marzena Wilamowska-Korsak4 and
Li Zhang5*
1
School of Economics and Management, Chang’an University, Xi’an, China
2
Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA
3
Department of Engineering, Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne, Fort Wayne, IN, USA
4
Safety Engineering Department, College of Engineering, Warmia and Mazury University at Olsztyn,
Olsztyn, Poland
5
School of Economics and Management, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China

The share of gross domestic product from the service industry reflects the competitiveness
of a nation; the service industry in the USA accounts for around 80% of its gross domestic
product, and it has been increasing gradually. Continual innovations and advances in en-
abling technologies for the service industry are crucial for developed countries to sustain
their leading positions in the globalized economy. To clarify future research directions of
operations research (OR) in the service industry, the state of art of OR has been examined
systematically, the new requirements of OR are identified for its applications in service
industries in comparison with those in manufacturing industries, and the limitations of
existing methodologies and tools have been discussed. This paper was intended to
provide an updated review on how OR has been applied in the service sector in recent
years and what directions the study of OR will be carried forward in the near future.
Under a proposed research framework, recent OR-related articles were collected from
17 leading OR journals and classified into the five most active sectors, that is, transporta-
tion and warehousing, information and communication, human health and social assis-
tance, retails and wholesales, and financial and insurance services. The conclusions on
the limitations of existing studies and the demanding ORs in the service have been drawn
from our summaries and observations from a comprehensive review in this field.
Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords literature review; operations research (OR); service industries; systems science;
systems research

* Correspondence to: Li Zhang, School of Economics and Management,

Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China.
E-mail: lzhang@bjtu.edu.cn

Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Syst. Res.
INTRODUCTION
Operations research (OR) is an applied science,
defined by its founders as ‘a scientific method of
providing executive departments with a quantita-
tive basis for decisions regarding the operations
under their control’ (Little, 1991), regardless of
methodologies. From this point of view, the living
basis of OR is to solve real problems; however, a
discussion without the context of where OR is
applied is pointless.
Its application history has clearly shown that OR
is so related to social and economic development.
It is well known that the concept of OR was
conceived early in World War II because people
found that the operational aspects fell far short of
the requirements even though the technical factors
were good enough (CONDOR, 1988). After the
war, when the world was all busy in rebuilding
new life, OR quickly found its way from military
use to civilian use (Machol, 1971; Little, 1991;
Kirby, 2000). Because many new technologies were
rapidly applied to all industries to improve pro-
ductivity, researchers and practitioners were faced
with challenges similar to those during World War
II. Therefore, accumulated OR theories and meth-
odologies during the war have naturally been
brought into and developed within the industry.
In light of its considerable proportion in the whole
economy, OR primarily had its early diffusion
and a great deal of success in manufacturing
(CONDOR, 1988).
Since 1990s, the modern economy has been
experiencing a structural change, and the service in-
dustry has gradually become its core (Sirilli, 1998).
In recent years, the service sector has become the
largest part of today’s economy in most developed
countries. According to the US Department of
Labor, approximately 83% of employment in 2006
was involved with the service industry, whereas
manufacturing only accounted for about 10%
(Chase and Apte, 2007). In developing countries,
the service industry is also growing at a phenome-
nal speed. As an example, China’s service sector
took 29.5% of the total employment in 2004
whereas it was only 13% in the 1980s. This fol-
lows an economic developing route where the
core of the economy shifts from agriculture to
manufacturing and then to service, in which the
Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Operations Research in Service Industries
RESEARCH PAPER
first shift is well known as ‘industrialization’ with
manufacturing as the core and the second shift is
now referred to as ‘tertiarization’ with service as
the core.
As the service industry plays a much more
important role in the global economy nowadays,
it is natural for us to consider if this industry
has achieved favourable productivity and, if
not, whether OR—the traditional productivity
promoter—can help propose more effective solu-
tions just like it has done for manufacturing. In this
paper, we are motivated to provide a comprehen-
sive perspective of how OR has been applied in
the context of the service industry in recent years
and to call for more attention from OR researchers
on this field. In addition, by nature, the service sys-
tem is complex. Thus, the following questions
arise: does OR help solve all the real-world prob-
lems in the service sector, and would systems
methodology (Jackson, 1995) be a valuable method
to problem solving in the service sector in addition
to OR? We hope that this paper will acquaint our
readers with the research topics in the service
sector while, more importantly, simulating a more
systematic approach to problem solving in the
service industry (Xu, 2014).
BACKGROUND
As many researchers have noted, although the
industrial economy has rapidly shifted from a
manufacturing orientation to a service orientation,
no corresponding situation has been found in its
research field. However, OR has long been applied
to service industries. We can trace back its applica-
tion to the 1960s, when a great deal of important
works tried to help with airport operations in
Britain (Little, 1991). Many airline firms tried to
optimize the allocation of their flight crews with
integer programming (Arabeyre et al., 1969). From
the 1960s to 1970s, OR professionals doing finan-
cial planning started to have substantial positions
in banks (Tomlinson, 1974). For the next 30 years,
especially with the development of computing
technologies, OR has grown rapidly and pene-
trated a variety of service sectors such as health
care, telecommunications and public services
(Kirby, 2000; Hillier and Lieberman, 2005).
Syst. Res. 30, 300–353 (2013)
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301
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Certainly, manufacturing operations and service
operations have several aspects in common, for
example, project planning and scheduling (Zhang
et al., 2011; Tao et al., 2012, 2013; Xu et al., 2012b,
2013; Yin et al., 2012a, 2012b; Yu et al., 2013). It
means that some models and/or theories, which
have been developed for manufacturing OR, can
be directly applied to the service contexts with no
or only little change. However, things are not that
optimistic. There are much more differences
between manufacturing and service, which are
both a challenge and an opportunity.
To compare the manufacturing and service
industries, we can see them as two similar
processes that utilize all kinds of resources to pro-
duce tangible products or intangible services for
customers. Obviously, there are hundreds of activ-
ities involved in these processes. The differences of
ORs in these two types of businesses are associated
with the different characteristics of these activities.
According to the process in Figure 1, there are
primarily three differences between the manu-
facturing and service contexts, which are critical
for application of OR methodologies. Firstly, the
resources for service industries have inconstant
features. In manufacturing, the number of resources
(which are typically machines and tools) is usually
fixed, and the composition of the machines (parallel
or in series) is usually set up (at least for a short
term), whereas in service, not only is the number
variable, but the resources required will also vary
even for the same activity. Secondly, the production
process in service industries is immediate. In
manufacturing, there is a substantial production
process from raw materials to work in process
and to finished products, and then the finished
products are delivered to the customers. But in
service industries, the service is produced at the
same time it is delivered. So the relationships are
more complicated in service industries. Many
models may have to interact with one another to
Resources Processing
Figure 1 Activity processes of manufacturing industries and service industries
Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
302
Syst. Res.
achieve the research objectives (typically multi-
objectives). Thirdly, in manufacturing, products
have limited categories for logistics, whereas in ser-
vice industries, services are intangible and have dif-
ferent natures. Because a service can be of
thousands of forms, the delivering process or the in-
terfaces with the customers are varied dramatically
in terms of the service features.
From the preceding discussion, one can see
that the operational characteristics in the service
context are more diverse and complex than those
in manufacturing. Thus, it gives researchers a
broader and more challenging field to explore.
In recent years, more researches have appeared
in the literature in this field. Therefore, it is our
intention in this paper to make an exploratory
effort to obtain an overview of the latest develop-
ment in OR applications in service industries by
reviewing the recent literature.
The remainder of this paper is organized as
follows. In Section 3, a framework to review the
literature is established. In Section 4, the recent
developments of OR in different service industries
are classified and analysed. In Section 5, the state
of the art of OR and our literature review are
summarized and concluded.
THE FRAMEWORK OF THE SURVEY
Paper Collection
To get the latest and representative status of
OR applications in service industries, we mainly
collected the articles published in the recent 5 to
6 years in 17 top OR journals, namely, Operations
Research, Management Science, Annals of Operations
Research, Mathematical Programming, Mathematics
of Operations Research, Manufacturing & Service
Operations Management, Naval Research Logistics,
IIE Transactions, Transportation Science, Operations
Products
or
Service Customers
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Yiting Xing et al.
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Research Letters, European Journal of Operational
Research, Production and Operations Management,
Computers & Operations Research, Journal of
Operations Management, Journal of the Operational
Research Society, Decision Sciences, and Omega.
These journals largely serve the OR community
and contain a large portion of high-quality
researches with OR theories or methodologies.
We searched and collected papers through a
two-stage process. In the first stage, we used ‘ser-
vice’ as the keyword to do a ‘full-text’ search
within a database constrained within these
journals and period (e.g. since 2004), and retrieved
all related papers as the paper pool. In the second
stage, we identified, from the pool, research papers
that really address decision-making problems in
service industries with OR theories or methodolo-
gies. We finally obtained 642 papers. Table 1 dem-
onstrates the results sorted by journals.
concerned about how OR theories and methodol-
ogies are applied in service industries, it would
be reasonable to classify the papers by their
application areas, that is, subsectors in service,
so as to get a better understanding.
According to the classification of the US Bureau
of the Census (2007) and the United Nations
(Statistic Division, 2008), there are 11 subsectors
of service industries. Table 2 shows the papers we
classified in Table 1 in relation to the 11 subsectors.
It shows that the five subsectors with the most
active OR researches are transportation and
warehousing, information and communication,
human health and social assistance, retails and
wholesales, and financial and insurance services
in a descending order. Papers classified within
these five sectors account for more than 80% of
the total papers. Thus, to get a better and deeper
understanding, in the next section, we will discuss
in detail OR applications in these five subsectors.

Paper Classification
The service industry is a rather big family with its
members owning very different natures and
characteristics, so researchers have found it diffi-
cult to give it a unified definition. Because we are
Analysis Framework
From the selected papers, we will make a
comprehensive analysis in Section 4. Within each
service subsector, three aspects of an OR study to

Table 1 Operations research applications in service industries published in 17 top operations research journals since 2004
Total papers Papers in service
Journals published (2004-) industries Service/OR %

Manufacturing & Service 158 37 23.417722

Operations Management
Transportation Science 202 36 17.821782
Operations Research 445 44 9.8876404
Annals of Operations Research 813 59 7.2570726
Naval Research Logistics 349 25 7.1633238
Computers & Operations Research 1258 85 6.7567568
Production & Operations Management 364 24 6.5934066
Omega 446 25 5.6053812
Decision Sciences 171 9 5.2631579
IIE Transactions 518 26 5.019305
Management Science 769 38 4.9414824
European Journal of Operational Research 3739 160 4.279219
Journal of the Operational Research Society 1019 32 3.1403337
Journal of Operations Management 313 2 0.6389776
Operations Research Letters 598 3 0.5016722
Mathematics of Operations Research 272 1 0.3676471
Mathematical Programming 483 1 0.2070393
Total 11 917 607 5.0935638

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Table 2 Number of articles related to 11 subsectors of service industries

Subservice sectors Number of papers % Accumulated %

Transportation and warehousing 168 27.67710049 27.67710049

Information and communication 142 23.3937397 51.0708402
Human health and social assistance 93 15.32125206 66.3920923
Retails and wholesales 60 9.884678748 76.276771
Financial and insurance services 37 6.095551895 82.3723229
Arts, entertainment and recreation services 13 2.141680395 84.5140033
Rental and leasing services 11 1.812191104 86.3261944
Administrative and support service activities 10 1.647446458 87.9736409
Accommodation and food services 4 0.658978583 88.6326194
Professional, scientific and technical services 3 0.494233937 89.1268534
Other services 15 2.471169687 91.5980231
General topics 51 8.401976936 100.0000000

be discussed are research topics, OR models, and
research methods and techniques. Here, the analysis
framework as shown in Figure 2 is introduced on
the basis of the general OR work process; we
used this analysis framework to obtain an in-
depth understanding of the characteristics of
OR work in service industries.
Operations research is a science facilitating
decision-making in operational activities. There-
fore, every study starts from a real-life opera-
tional decision, which is called a research topic in
this paper. As shown in Figure 2, given a to-be-
solved problem, there is a general sequence of
steps to be followed in an OR study, namely,
problem analysis (including data collection), model-
ling, model resolving, and verification. In addition,
the effectiveness of the model should be investi-
gated in practice. In step 1, necessary materials
and information are collected for modelling. In
step 2, real problems are abstracted to models,
such as linear programming models or queuing
models. This step is critical to the success of the
solutions. In step 3, the solutions to the defined
problems are obtained via a variety of methods
or techniques. Thus, the same problem may be
formulated into different models and, further-
more, to get solutions of different levels through
different methods.
In this paper, we focus on the application
aspects of OR studies in service industries. It is
the basic objective of this survey to show what
kinds of topics have been investigated through

Problems to be solved
for decision makers

Topics Step 1: Problems analysis

Problems with
Constraints and
Analysis
Models Step 2: Modeling
Framework

Models

Step 3: Model Resolving

Methods

Optimal Solutions

Step 4: Verification

Figure 2 General steps of an operations research study

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304 Yiting Xing et al.

Syst. Res.
OR studies in recent years and to what extent OR
methodologies have helped various fields in
service industries. To achieve this objective, in
the next section, we will organize the discussions
according to the research topics. Furthermore, we
will examine how different problems have been
modelled and solved, especially when there are
different researches addressing the same topics.
Thus, we could have a comprehensive under-
standing of the characteristics of the develop-
ment in this field.
OPERATIONS RESEARCH APPLICATIONS IN
DIFFERENT SERVICE INDUSTRIES
Information and Communication Industry
With the marvellous development of information
processing capacity and the worldwide spread
of the Internet, such expressions as ‘information
age’ and ‘information economy’ have been
familiar to almost everyone. All kinds of
information-related industries have emerged
rapidly, such as Internet service providers (ISPs)
and data-processing industries. From 1997 to
2006, this industry experienced a 17% net
employment growth and now employs 2.7 million
Americans, and it is growing faster than the
overall US economy at a rate of 10%
(Brynko, 2008).
This industry has also attracted a lot of OR
researchers. According to our survey, around 30%
of the selected papers are concerned about issues
within this subsector. In the following, we will
analyse how OR has been applied in terms of
topics, models, and methods.
Because it is a rather big sector, we would like to
discuss the OR applications within more specific
classifications. According to the US Census Bureau
Table 3 More specific classification in service industries
Information product
producing
Number of 16
papers
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Operations Research in Service Industries
RESEARCH PAPER
(2007), the information and communication indus-
try sector comprises establishments engaged in the
following processes: (i) producing and distributing
information and cultural products; (ii) providing
the means to transmit or distribute these products
as well as data or communications; and (iii) pro-
cessing data. The results of classification are shown
in Table 3. It appears that the largest proportion of
work is on information transmitting and communica-
tion industries, although the other two categories
are covered as well.
Research in Information Product-Producing
Industries
Information product-producing industries are those
involved in the process of information goods de-
signing, producing, selling, and so on. Here, the
discussed papers are concerned with operational
decisions of the industries within this category.
Barreto et al. (2008) presented an optimization-
based approach to staffing the software develop-
ment project. Fan et al. (2009) used a game
theoretical approach to examine short-term and
long-term competition between software as a
service and shrink-wrap software providers on
an equilibrium price. Huang et al. (2008) applied
the grey relational analysis method in building a
formal software development effort estimation
model. Alan (2006) provided a sequential Bayesian
generalization of the Jelinski–Moranda model to
track and estimate software reliability. The models
by Bhaskar and Kumar (2006) were developed to
optimize software release time with the assump-
tion that the debugging process was imperfect
and that there was a penalty for late release of the
software. Haruvy et al. (2008) examined the
optimal control decisions regarding pricing,
network size, and hiring strategy in the context of
open-source software development.
Processes
Information transmitting Data
and communication processing Total
123 3 142
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Two articles have been found on studying
the versioning policies (including number of
versions and price of each version) for the
maximization of profit. However, Bhargava and
Choudhary (2008) modelled the profit formula-
tion with customer types in the constraints and
derived a simple rule to decide when versioning
can bring in the largest profit. In another
research, Wu and Chen (2008) included piracy
cost in their optimal constraints; through a sim-
ple model and a general model, they illustrated
the relationships between versioning and piracy.
Another type of study concerned the operations
in software vulnerability management, and it had
a completely different perspective. Arora et al.
(2008) formulated a two-stage model involving a
social planner who pursues the vulnerability
disclosure policy at the first stage and a vendor
who pursues its cost minimization based on the
disclosure policy at the second stage. Cavusoglu
et al. (2008) considered a game theoretic model of
the strategic interaction between a software ven-
dor and a firm that used the software. Their objec-
tives were to minimize the respective costs by
choosing the patch-release policy or patch-update
policy. On the basis of this model, the authors
analysed different scenarios and examined the
effects of the two policies.
Other studies were about the solutions to
bundle pricing of information goods. Hitt and
Chen (2005) and Wu et al. (2008) used a non-
linear mixed-integer programming to decide on
the optimal customized bundling and pricing to
maximize the sellers’ profit. Geng et al. (2005) pro-
vided guidelines to optimal bundling strategies for
information goods with decreased value. Khouja
and Smith (2007) considered the case of informa-
tion products that could be copied perfectly and
distributed at little or no cost and examined the
best pricing strategy over time to maximize profit.
Research in Information Transmitting and
Communication Industries
Information is transmitted through different chan-
nels, such as radio broadcasting, TV broadcasting,
wired network, wireless network, and satellite
network. Accordingly, information transmitting and
communication industries can be categorized into
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306
Syst. Res.
the following services: TV or radio broadcasting,
wired telecommunications, and wireless telecommuni-
cations. Because ITs are the critical infrastructure
that supports these service activities, many opera-
tions in these industries are often executed through
ITs as opposed to business operations (Xu, 2011).
So researches in these industries can be divided
into two groups, that is, business operational prob-
lems and IT operational problems, respectively.
Table 4 shows the research topics organized by cat-
egories and groups.
Broadcasting Industries. Bollapragada and
Garbiras (2004) investigated the scheduling of
automated commercials on TV to fulfil multiple
requirements; an integer program model was
developed for the situation where the penalty
cost was used as the objective function to be
minimized, and a heuristic algorithm was used
to obtain near-optimal scheduling solutions.
Bollapragada and Mallik (2008) presented a
model to provide an optimal allocation of rating
point between two advertisement markets.
Mannino (2006) studied the resource alloca-
tions among several analogue and digital broad-
casting networks to maximize the total coverage
revenue of all the networks. Frequencies and
emission powers of transmitters of all networks
were decided. Because the problem has been
proven as an NP-hard problem, the authors uti-
lized a two-stage heuristic algorithm.
Wireless Telecommunications. In recent years,
various wireless applications have been widely
used (Li et al., 2012). Therefore, more researches
are attracted by OR problems in this field.
Addressed technical problems cover the pro-
cesses from network set-ups to daily operations.
In this section, the works in wireless telecommu-
nications are classified into business OR and
technical OR. The works in technical OR are
further decomposed into more detailed aspects.
For the works in business OR, Kim and Hwang
(2009) developed a mathematical model to find
discount policies with the maximized average
expected revenues for cell phone carriers while
satisfying a prescribed connection success rate.
Olinick and Rosenberger (2008) presented a
stochastic revenue optimization model for the
code-division multiple-access networks and
developed a super-gradient algorithm to solve
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Table 4 Research topics in information transmitting and communication industries

Categories Detailed information

Broadcasting
OR in Business Commercial scheduling on TV broadcasting (Bollapragada and
Garbiras,
2004; Bollapragada and Mallik, 2008)
OR in IT Network packing problem in territorial broadcasting (Mannino, 2006)
Wireless telecommunication
OR in business Pricing (Olinick and Rosenberger, 2008; Rouskas et al., 2008; Yaiparoj
et al., 2008;
Kim and Hwang, 2009)
Timing (Gavish and Kalvenes, 2004)
OR in IT Frequency assignment (Akella et al., 2005; Aardal et al., 2007; Han, 2007;
Kim et al., 2007; Akella et al., 2008; Milas et al., 2008; Touhami et al., 2009)
Base station location and configuration (Chamberland, 2004; Akella
et al., 2005; Bollapragada et al., 2005; Amaldi et al., 2006; d’Halluin
et al., 2007; Paik and Soni, 2007; Rosenberger and Olinick, 2007;
Siomina et al., 2007; Zhang et al., 2007a, 2007b; Akella et al., 2008;
Touhami et al., 2009)
Other network design problems (Jeske and Sampath, 2004; Yang and
Wen, 2005; Vroblefski and Brown, 2006; Siomina et al., 2007; Wu, 2007;
Amiri, 2009)
Resource allocation to users (Lee et al., 2004a, 2004b; Dahl and
Foldnes, 2006; Abrardo et al., 2009; Borst et al., 2009; Mäder and
Staehle, 2009)
Network operation scheme (Jain and Rakhee, 2005; Jeong et al., 2005;
Choi et al., 2008; Machihara and Saitoh, 2008; Papadaki and
Friderikos, 2008; Song and Jamalipour, 2008;
Artalejo and López-Herrero, 2010)
Transmit power (Ata, 2005; Heikkinen an Prekopa, 2005)
Packet scheduling (Shyu et al., 2006; Ciaschetti et al., 2007; Mandal et al.,
2007; Portilla-Figueras et al., 2008)
Wired telecommunication
OR in business Multihoming architecture of Internet service providers (Levy et al.,
2006)
Cooperation between backbone providers (Yong et al., 2006)
Pricing service (Bapna et al., 2005; Anderson et al., 2006; Audestad et al.,
2006; Cancela et al., 2008; Guan et al., 2008; Hosanagar et al., 2008;
Jaisingh et al., 2008)
Revenue management (Oul et al., 2006)
Ads scheduling (Kumar et al., 2006; Lim and Tang, 2006; Feng et al.,
2007; Kumar and Sethi, 2009)
Call centres outsourcing contracts (Yong et al., 2006; Aksin et al., 2008;
Hasija et al., 2008; Ren and Zhou, 2008)
Call centre routing system (Armony and Maglaras, 2004a, 2004b; de
Véricourt and Zhou, 2005; Byers and So, 2007; Gans and Zhou, 2007;
Sisselman and Whitt, 2007; Bassamboo et al., 2009)
Call centre staffing (Armony and Maglaras, 2004a, 2004b; Atlason et al.,
2004; Borst et al., 2004; Harrison and Zeevi, 2005; Wallace and Whitt,
2005; Whitt, 2006a, 2006b; Deslauriers et al., 2007; Atlason et al., 2008;
Bhandari et al., 2008; Bhulai et al., 2008; Cezik and L’Ecuyer, 2008;
Chevalier and Van den Schrieck, 2008; Feldman et al., 2008; Gurvich
et al., 2008; Pot et al., 2008; van Dijk and van der Sluis, 2008;
Bassamboo et al., 2009; Avramidis et al., 2010)
(Continues)

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Table 4 (Continued)
Categories Detailed information

Call centre model analysis design (Artalejo et al., 2007; Kawanishi, 2008;
Shen and Huang, 2008; Ibrahim and Whitt, 2009)
OR in IT Long-distance telephone companies access network (Berger and
Raghavan, 2004)
Internet network design(Chamberland, 2005; Deb et al., 2005; Heyman,
2005; Li et al., 2005; Ye et al., 2005; Borne et al., 2006; Bektas et al., 2008;
Cabral et al., 2008; Cancela et al., 2008)
Specific Internet service mechanism design (Bektas et al., 2007; Kalvenes
and Keon, 2007; Kim et al., 2008; Steyaert et al., 2008)
Telecommunication in general
OR in business Manpower planning (Voudouris et al., 2006)
Service pricing(Zhang et al., 2008)
OR in IT Network design (Meli-an et al., 2004; Riis and Andersen, 2004;
Vroblefski et al., 2005; Smith, 2006; Chao et al., 2009)
Traffic control (Smith, 2004; Loudni et al., 2006; Bose, 2009)
Bandwidth allocation (Khouja and Kumar, 2005; Salles and Barria, 2008;
Tsesmetzis et al., 2008; Yao et al., 2008a; Zukerman et al., 2008)
OR, operations research.

it. Rouskas et al. (2008) investigated the admis-
sion control and pricing for a service provider
through a game model. Yaiparoj et al. (2008)
introduced a novel pricing model for general
packet radio service networks; their objectives
were to maximize the operators’ overall revenue
and potentially improve the performance of gen-
eral packet radio service networks. Gavish and
Kalvenes (2004) formulated the satellite launch
problem as a Markovian decision model, which
was solved by dynamic programming with the
consideration of cost containment.
The works related to technical OR are classified
and discussed in the following aspects:
• Frequency assignment is a traditional and
fundamental problem at the set-up stage in
wireless communication networks. In recent
years, many new models have been developed
because of the growing applications of wire-
less networks. Aardal et al. (2007) provided a
comprehensive overview on the models and
methods used for frequency assignment.
Han (2007) defined a frequency reassignment
problem when a telecommunication network
needed to be expanded and developed a novel
decomposition-based heuristic procedure to
solve large-scale problems. Kim et al. (2007)
devised a formulation for a minimum-span
frequency assignment problem and combined
the genetic algorithm with an analytical opti-
mization algorithm to solve the model. Milas
et al. (2008) studied the spectrum allocation of
the fixed satellite service with the consider-
ation of cochannel interference.
• Base station location and configuration is also a
traditional problem for the design of a wireless
network. Amaldi et al. (2006) used mixed-
integer programming models to locate and
configure base stations in Universal Mobile
Telecommunications System networks; their
objectives were to maximize coverage and
minimize installation costs. The authors pro-
posed a two-stage tabu search algorithm to find
good approximate solutions. For the planning
problem of a wideband code-division multiple-
access base station, Zhang et al. (2007a)
decomposed the global optimization problem
into a set of suboptimizations and used a new
rolling-window optimization method to solve
the problem. Chamberland (2004) studied the
expansion decision of the network when
updating the base station subsystem to mini-
mize the expansion cost; he applied the heuristic
based on the tabu search to obtain an optimized
solution. d’Halluin et al. (2007) discussed
adding new capacity in the presence of stochas-
tic wireless demand for services and developed

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308 Yiting Xing et al.

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a four-factor algorithm based on a real-options
formulation. Paik and Soni (2007) presented a
mathematical model and simulated an
annealing-based approach to find optimal loca-
tion updates and paging area configuration.
Zhang et al. (2007b) analysed an integer
programming model and its relaxations for up-
link with integer and non-linear constraints.
Rosenberger and Olinick (2007) described a
deterministic model and algorithm for the tower
location; he applied a stochastic model to assign
a customer market and optimize revenue given
a set of constructed towers. With the mathemat-
ical programming techniques, Siomina et al.
(2007) minimized the total amount of pilot
power. Bollapragada et al. (2005) studied a
two-phase, budget-constrained network plan-
ning problem with multiple hub types and
demand scenarios; they proposed a greedy
algorithm to maximize the expected demand.
Akella et al. (2005, 2008) investigated decision-
making regarding both the base station location
and channel allocation with consideration of
different situations such as emergency or
cochannel and channel interference require-
ments. Touhami et al. (2009) partially integrated
the antenna positioning problem and frequency
allocation problems to improve the interference
level and resource utilization.
• Survivability is an important factor to the costs
of wireless networks. Amiri (2009) tried to
integrate survivability of the network into the
backbone designs to minimize both the diame-
ter and the total length of the network. Yang
and Wen (2005) considered the survivability
problem by preplanning a delay-constrained
backup path for multicast networks to
minimize the cost of backup paths. Jeske and
Sampath (2004) developed new signal-to-
interference-plus-noise ratio estimators, which
is an important metric of wireless communica-
tion link quality. Wu (2007) investigated the
important infrastructure design and expansion
problem for broadband wireless access
networks subject to user demand constraints
and system capacity constraints; the problem
was modelled as an integer program and solved
by a heuristic algorithm. To minimize the
impact on the network’s bandwidth when
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Operations Research in Service Industries
RESEARCH PAPER
updating the mobiles’ locations, Vroblefski and
Brown (2006) developed a grouping genetic
algorithm to efficiently solve the planning
problem of registration areas.
• While the network is operating, resources (e.g.
base stations, power, or bandwidth) in the
network can be optimally allocated among
users within diverse transmission applications.
Dahl and Foldnes (2006) examined the
problem of allocating base stations to mobile
users applying for connections. They naturally
modelled it as a multiknapsack problem with
assignment restrictions and presented some
linear programming-based approximation algo-
rithms to discuss their usefulness. Borst et al.
(2009) examined the same problem restricted
to downlink but modelled it as an M/M/N
queuing system. Through the analysis of the
model, the authors discussed the potential
capacity obtained by different resource
allocation strategies. Mäder and Staehle (2009)
examined two service load allocation strategies
in a Universal Mobile Telecommunications
System uplink; they built the mathematic model
for the two strategies and evaluated their
performances such as dropping probabilities
and blocking probabilities. Abrardo et al. (2009)
addressed the radio resource (transmission
power) allocation problem in the downlink of a
multicellular orthogonal frequency-division
multiple-access system; they proposed an exact
approach based on a mixed-integer linear pro-
gram formulation and two heuristic algorithms
for the problem. Lee et al. (2004a, 2004b) and
investigated a fair bandwidth allocation while
minimizing the overhead in multicast networks;
they formulated it as a non-linear integer
programming and solved it by a proposed
dual-objective tabu search approach.
• Many operating schemes have been provided to
improve the efficiency of the network. Papadaki
and Friderikos (2008) addressed link scheduling
in a wireless mesh network by using the approx-
imate dynamic programming. Jeong et al. (2005)
proposed an efficient scheduling algorithm to
maximize system throughout while providing
a level of fairness among users for non-real-
time data traffic in the downlink of a multiuser
orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing
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system. To suggest a congestion control scheme
for a next-generation network-comprehensive
service, Choi et al. (2008) considered an
MMPP/G/1/K queue, which was able to con-
trol arrival rates according to the queue length.
Jain and Rakhee (2005) provided a subrating
channel assignment scheme for a cellular
radio network with directed retry to improve
the handoff performance of an ongoing call.
Artalejo and Lopez-Herrero (2010) provided a
novel model of a cellular network with matrix
analytic formalism while considering the
repeated dials in varying environments; the for-
malism could be used to measure the business
performance of the network. Machihara and
Saitoh (2008) studied the network performance
by investigating the effect of the customers’ dif-
ferent retrial behaviours. Song and Jamalipour
(2008) provided a novel scheme for the handoff
decision to enhance the quality of service and
maximize network revenue.
• Operations research can also assist in the
process of transmitting data packets. Some
researchers discussed the long-run energy cost
minimization through dynamic control of
transmission power subject to a quality-of-
service (QoS) constraint. Ata (2005) modelled
the transmitters as a finite-buffer Markovian
queue with adjustable service rates; he
developed an explicit solution to determine
transmission rates. Heikkinen and Prekopa
(2005) considered the transmit power alloca-
tion where both the useful and interference
coefficients were randomly based on a stochas-
tic programming formulation. Ciaschetti et al.
(2007) were concerned with the packet sched-
uling in a transmission frame for downlinks;
they applied a pseudo-polynomial algorithm
and a greedy heuristic technique to fulfil the
requirements of QoS of different traffic classes.
Portilla-Figueras et al. (2008) dealt with the
cell size determination problem subjected to
the given services and the constraints in the
mobile networks. To minimize the cost in
mobile communication services or personal
communication services, Shyu et al. (2006) ap-
plied the ant colony optimization approach
for the assignment of cells to switches. Mandal
et al. (2007) presented a state space search
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technique, called the block depth-first search,
to allocate cells to switches.
Wired Telecommunications. Similarly, the works
in the wired telecommunications are classified
into business OR and technical OR. The works
in technical OR are further decomposed into
more detailed aspects.
For the works in business OR of wired telecom-
munications, researches have addressed business
operations problems at different levels. At the
strategic level, Levy et al. (2006) examined the
efficient routing decision of multihoming ISPs;
their objective was to minimize the cost under a
top-percentile pricing by providers. Special cases
were analysed within this model. Yong et al.
(2006) discussed the cooperation strategies of
multiple internet backbone providers to improve
routing decisions and service quality; they used
queuing models to analyse the QoS under different
interconnection decisions for all the partners, and
they utilized game theories to obtain optimal
routing strategies and pricing decisions in inter-
connection. Oul et al. (2006) studied the economic
benefits of differentiated services and built optimi-
zation models for managing the website host’s
connection bandwidth to the Internet. At the
operational level, many researches have been
published on pricing of various Internet services.
Backbone network owners decide charging
schemes for those network access players.
Anderson et al. (2006) illustrated their pricing
mechanism, modelled the utility of each network
contractor, and analysed their balancing behaviour
in the short and long terms. In the research
performed by Audestad et al. (2006), to provide
decision support for network owners’ to obtain
maximized profits, the dynamic relationships
among owners, customers, and competitors are
considered; customers and competitors leased the
network from the owner. Jaisingh et al. (2008)
provided different service providers with advice
on optimal strategies to collect customers’
information.
There are also researches on pricing in ISP net-
works. Guan et al. (2008) provided a decentralized
auction-based scheme for bandwidth allocation
and pricing in a differentiated service network to
maximize the service provider’s revenue. Cancela
et al. (2008) designed a pricing scheme for the
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situation when the communication capacity of an
ISP was larger than the demand; the classic
queuing model M/M/1 was used to obtain the
optimal prices with the maximized revenue. The
research by Hosanagar et al. (2008) helped content
delivery network owners in pricing their service to
gain the largest profit; customers’ decision-making
was analysed to optimize customers’ utility, and
the profit maximization model was developed for
the optimal pricing policy. Bapna et al. (2005)
explored pricing for the data stream service in
Internet where the servers owned limited capacity.
The study combined knapsack-based allocation
and auction-based preference elicitation schemes
for information goods together with pricing and
proposed a uniform-price, computationally
efficient, and revenue-maximizing mechanism.
Kumar et al. (2006) investigated how advertise-
ments at a website should be scheduled in a
planning horizon to maximize revenue; a hybrid
genetic algorithm was developed for the integer
programming formulation of the problem. The
problem of dynamic pricing of Web contents was
studied where revenue was generated from the
subscription fees and advertisements (Kumar and
Sethi, 2009). The auction model to determine the
priorities of listing in searching results was
presented to examine the firm’s optimal bidding
strategy (Lim and Tang, 2006; Feng et al., 2007).
It is also worth noting that numerous
researches have been reported on the manage-
ment of call centres. Works conducted in this field
can be divided into four aspects as follows.
(1) Outsourcing contract design. Outsourcing con-
tracts can be made by client firms who hire call
centre services, and they affect the operations’
decisions of call centres (Hasija et al., 2008;
Ren and Zhou, 2008). The objective is to maxi-
mize profits subject to constraints on staffing
levels, and the queuing theory can be used to
model the operations of call centres. Different
contracts have been compared on the basis of
the models by Ren and Zhou (2008). Another
outsourcing occurs between two call centres;
one of them gets the service and outsources it
to a contractor call centre to achieve the largest
profit. The contractor offers the pricing
contracts, which influence the decision of the
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Operations Research in Service Industries
RESEARCH PAPER
service firm on how much capacity should be
hired; Aksin et al. (2008) characterized the opti-
mal pricing and capacity under two contracts.
(2) Routing. Routing schemes investigate how cus-
tomers can be matched to servers to achieve
the best service level. A customer-scheduling
scheme with two service types was investi-
gated to minimize real-time delay; the system
was modelled as a two-class M/M/N queuing
system, and an asymptotic policy was pro-
posed for better performance (Armony and
Maglaras, 2004a, 2004b). The problem of
service failure with callbacks was considered
by de Véricourt and Zhou (2005); a Markov
decision process formulation was used to
obtain analytical results and insights about
the optimal routing policy with the minimized
average total time of call resolution. The con-
trol policy to maximize the expected operating
profit was studied by Byers and So (2007); the
information of system status and customer
profile in a cross-sales context was used in the
optimization. Gans and Zhou (2007) studied
a routing scheme within an outsourcing
relationship. Sisselman and Whitt (2007) intro-
duced value-based routing and preference-
based routing into the multiskill agent model
for call centres.
(3) Staffing. Staffing in call centres is typically
managed to minimize staffing cost subject to a
satisfactory level of service quality; a number
of methods can be applied to define and solve
this optimal problem. For example, call centres
can usually be modelled as M/M/N queue
systems with different features according to
different situations. In general, staffing is based
on certain routing schemes. Armony and
Maglaras (2004a, 2004b) investigated a call
centre with two classes of users and provided
an asymptotic analysis for the solution. Atlason
et al. (2004, 2008) discussed a multistage situa-
tion where the staffing level could affect the ser-
vice level in the sequent periods and provided
a simulation-based method to find an approxi-
mation of the problem. Bhandari et al. (2008)
generalized the situation where both perma-
nent and temporary operators were involved
and introduced an exact and efficient algorithm
to solve the problem. Taking into consideration
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the three-regime operations (quality-driven,
efficiency-driven, and rationalized way),
Borst et al. (2004) and Gurvich et al. (2008)
emphasized the trade-off between staffing
cost and service level and provided an
approach for asymptotic approximations.
Cezik and L’Ecuyer (2008) focused on the itera-
tive cutting-plane algorithm for this problem.
Feldman et al. (2008) developed a simulation-
based iterative staffing algorithm for the situa-
tion where the Poisson arrival of customers
was nonhomogenous. Deslauriers et al. (2007)
considered a call centre with two kinds of
traffic and agents (in-bound and blend) and
proposed a collection of continuous-time
Markov chain models. Avramidis et al. (2010)
compared the simulation-based algorithms in
scheduling agents in a multiskill call centre.
Bassamboo et al. (2009) introduced a processing
network model with large server pools and
doubly stochastic input flows. Bhulai et al.
(2008) proposed a new method for shift sched-
uling in multiskill call centres. Harrison and
Zeevi (2005) provided a method for staffing
large call centres based on stochastic fluid
models to optimize the trade-off between
personnel costs and abandonment penalties.
Pot et al. (2008) illustrated a simple method
for staffing in multiskill call centres. Wallace
and Whitt (2005) provided a skill-based routing
algorithm for call centres in which agents had
different combinations of skills. Whitt (2006a,
2006b) developed a mathematical model to
assess the impact of employee retention and
job satisfaction on system performance.
Chevalier and Van den Schrieck (2008) tried
to find optimal staffing configurations in
a small-sized hierarchical call centre and
applied a branch-and-bound algorithm to
find a minimum-cost configuration subject to
service-level constraints. van Dijk and van der
Sluis (2008) considered decisions on pooling
agents. Whitt (2006a, 2006b) proposed simpli-
fied methods to staff a single-class call centre
with uncertainties in arrival rate and staffing.
(4) Model analysis. Artalejo et al. (2007) dealt
with the distribution of the maximum
queue length in two-dimensional Markov
models. Kawanishi (2008) tried to find a
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Syst. Res.
computationally practical way to analyse
queuing models in call centres. Ibrahim and
Whitt (2009) studied the performance of
alternative real-time delay estimators based
on recent customer delay experience. Shen
and Huang (2008) developed the methods for
intraday and dynamic intraday forecasting of
incoming call volumes.
Researches on technical OR of wired telecom-
munications can be classified as network design
and mechanism design of specific service. Most
researches are related to the Internet; the work
by Berger and Raghavan (2004) was the only
paper found on the design of long-distance tele-
phone network; their objective was to minimize
the access cost paid to local telephone companies;
the problem was formulated as a mixed-integer
program. To support the design of the Internet
network, OR has helped in building the models
for performance evaluations from different
perspectives. Cancela et al. (2008) modelled the
evaluation as a combinational optimization
problem and solved it by a genetic algorithm to
optimize network typology. Borne et al. (2006)
focused on cost minimization of optical networks
with Internet protocol (IP)-based routers subject
to the constraints of survivability; integer
programming and a cutting-plane algorithm
were used to get extensive results. Heyman
(2005) provided a model capable of predicting
the packet loss rate in backbone links and used
it to estimate the required capacity of the
network. Ye et al. (2005) examined the effect of
policies of a wide range of bandwidth allocation
on network stability and analysed the stabilities
for the stationary network and burst network.
Deb et al. (2005) considered a single link accessed
by a large number of transmission control
protocol-like flows and uncontrolled flows and
revealed the relations of single-link stability and
global stability conditions. Chamberland (2005)
proposed a model of the point of presence design
problem with consideration of router selection
and traffic routing and proposed the use of a tabu
search to find solutions. Li et al. (2005) deter-
mined the parameters in a new method called
dynamic weighted round-robin to solve Internet
traffic jam problems (to find a load-balancing
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method). Bektas et al. (2008) described a two-level
simulated annealing heuristic for a joint problem
of object placement and request routing in a
content distribution network; the considered
constraints included server capacity and end-to-
end object transfer delay. Cabral et al. (2008)
developed and tested the mathematical models
for the design of a wide area telecommunication
network.
Several researches concerned the mechanism
design of different Internet services. Kalvenes and
Keon (2007) examined the capacity assignment
problem within the video-on-demand service
subject to given routing and service quality. The
problem was proven as an NP-hard problem.
Bektas et al. (2007) tried to solve the video
placement and routing problem in the video-on-
demand service with an algorithm based on
Lagrange relaxation and decomposition. To
provide the necessary information for QoS in the
Voice-on-IP (VoIP) service, Kim et al. (2008)
obtained the probability distribution of queuing
delay of an extended real-time polling service
network for the Voice-on-IP service; under the
situations of the exponential and deterministic
service time, the matrix analytic method was used
for the GI/M/1-type and M/G/1-type matrices.
Steyaert et al. (2008) focused on the playout buffer
dimensioning design in variable-bit-rate streaming
video service; the probability models of packet loss
were proposed to find general dimensioning rules.
Telecommunications in General. Voudouris et al.
(2006) integrated demand forecasting and
resource planning tools as an automated system
for planning human resources. Zhang et al. (2008)
studied the price competition in packet-switching
networks in which multiclass priority-based
services were available to maximize the profits.
Meli-an et al. (2004) studied the most cost-effective
combination of wavelength division multiplexing
equipment and fibres to satisfy the capacity
demand. Riis and Andersen (2004) considered
expanding the capacity on a single telecommunica-
tion connection to meet customer demand. Chao
et al. (2009) studied the dynamic capacity expansion
subject to a firm with capacity deterioration and
supply uncertainty. Smith (2006) studied the selec-
tion of machine size in the network to minimize
the total cost function, including both risk and
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rewards. Vroblefski et al. (2005) developed a unified
framework to approximate the performance of
telecommunications networks based on a decom-
position strategy. Smith (2004) examined a traffic
assignment problem related to the assignment of
telecommunications traffic to a set of synchronous
optical network rings. Loudni et al. (2006) dealt with
the online route allocation while considering the
possibility of reallocation in an ATM network.
The selection and routing problem of messages for
the maximization of revenues was formulated as
integer programming, two classes of messages with
different priorities are considered, and a Lagrange
relaxation-based method was used by Bose (2009)
to solve the problem.
To investigate the resource allocation for end-
to-end QoS provisioning, Yao et al. (2008a)
presented a modelling of a hybrid wireless wide-
band code-division multiple-access and wire line
IP-based DiffServ network. Zukerman et al.
(2008) proposed two algorithms for a bandwidth
allocation problem to maximize the service pro-
viders’ revenue with the constraints of ‘fairness’.
Salles and Barria (2008) applied the lexicographic
maximum criterion to address the problem of
bandwidth allocation in multi-application
computer network environments. Khouja and
Kumar (2005) modelled the bandwidth acquisi-
tion decision-making for buyers to determine
complex purchasing items. Tsesmetzis et al.
(2008) introduced the ‘selective multiple-choice
knapsack problem’ to identify the services for
service providers to maximize the profit subject
to the specified bandwidth. As a summary, the
cited papers in information and transmitting
and communication industries have been listed
in Table 4.
Research in Data-processing Industries
Data-processing industries provide expertise for
clients with all kinds of service treating data as
objects, such as data organizing, data maintaining,
and data mining (Chiang et al., 2011; Duan et al.,
2011; Duan and Xu 2012). Complicated processing
operations can be supported by OR studies. Three
review articles have been found in this field.
Data integration from multiple data sources
was investigated by Jiang et al. (2007); from the
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possible value probability distribution, the
authors modelled the problems to minimize the
total cost of all errors and found the solution to
support the proposed integration framework.
Gray et al. (2010) investigated the applicability
of ensemble classification to disparate data in
predicting protein phosphorylation sites. Four
existing methods were examined to compare
their performances in classification. Menon and
Sarkar (2007) considered data sharing with the
minimum information loss while preserving
privacy. The problem was modelled as an integer
programming and proved to be NP-hard; a two-
phased procedure was proposed as a practical
and effective alternative to decompose an origi-
nal problem into two smaller problems.
Summary
In this section, the OR researches in information
industries are summarized as follows:
• Firstly, these researches have generally covered
a broad range of topics in information indus-
tries. It can be evidenced from the rapid growth
of information industries that the majority of
research efforts have paid off. Among them,
researches in information transmission and
communication industries are the most produc-
tive because of the adoption of the Internet and
mobile services. Besides the methodologies for
solving problems at operational levels, consid-
erable articles are dedicated to the methodolo-
gies for decision-making at managerial levels,
for example, the versioning design by Bhargava
and Choudhary (2008) and strategic alliance
research by Yong et al. (2006).
• Secondly, the decision problems are complex for
two major reasons. On the one hand, the decision
problems can be complicated if different players
and decision models are considered simulta-
neously. For example, the software companies’
patch-releasing decisions interact with the
updating policies of the client firms (Cavusoglu
et al., 2008); some models even considered three
parties to analyse their mutual relationships
(Audestad et al., 2006). On other hand, the com-
plexity comes from the restrictions in both the
models and the parameters, and it leads to a
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Syst. Res.
number NP-hard problems. Models can be linear
equalities, non-linear equalities, or inequalities;
the parameters may be derived through specific
algorithms (Heyman, 2005).
• Lastly, the majority of reported methodologies
are incapable of obtaining the solution directly
because of the complexity of the problems. The
problems should be decomposed or simplified,
so that the complexity is manageable. To reach
this goal, different approaches have been
developed to find the solutions of the problems
indirectly. Indirect OR methods include
mathematical simplifications (de Véricourt
and Zhou, 2005), diverse heuristic algorithms
(Amaldi et al., 2006), asymptotic optimization
approaches (Armony and Maglaras, 2004a,
2004b), simulation-based approximation
(Atlason et al., 2008), and comparison studies
(Cavusoglu et al., 2008). Although the results
of the studies may not provide optimal solu-
tions, near-optimal solutions could be found,
which are of great value to decision-makers.
Retail and Wholesale Trading Industries
Retail and wholesale trading industries are for
resale businesses. Sales without transformation
are considered as usual operations associated with
trading, and typical activities include sorting,
grading, and assembling of good and so on. The
retail industry includes the resale of new and used
goods mainly to the public for personal or house-
hold consumption or utilization, by shops, depart-
ment stores, stalls, mail-order houses, hawkers
and peddlers, and consumer incorporations. The
wholesale industry includes the resale of new
and used goods on own accounts or on a fee or
contract basis; it relates to domestic wholesale
trades or international wholesale trades, to re-
tailers, business-to-business trades, other whole-
salers, or agents or brokers buying goods for, or
selling goods to, individuals or companies.
Classification
The retailers and wholesalers have similar
business processes, which include ordering and
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transporting products from suppliers, storing in
their own warehouse, and promoting and deliver-
ing products to customers. ORs in this area aim
at improving the efficiencies along with these
processes. Figure 3 depicts the research framework
based on retailing and wholesaling processes.
Firstly, every retail or wholesale deal is made in
an environment of either a traditional face-to-face
contacting or an e-commerce setting (Guo et al.,
2012a, 2012b; Viriyasitavat et al, 2012; Xu et al.,
2012a; He and Xu 2013). Secondly, all the researches
aim at helping ‘sellers’, that is, retailers and
wholesaler, maximize their profits. Profits can be
assessed at the aspects of revenues from buyers,
costs from suppliers, and operating costs of sellers.
In investigating the relations of participators,
researchers may focus on one or more aspects;
however, sellers play a significant role in trading.
On the basis of the classification framework in
Figure 3, the research can be firstly differentiated
in terms of the considered trading environments,
that is, a traditional environment or e-commerce;
secondly, the research is further classified into the
following three focused aspects from the perspec-
tive of profit: (1) marketing-focused operations
relating to buyers’ purchasing decisions, such as
pricing and advertising; (2) management-focused
operations to reduce inside operating costs, such
as workforce management and performance
management; and (3) order-focused operations to
reduce procurement costs, such as transportation
routing and inventory management.
Operations Research in E-commerce
The diversified OR problems in e-commerce are
discussed and classified into marketing-related
Trading Environment: Traditional & E-Commerce
Supplier
products products
Seller
Supplier cost revenue
Max (profit)
Supplier cost
……
Figure 3 Classification framework of operations research in
retail and wholesale industries
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OR, business management-related OR, and OR
for comprehensive e-commerce.
(1) Marketing-related OR. A few of the
researches discussed the pricing mecha-
nisms in e-commerce. The effect of the
auction mechanism on trade efficiency was
investigated by Chu and Shen (2008) from
the standpoint of the market owner; a linear
programming model was developed for the
trading dynamics, and two auction mecha-
nisms were proposed to stimulate truthful
biddings, which were proven to be asymp-
totically efficient for the market. The case
where a monopoly e-retailer provided
dynamic prices for two classes of customers
was considered by Raju et al. (2006), the
dynamics was modelled as a Markov deci-
sion process to maximize the retailer’s
profit, and a Q-learning algorithm was
employed to find optimal prices. Consider-
ing the possible choices from posted pricing
and auction, the dynamic mechanism of the
allocation and payment rules was investi-
gated by Gallien (2006), and the optimal
mechanism was characterized under a pile
of restrictive assumptions. A Markov pric-
ing model was developed by Asdemir et al.
(2009) for the cost control of home delivery
service. In dealing with an online retailer
with the price schemes of auctions and
posted prices, Etzion et al. (2006) developed a
model to analyse the auction lot size and
auction duration. The stochastic dynamic pro-
gramming was integrated with combinatorial
programming by Netessine et al. (2006) to
tackle dynamic cross-selling in e-retailing, that
is, selecting products to be cross-sold and pric-
ing cross-selling. For delivery in e-commerce,
the stochastic polling theory was used by
Buyer Gong and De Koster (2008), the waiting time
in the order line was represented in a closed
Buyer
form, and the dynamic picking system was
Buyer analysed. Several algorithms for dynamic
vehicle routing were proposed by Du et al.
……
(2005) for online business-to-consumer deliv-
ery. Regarding channel management, Dai
et al. (2006) studied the capacity (i.e. inventory)
allocation between the local store and the
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online store. Dutta et al. (2007) proposed an
approximate algorithm to compute the most
popular traversal sequences between node
pairs in a catalogue, which were then used to
discover critical edge sequences.
(2) Business management-related OR. To better un-
derstand the trade-offs in selecting the distribu-
tion strategy (i.e. leverage or direct) and
product focus (i.e. perishable or nonperishable),
Cattani et al. (2007) developed the profitability
of different operation models used by online
grocers, where a linear demand model was
applied in a competitive setting. Scott and Scott
(2004) studied the operations of an electronic
marketplace with direct or indirect customers
and supplier relations and provided the solu-
tions to minimize the cost for various scenarios.
Chen et al. (2007) discussed the optimal policy
to use third-party channels for an online retailer
with seasonal products and cost-per-click
payments for the third-party Webs.
(3) Comprehensive e-commerce OR. Some researchers
considered the comprehensive behaviours in e-
commerce. In dealing with the case where
buyers bid for units of the seller firm over an
infinite horizon and backordering was not
allowed, Ryzin and Vulcano (2004) formulated
a dynamic programming model and derived
simplified optimal principles. Tsai and Hung
(2009) provided an integrated approach in an
analytic hierarchy process for the auction in
internet retailing. Tan and Mookerjee (2005)
investigated the spending allocation in
electronic retailing between marketing (adver-
tising); such an allocation could seriously affect
the customer demand and website processing
capacity. Xiao et al. (2009) investigated the
optimal inventory and admission policies for
seasonal products sold by owners and through
third-party websites by means of affiliate
programmes.
Operations Research in Traditional Environment
Similarly, the diversified OR problems dealing
with traditional environments are discussed and
classified into marketing-related OR, business
management-related OR, and OR for comprehen-
sive e-commerce OR.
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Syst. Res.
(1) Marketing-related OR. One interesting topic
attracting researchers is the ‘discount’ retailers
or wholesalers should apply in various circum-
stances. The setting of quantity discount offered
by suppliers was studied by Altintas et al. (2008)
to motivate buyers and increase the volumes of
orders. A multiperiod model was proposed to
depict the dynamic system including a buyer
with stochastic demand and a supplier offering
quantity discount. Guidelines and insights on
the effectiveness of discount were provided
through a structural analysis of the model.
The advance-booking discount is studied
under either monopoly or duopoly markets.
McCardle et al. (2004) modelled a situation
where two retailers might offer the advance-
booking discount programme for the same
product. They analysed the equilibrium profits
and the discount rate in four scenarios of
different strategies adopted by the two retailers.
Tang et al. (2004) applied an advance-booking
discount programme to achieve optimal profit
for a retailer selling products in short sales
seasons; the determinants were discount rates,
forecasting quantities, and orders. Aviv and
Pazgal (2008) studied the optimal pricing of a
finite quantity of fashion products in the
presence of forward-looking customers. Aydin
and Ziya (2008) investigated the pricing and
discounting issues to promote products.
McCardle et al. (2007) developed models to
calculate the optimal bundle prices, order quan-
tities, and profits when bundling basic and
fashion products. Bulut et al. (2009) determined
optimal products and bundle prices to maxi-
mize the expected revenues. There are some
other issues related to marketing. For example,
Lim et al. (2004a) examined the shelf allocation
to stimulate customer demand and devel-
oped a linear shelf allocation model with
product grouping; furthermore, they pro-
posed a strategy of combining a strong local
search with a metaheuristic approach as a
network flow solution. Hu et al. (2009) devel-
oped a two-stage solution to distribute foods
according to the criteria of cost and quality.
Campbell and Savelsbergh (2006) examined
the use of incentives to reduce the costs of
home deliveries.
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(2) Business management-related OR. The studies
on this subject include the design of retail
networks and workforce management. Gaur
and Fisher (2004) looked into the delivery-
scheduling problem between a distribution
centre and supermarkets; the considered vari-
ables were vehicle routes and replenishment
schedules. Naseraldin and Herer (2008)
discussed arranging retail outlets on routes to
meet the delivery needs of customers.
Helmberg and Rohl (2007) studied optimiza-
tion of the transportation among warehouses
to ensure the supplies for uncertain demands.
Teo and Shu (2004) studied the design problem
of the warehouse–retail network to minimize
total costs. Regarding workforce management,
Mirrazavi and Beringer (2007) introduced a
workforce management system for supermar-
kets; the system was capable of forecasting
work demands, generating workloads, and
scheduling the right employees with the right
sets of skills at the right time. Berman and
Larson (2004) used a queuing control model
for retail services having both front and back
room operations. Pastor and Olivella (2008)
studied weekly work schedules in two fran-
chises of an important retail clothing chain
through a mixed linear program and a local
optimization process.
(3) Comprehensive OR in traditional environment.
One noticeable study in this topic is data
envelopment analysis (DEA) for performance
evaluation; DEA is a powerful tool to assess
the performance of the trading operations
(Cao and Yang, 2011). Førsund and Zanola
(2006) applied the DEA method to assess the
work of auction houses in selling art objects.
Vaz et al. (2010) proposed network DEA to
assess the performance of the stores, which
consisted of several sections. Two levels of
assessment were conducted: at the section
level, similar sections in different stores were
assessed, and the DEA model could provide
the benchmark for inefficient sections; the
store-level assessment also included resource
reallocation. Hu and Ansell (2007) discussed
models for measuring retail company perfor-
mance using credit-scoring techniques.
Pauler et al. (2009) provided an approach to
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assess individual stores in a supermarket;
they formulated four different models based
on various assumptions.
Ordering-related Operations Research
Ordering-related OR concerns inventory manage-
ment to decide ordering points and ordering quan-
tities under certain circumstances. Balakrishnan
et al. (2004) studied inventory policies to maxi-
mize the profits because the inventory could
stimulate the demand effectively. Nagarajan
and Rajagopalan (2008) examined the inventory
policies of retailers selling substitutable products
and found that for a single-period case, the opti-
mal policies could be easily determined. Olsen and
Parker (2008) investigated inventory management
under a dynamic market and indicated that firms
might use the marketing mix to attract latent and
new customers. Axsater and Marklund (2008)
provided an optimal position-based ordering
policy for warehouses that served multiple re-
tailers. Tan and Karabati (2004) proposed a point-
of-service data-based mechanism for periodic
updating of the order-up-to level in the retail
industry with unobserved lost sales. DeHoratius
et al. (2008) considered an intelligent inventory
management tool that accounted for record
inaccuracy using a Bayesian belief of the physical
inventory level. Li et al. (2009a) examined the in-
ventory management of products in short selling
seasons and modelled it as a sequential decision
problem to obtain the optimal policy. Gupta and
Wang (2009) presented a discrete-time model with
random demand to determine the optimal stock
level in the presence of supplier-provided credit.
Chao et al. (2008) considered a classic dynamic
inventory control for a self-financing retailer
who periodically replenished its stock from a
supplier and sold it to the market. Ferguson and
Ketzenberg (2006) formulated the retailer’s replen-
ishment policies under the circumstance where
the ages of products could be unknown. Choi
et al. (2004) investigated a retailer’s optimal single
ordering policy with multiple delivery modes
and formulated it as a multistage dynamic optimi-
zation problem. Ozen et al. (2008) considered an
associated cooperative game between the retailers
who would increase their expected profits by
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coordinating their orders and made allocations
when demands were requested from warehouses.
In many cases, the aspects of marketing and
ordering should be considered simultaneously to
maximize the profit for retailers. Kök and Fisher
(2007) studied the assortment planning of products
for a large supermarket and used an iterative
heuristic algorithm to address the problem. Yücel
et al. (2009) analysed product assortment and
inventory planning driven by customers’
demands. Cachon et al. (2005) developed several
models of retail assortment planning that explicitly
accounted for consumers. Li (2007) modelled a
single-period assortment optimization problem
with unequal cost parameters. Bernstein and
Federgruen (2004) addressed the infinite-horizon
models for competing retailers’ equilibrium behav-
iours in determining dynamic inventory and
pricing. Aydin and Porteus (2008) studied the joint
decision for optimal inventory levels and prices,
where products were substitutable on the basis of
price rather than stock-out. Arcelus et al. (2005) con-
sidered the joint development of the optimal pric-
ing and ordering policies of a profit-maximizing
retailer. Balakrishnan et al. (2008) studied inventory
management and pricing policies when demand
was uncertain but increased with stocking quantity.
Tsai and Hung (2009) used an N-period discrete-
time model to characterize the optimal dynamic
ordering and pricing policies of a retailer who had
uncertain price-dependent demand.
Summary
Operations research in retail and wholesale
industries has covered many interesting issues
from e-commerce to traditional trading and from
marketing, business management, to ordering.
Table 5 has summarized the main topics discussed
in the literature. In general, although e-commerce
has achieved rapid development in practice, the
researches in this area are still limited in terms of
the number of papers and the covered topics.
There are only six papers for e-commerce in
comparison with 17 articles for traditional trading
environment. The topics are focused majorly on
marketing-related OR (Ryzin and Vulcano, 2004;
Gallien, 2006; Netessine et al., 2006; Raju et al.,
2006; Chu and Shen, 2008). For other specific
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Syst. Res.
topics, the researches on price-related strategies
are always prominent either in traditional or e-
commerce trading. In particular, several researches
have been concerned with discount policies, such
as quantity discount (Altintas et al., 2008) and
advance-booking discount (McCardle et al., 2004;
Tang et al., 2004). Besides, some traditional OR
models have found their new values in this field,
such as DEA models for performance assessment
(Førsund and Zanola, 2006; Vaz et al., 2010) and in-
ventory management (Balakrishnan et al., 2004).
Strategic decision-making such as retail outlet
location has also been supported by the OR
approach (Naseraldin and Herer, 2008).
No matter how complex the systems may be,
or if a problem is linear or non-linear, all of the
studies in this category have been formulated as
optimal models to maximize profits and/or
minimize cost. Solutions may be deduced from
analytical mathematic models or approximate
ones from heuristic algorithms.
Transportation and Warehousing Industries
In this subsector, the covered studies are OR in
transportation and warehousing industries, the
typical activities include passenger or freight
transportation, associated activities such as
terminal and parking facilities, cargo handling,
storages, and postal and courier activities. These
forms of transportation can be by air, water, high-
way, and rail. The OR works in this field are
classified into passenger transportation and
freight transportation. For passenger transporta-
tion, airline industry and public transportation
have attracted the most attention. For freight
transportation, the work is decomposed into
terminal transport service to shippers and
postal/courier service.
Airline Industry
Among all the operations in the airline industry,
crew planning is the most attractive. Because it
has much higher requirements on time and secu-
rity, the airline industry faces the most challenges
in planning and scheduling. Researches on this
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Table 5 Topics of operations research in retail and wholesale industries
Classification
E-commerce
Marketing-related OR
Business management related OR
Comprehensive OR
Traditional environment
Marketing-related OR
Business management-related OR
Comprehensive OR
topic started around 1990s, and this topic is still
attracting a great deal of attention.
Kim and Barnhart (2007) considered schedul-
ing flights for a maximized profit for charter
airlines. Abdelghany et al. (2008) presented a
decision support tool to adjust schedules of
airlines during irregular operations; the tool was
capable of generating a proactive recovery plan
using all flight resources. Lee et al. (2007)
improved the robustness of a flight schedule by
retiming its departure times; they developed a
multi-objective genetic algorithm to attack this
issue. Barnhart and Cohn (2004) investigated
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Examples
Pricing mechanisms (Etzion et al., 2006; Gallien, 2006; Raju et al.,
2006; Chu and Shen, 2008; Asdemir et al., 2009)
Cross-selling (Netessine et al., 2006)
Delivery (Du et al., 2005; Gong and De Koster, 2008)
Customer behaviour (Dutta et al., 2007)
Channel management (Dai et al., 2006; Chen et al., 2007)
Operating strategy (Cattani et al., 2007)
Joint pricing–inventory model (Ryzin and Vulcano, 2004; Tsai and
Hung, 2009)
Joint advertising–IT model (Tan and Mookerjee, 2005)
Joint inventory–channel decision (Xiao et al., 2009)
Discount policy (McCardle et al., 2004; Tang et al., 2004; Altintas, et al.,
2008)
Pricing (Aviv and Pazgal, 2008; Aydin and Ziya, 2008)
Shelf-space allocation (Lim et al., 2004a)
Product bundling(McCardle et al., 2007; Bulut et al. 2009)
Product delivery (Campbell and Savelsbergh, 2006; Hu et al., 2009)
Retail network design (Gaur and Fisher, 2004; Teo and Shu, 2004;
Helmberg and Rohl, 2007; Naseraldin and Herer, 2008)
Strategy (Scott and Scott, 2004)
Workforce management (Berman and Larson, 2004; Mirrazavi and
Beringer, 2007; Pastor and Olivella, 2008)
Performance evaluation (Førsund and Zanola, 2006; Hu and Ansell,
2007; Pauler et al., 2009; Vaz et al., 2010)
Inventory management (Balakrishnan et al., 2004; Tan and Karabati,
2004; Ferguson and Ketzenberg, 2006; Axsater and Marklund, 2008;
Chao et al., 2008; DeHoratius et al., 2008; Nagarajan and
Rajagopalan, 2008; Olsen and Parker, 2008; Gupta and Wang, 2009;
Li et al., 2009a)
Ordering decision (Choi et al., 2004; Ozen et al., 2008)
Assortment planning (Cachon et al., 2005; Kök and Fisher, 2007; Li
2007; Yücel et al., 2009)
Joint inventory and prices (Bernstein and Federgruen, 2004; Arcelus
et al., 2005; Aydin and Porteus, 2008; Balakrishnan et al., 2008; Tsai
and Hung, 2009)
the optimization approach of airlines planning
to increase airline profits. Yan et al. (2007)
developed a short-term flight-scheduling model
with variable market shares, formulated as a
non-linear mixed-integer program. Hansen
(2004) and Bäuerle et al. (2007) dealt with flight
traffic controls to schedule arriving aircrafts to
runways to minimize delays. Pinol and Beasley
(2006) studied the case of multiple runways in a
static aircraft landing problem and presented a
scatter search, bionomic algorithm, and popula-
tion heuristic approach to find solutions. Atkin
et al. (2007) presented the models to evaluate a
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runway schedule for aircraft take-off and verifi-
cation of physical constraints.
Sherali et al. (2006) introduced existing
works on air fleet assignment. Grönkvist (2006)
combined constraint programming with column
generation to solve a relaxed tail assignment
problem in aircraft scheduling. Belanger et al.
(2006) modelled a periodic fleet assignment prob-
lem with time windows in which departure times
were determined to maximize anticipated profits.
Haouari et al. (2009) investigated network flow-
based heuristic approaches to schedule aircraft
fleeting and routing and match one to one the
corresponding flights and aircrafts. Pilla et al.
(2008) proposed a two-stage stochastic program-
ming framework for demand-driven fleet assign-
ment to assign crew-compatible aircrafts at the
first stage and enhance the demand-capturing
potential of swapping at the second stage.
Rosenberger et al. (2004) presented fleet
assignment models that embedded many short
cycles and reduced hub connectivity within a
solution to minimize planned operating cost
and passenger spill. Sherali et al. (2005) proposed
a demand-driven refleeting approach to offer
dynamic reassignment of aircraft capacities in a
flight network. Smith and Johnson (2006)
provided the fleet assignment solutions that
increased planning flexibility and reduced cost
by imposing station purity.
Abdelghany et al. (2004) studied the crew
planning strategy to avoid irregular operations in
a proactive way; the objective was to maintain as
many flights as possible while minimizing the total
system cost resulting from resource reassignments
and flight delays. Freling et al. (2004) introduced a
decision support system for crew scheduling and
crew rostering. The system used a set partitioning
model and a branch-and-price algorithm. Hao
et al. (2004) proposed the neural network algo-
rithms in solving the airport ground staff rostering
problem. Kohl and Karisch (2004) described com-
prehensive real-world airline crew rostering prob-
lems, constraints and objectives, and a result and
developed a commercial crew rostering system.
Lu
cić and Teodorović (2007) combined a simulated
annealing, genetic algorithm, and tabu search tech-
nique to solve the aircrew rostering problem.
Sohoni et al. (2004) studied long-range manpower
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planning in the airline industry and formulated
the optimization problems to minimize total costs.
Yang et al. (2008) addressed the issue of aircraft
and crew scheduling for fractional ownership
programs. Guo et al. (2006) proposed a partially
integrated airline crew-scheduling approach with
time-dependent and unevenly distributed crew
capacities at multiple home bases. Xu et al. (2006)
studied the scheduling problem of flight instructors
with multiple criteria, that is, labour cost, consis-
tence of plan, and satisfaction level of instructors.
Zhang and Cooper (2005, 2009) studied different
topics of seat inventory control to maximize
the revenue in multiple parallel single-leg flights
for customers; they provided simulation-based
approximating procedures to obtain the policies.
On the basis of accurate forecasting of demands,
Mukhopadhyay et al. (2007) studied the seat inven-
tory control by sustaining the right number of seats
for late-booking, high-revenue-generating passen-
gers and low-value, leisure passengers. Marcus
and Anderson (2008) formulated a pricing control
model for the airline industry to maximize the rev-
enue. Schipper et al. (2007) modelled airline compe-
tition as a two-stage game in frequency and prices,
allowing for asymmetric frequency equilibriums.
Currie et al. (2008) introduced dynamic pricing
strategies to maximize revenue where there was a
competing seller. Cooper and Gupta (2006) studied
the optimal decision of assigning seats to different
markets with different stochastic demands.
Some OR works are related to operations
at terminals. Andreatta et al. (2007) provided a
model to evaluate the efficiency analysis of the
baggage handling system. Chu (2007) proposed
goal programming models for integrated
assignment of crew duties at the Hong Kong
International Airport. Bazargan (2007) examined
interferences among passengers that cause
boarding delays in a single-aisle aircraft and
offered a new mixed-integer linear program to
minimize the delays. Drexl and Nikulin (2008)
applied the Pareto simulated annealing to mini-
mize the number of ungated flights, shorten
walking distance, and improve gate assignment
preferences in an airport gate assignment prob-
lem. Dorndorf et al. (2007) surveyed a large vari-
ety of mathematical models in solving general
flight gate scheduling problems. McLay et al.
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(2007) modelled a multilevel passenger screening
problem to use the prescreening information in
determining passenger assignments with the
highest level of security.
Revenue management is another issue. Liu and
van Ryzin (2008) and van Ryzin and Vulcano
(2008) considered a revenue management,
network capacity control problem in a situation
where heterogeneous customers choose among
various products. Yao et al. (2008a) presented a
methodology for efficiently scheduling available re-
sources of a fractional jet management company.
Bish et al. (2004) proposed a dynamic aircraft swap-
ping approach, which took advantage of system
flexibility and accurate forecasting of demands.
Goto et al. (2004) developed and analysed a
finite Markov model for the airline meal provision-
ing activity focusing on developing policies to
determine and revise the number of meals to be
uploaded. Wen and Hsu (2006) presented an
interactive airline network design procedure to
facilitate bargaining interactions necessitated by
international code-share alliance agreements.
Ouellette et al. (2010) proposed a framework to
measure the efficiency of the air carriers by using
Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA).
Public Transportation
The research topics appearing in the collected OR
articles can be roughly classified into the following
groups: vehicle scheduling, driving scheduling,
route choice, network design, and resource
allocation.
• Vehicle scheduling. Fügenschuh and Martin (2006)
aimed at optimizing bus schedules with consid-
eration of school timetables and the service level;
they developed a two-stage decomposition ap-
proach to implement multi-objective mixed-
integer linear programming. Maróti and Kroon
(2007) investigated the train schedules and
modelled the regular maintenance using an inte-
ger programming. Flamini and Pacciarelli (2008)
studied the management of routing the trains at
rail stations with the objective of optimizing
punctuality and regularity of train service.
Kliewer et al. (2006) discussed the problem of
multidepot, multi-vehicle-type bus schedules
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RESEARCH PAPER
as time–space-based models. Vansteenwegen
and Oudheusden (2006) developed railway
timetables to minimize the cost of waiting
through the simulation of the linear program
formulation. Zhou and Zhong (2005) studied
the problem of double-track train schedules
with the consideration of expected waiting
times and total travel times of trains. Dessouky
et al. (2006) developed a branch-and-bound
model, which was able to determine optimal
dispatching times in complex rail networks.
Chung et al. (2009) addressed a train-
sequencing problem encountered in the
Korean railway with a hybrid genetic algo-
rithm. Taking into account the design factors
of passenger choice behaviours and uncertain
market demands, Yan and Tang (2009) pro-
vided a new intercity bus scheduling models.
Zhao et al. (2006) studied how to determine
an optimal slack in the schedule, which mini-
mized passengers’ expected waiting times by
applying a D/G/c queue model. Liebchen
(2008) applied mathematical programming
techniques successfully in producing timeta-
bles of the Berlin subway.
• Drivers scheduling. Kwan and Kwan (2007)
modelled a large and/or complex driver sched-
uling problem as a set covering/partitioning in-
teger linear programming, and they combined
an iterative heuristic approach and an existing ef-
ficient set to solve the problem. Gome et al. (2006)
solved a crew-scheduling problem when the
cases of cover crew resources were considered.
Their objective was to balance the number of
driving and backup crews. Yang et al. (2005)
looked into taxi working schedules in an equilib-
rium way and integrated an inner penalty
method in the Frank–Wolfe algorithm to solve
the clock network problem. To resolve the dis-
ruptions in a railway operating schedule, Walker
et al. (2005) developed an optimization model
allowing the train timetable alternative and
crewing roster to be made simultaneously.
• Routing. Cordeau and Laporte (2007) studied
the problem of route selections in a dial-a-ride
business; their purposes were to reduce cost
while accommodating as many users as possible
with given resources. Coslovich et al. (2006a,
2006b) dealt with a dynamic dial-a-ride problem
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with a two-phase algorithm based on route
perturbations. Jorgensen et al. (2007) applied
a genetic algorithm to solve a dial-a-ride prob-
lem. Hong et al. (2009) presented a two-phase
routing algorithm to cover a weekly train
timetable with minimized working days and
train-sets. Branke et al. (2005) considered the
problem of vehicle routing where unantici-
pated customers arrive at unknown locations
and when the vehicles are already on the
way. Gunluk et al. (2006) presented a decision
support system to assist a sedan service pro-
vider in scheduling driver shifts and routing
the fleet to satisfy customers’ demands within
tight time windows. Tavares-Pereira et al.
(2007) studied the transportation pricing
system based on partitioning the territory into
homogeneous zones. They modelled it as a
multiple-criteria districting problem and
applied an evolutionary algorithm with local
search to solve large-size instances.
• Network design. Nielsen and Frederiksen (2006)
were concerned with a public transit assign-
ment problem with an increased complexity of
considered passengers’ choices of routes; they
applied the method of successive averages to
solve the problem. Schöbel (2005) considered
the set-up of stop locations to cover the given
demand points with a minimal number of stops
and proved that it could be solved within the
polynomial time. Marín and García-Ródenas
(2009) studied the locations of a rapid transit
urban railway network to maximize the transit
demands and minimize the private travel time;
the design factors under consideration included
users’ behaviours, physical networks, budget
constraints, and other network constraints.
Mauttone and Urquhart (2009) presented a con-
structive algorithm for public transportation
networks to produce bus routes with the consid-
eration of users and operators. Odijk et al. (2006)
discussed the problem of randomly sampling
classes of fixed-interval railway timetables from
a so-called timetable structure. Delorme et al.
(2009) evaluated the stability of timetable by
using an original method based on delay propa-
gation. Heilporn et al. (2008) presented two
equivalent mixed-integer linear programming
models in defining the wait/depart policies that
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minimize total delays in a public intermodal
transportation network. Mateus et al. (2008)
described a multicriterion decision analysis
approach for the design of high-speed railway
stations; the best alternative was identified
from the given set of possible alternatives.
Sun and Gao (2007) modelled the equilibrium
of a public urban transport system as a set of
mathematical equations; the model was to
describe the competitions among operators
and mutual influences among passengers.
Vromans et al. (2006) attempted to improve
network reliability by decreasing the inter-
dependence of trains through the reduction
of the running time differences per track
section. Yalcınkaya and Bayhan (2009) devel-
oped a discrete-event simulation model to
deal with average passenger travel time
optimization problem related to the metro
planning process. Borndörfer et al. (2007)
proposed a new multicommodity flow model
to find lines and corresponding frequencies
in a network to minimize operating costs
and passengers’ travel times. Quadrifoglio
et al. (2006) developed the bounds on the
maximum longitudinal velocity to evaluate
the performance and help the design of mobil-
ity allowance shuttle transit services of buses.
• Resource allocation. Fioole et al. (2006) addressed
the problem of rolling stock circulation in
assigning rolling stocks to the timetabled
services; the departure and arrival times and
the expected numbers of passengers were
given. Alfieri et al. (2006) tried to determine
the appropriate numbers of train units with
mixed types and their efficient circulation on a
single line. Hamdouni et al. (2007) discussed
assigning buses to the depot parking slots to
minimize the number of mismatches through
a decomposition approach. Vaidyanathan et al.
(2008) studied the problem of assigning
each locomotive to a sequence of trains, which
was a very large-scale combinatorial optimiza-
tion problem. Taking into consideration
reliability, availability, and maintainability,
Carrese and Ottone (2006) examined mainte-
nance management and developed two models
to forecast time and operating costs to maintain
rolling stocks.
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Logistic Transportation
In a logistic transportation network, two major
participators are the companies who offer trans-
portation service and the customers who have
goods to be transported. Besides, the infrastructure
resources to support transportation processes,
such as terminals and warehouses, also play signif-
icant roles.
(1) Facilities-related decision problems
A few of the researches are about the allocations of
resources at terminals. Dell’Olmo and Lulli (2004)
represented terminals as a network of substructures
with shared resources, and the problem was
defined as allocating resources to substructures to
minimize total delays over the network. Lau and
Zhao (2008) scheduled mixed material-handling
equipment in an integrated way to improve the
productivity of an automated container terminal.
Kim and Park (2004) discussed the problem of
scheduling quay cranes in port terminals and for-
mulated it as a mixed-integer programming model
with various constraints. Caris and Janssens (2009)
modelled the drayage of containers in the service
area of an intermodal terminal and proposed a
two-phase insertion heuristic algorithm to solve
the problem. Cordeau et al. (2007) studied the
service allocation problem in the yard management
of a container transshipment terminal to minimize
container rehandling operations. Hansen et al.
(2008) studied the problem of berth allocation to
allocate space along the quayside to incoming ships
at a container terminal; two design factors under
consideration were total cost and earliness or tardi-
ness of handling. Imai et al. (2007) addressed a berth
allocation problem by a genetic algorithm at a
multi-user container terminal with indented berths
for fast handling. Lee and Chen (2009) studied a
berth scheduling problem to determine berthing
time and space for each incoming ship by a
neighbourhood-search-based heuristic algorithm.
Lim and Xu (2006) proposed an effective meta-
heuristic procedure, named critical-shaking
neighbourhood search, to deal with the yard alloca-
tion problem at the port of Singapore authority. Lim
et al. (2004b) examined port crane scheduling to
maximize throughput and provided a dynamic
programming algorithm as a solver. Vis et al.
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Operations Research in Service Industries
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(2005) studied a vehicle planning problem in
minimizing vehicle fleet size such that the transpor-
tation of each container started within its time
window. Legato and Monaco (2004) considered
the manpower planning problem with the consid-
eration of uncertain workforce demands and time-
continuous efficiency. Corry and Kozan (2006)
aimed at improving the dynamic load planning
of trains in an intermodal terminal with numerous
uncertainties. Zeng and Yang (2009) developed
a simulation optimization method to schedule
loading operations in container terminals.
(2) Operations of carriers
Researches on operations of carriers are classified
into the related topics of markets, pricing,
network design, capacity management, driver
scheduling, vehicle maintenance, routing, and in-
tegrated planning as discussed in the following.
• Markets. Mudrageda and Murphy (2008)
presented a market model for petroleum tank
vessels to forecast profit rate and facilitate
decision-making in a marine transportation
company; it was based on an economic analysis
of transportation services. Lim et al. (2008)
discussed a situation where customers decided
to allocate the freights to carriers through an
auction process with the goal of minimized cost
and quarantined volumes. Ağrali et al. (2008)
developed a two-stage stochastic model to ana-
lyse the effect of a logistics spot market on firms,
local carriers, and in-transit carriers. Krajewska
et al. (2008) were concerned with the freight
carrier coalition and applied the cooperative
game theory to meet all of the customer
demands and determine a fair profit allocation.
• Pricing. Lin and Liao (2006) studied the prob-
lem of price planning for time-definite freight
delivery carriers through the computation of
a Cournot–Nash equilibrium. Geunes et al.
(2007) proposed approximation models to esti-
mate the impact of pricing on the delivery
services when the demands vary with pricing.
Yano and Newman (2007) considered structur-
ing long-term customer contracts including
prices that differed by day of week and by
speed of service and formulated the pricing
problem as a biconvex optimization model.
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Figliozzi et al. (2007) studied the decision-
making of carrier pricing under a competitive
and dynamic environment.
• Network design. Campbell (2009) provided time-
definite models for the problem of multiple allo-
cations of p-hub medians and hub arc locations
with imposed service levels for a truck transpor-
tation service. Sim et al. (2009) presented a
stochastic p-hub centre problem with service-
level constraints for small package delivery
companies. Cunha and Silva (2007) proposed a
genetic algorithm to solve the problem of config-
uring hub-and-spoke networks operating less-
than-truckload services in Brazil. Bock (2010)
proposed a new real-time-oriented control
approach to enhance the efficiency of a freight
transportation network, which integrated
multimodal transportation and multiple trans-
shipments. Jansen et al. (2004) studied an opera-
tional planning system with consideration of
the repositioning aspects and the orders to obtain
cost-efficient solutions. Liu et al. (2008) devel-
oped a mathematical programming formulation
and solution to a yard location problem in a
railway system. Chen et al. (2008) conducted a
strategic design of a delivery network used in
providing time-constrained services.
• Capacity management. Adelman (2007) studied
the policy for an intermodal logistics supplier to
allocate its shipping containers in a closed queu-
ing network; the problem was formulated as a
semi-Markov decision process with consider-
ation of queuing and stock-out effect on the net-
work. Sayarshad and Ghoseiri (2009) proposed
a new simulation solution to the optimization
of the fleet size and freight car allocation in a rail-
car network. Ang et al. (2007) considered the
problem of sea cargo mixing and modelled it as
a multiple-knapsack programming problem
subject to given shipping capacities. Chew et al.
(2006) proposed a stochastic programming
model for short-term capacity planning of air
cargo space. Coslovich et al. (2006b) focused on
fleet management in the container trucking
industry to minimize the cost divided into
routing cost, resource assignment cost, and
container repositioning cost. Li et al. (2007a)
formulated a policy for emptying containers
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Syst. Res.
among multiports. Li et al. (2009c) studied load-
ing planning to minimize the total freight cost
under a given number of rented containers and
proposed a new large-scale neighbourhood
search heuristic algorithm to address the issue.
Sambracos et al. (2004) discussed the impact of
small containers and new technologies on re-
engineering of coastal freight shipping.
Anderson and Christiansen (2009) presented a
mixed-integer programming for new rail-based
freight transportation services to maximize the
profit of the system.
• Driver scheduling. To improve the satisfactory
level of service, Genta and Muñoz (2007) ap-
plied a linear regression approach to estimate
the productivity of drivers in driver scheduling
of a home delivery business. Erera et al. (2008)
dealt with dynamic driver scheduling for less-
than-truckload trucking carriers. Kan and Hall
(2006) formulated a static linear programming
model in a long-haul trucking network and pro-
posed a column generation algorithm to solve
the model, so that drivers were able to return
home within a reasonable amount of time. Uster
and Maheshwari (2007) presented a multizone
dispatching method to reduce driver tour
lengths under the constraints reinforced by the
truck companies and customers. Cheung et al.
(2005) solved the problem of assigning drivers
to cover tasks within service time windows by
formulating it as a stochastic model and apply-
ing an adaptive labelling procedure capable of
incorporating various practical constraints and
work rules.
• Vehicle scheduling. BrZnmo et al. (2007) presented
a multistart local search heuristic algorithm in a
ship scheduling problem. De Angelis et al.
(2007) dealt with weekly planning in the world
food programme for the deliveries of emergent
food aid by air in Angola. Lo and Hall (2008)
designed a real-time logistics information
system for express transportation carriers to pre-
dict travel time and facilitate scheduling.
Krajewska and Kopfer (2009) applied a tabu
search algorithm for integrated planning of
vehicles in freight forwarding companies with
the possibilities of outsourcing the requests via
subcontracting. Song and Earl (2008) studied
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Syst. Res.
the determination of control policies for empty
vehicle repositioning and fleet sizing in a two-
depot service system with uncertainties. Kim
and Lee (2007) introduced a scheduling method
for trucks delivering and picking up freights
between branch offices and a regional depot in
door-to-door delivery services. Root and Cohn
(2008) provided a modelling approach for
express package carriers to schedulelarge
numbers of heavily interconnected and tightly
constrained resources. To increase the utilization
of a locomotive fleet, Kuo and Nicholls (2007)
developed a mixed-integer linear program to de-
termine the least-cost plan of allocating locomo-
tives to yards and moving light engines between
yards. Ergun et al. (2007) discussed enabling
technologies to assist in the identification of re-
peatable, dedicated truckload continuous move
tours with little truck repositioning. Schenk and
Klabjan (2008) dealt with the decision-making
involved in sorting at stations, ramps, and
transportation among the locations of an
express carrier.
• Routing. Chang (2008) formulated and
studied an international intermodal routing
problem as a multi-objective, multimodal, and
multicommodity flow model under the con-
straints of time windows and concave costs.
Branchini et al. (2009) considered dynamical
updating to accommodate new customers to
maximize the expected profit through an adap-
tive granular local search heuristic algorithm.
Groer et al. (2009) solved a variant of the
classical vehicle routing problem with higher
service requirements for the small-package
shipping industry and formulated it as a
mixed-integer program. Caramia and Guerriero
(2009) depicted a long-haul freight transporta-
tion problem into a multi-objective vehicle
routing model where the travel time and route
cost were minimized and the transportation
mean sharing index is maximized. Agarwal
and Ergun (2008) presented an integrated
mixed-integer linear program to schedule ships
and cargo routes simultaneously. Ceselli et al.
(2009) introduced a column generation
algorithm in providing a daily plan of vehicles
that departed from different depots for
multideliveries to a set of customers.
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Operations Research in Service Industries
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Fleischmann et al. (2004) introduced a dynamic
routing system that dispatched a fleet of
vehicles on the basis of randomly arriving cus-
tomers’ orders. Zhong et al. (2007) modelled
the delivery of local packages to optimize vehi-
cle dispatching routes with the consideration
of the varied customers’ locations and demands.
Ichoua et al. (2006) were concerned with the
dynamic vehicle routing and dispatching with
a strategy based on probabilistic knowledge
about future request arrivals. Larsen et al.
(2004) examined a travelling salesman problem
with time windows to minimize lateness moti-
vated by the overnight mail service. Si et al.
(2009) studied an arc-routing problem in small-
package delivery to construct efficient master
routes. Sigurd et al. (2004) considered the
problem of a variant of vehicle routings in the
transportation of live animals to avoid the
spread of diseases. Thomas and White (2004)
discussed minimization of the total cost of a
route from an origin to an anticipated
destination by responding to service requests
when a vehicle was en route. Thomas (2007)
took advantage of the information of customer
locations and probabilistic information
about future service requests to maximize the
expected number of customers served by a
single incapacitated vehicle.
• Integrated planning. Ceselli et al. (2008) studied
the cargo express service of Swiss federal rail-
ways in Switzerland and presented three differ-
ent models to plan operations of the service.
Cohn et al. (2007) suggested considering the
problems of load matching and equipment
balancing simultaneously in small-package
deliveries. Gendreau et al. (2006a) applied the
tabu search algorithm to solve the routing of
capacitated vehicles and loading of freight
transportations. Li and Tayur (2005) developed
a mathematical model for pricing and planning
of service in a real transportation system. In
some circumstances, the operations in transpor-
tation and facilities are strongly coupled, and
these operations should be scheduled simulta-
neously. For example, Boros et al. (2008)
discussed the interconnection of the port and
the shipping company in such a way that empty
containers were accumulated at the port.
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Postal Service
Bard et al. (2007) described a staff planning and
scheduling problem with the uncertainties of
demands in mail processing and distribution;
they developed a two-stage stochastic integer
program to minimize the weekly cost of work-
force. Bard and Wan (2008) were concerned with
the problem of determining the optimal size and
the composition of a permanent workforce.
General Operations
Li et al. (2007b) provided a solution to the
rescheduling problems of single-depot vehicles;
the main purpose was to minimize operational
costs and reduce delays. Son and Carter (2008)
discussed the redistribution problem of empty
vehicles in a hub-and-spoke transportation sys-
tem with the design factors of random demands
and stochastic transportation times. Sungur et al.
(2008) applied a robust optimization approach
to solve a vehicle routing problem with uncertain
demands. Bräysy et al. (2008) presented a deter-
ministic heuristic algorithm to optimize fleet
sizes and mixes.
Summary
Operations research has been applied to diversi-
fied topics in transportation and warehousing indus-
tries in recent years, from decisions at strategic
levels, such as public transit design (Nielsen and
Frederiksen, 2006) and market structure forecast
(Mudrageda and Murphy, 2008), to decisions at
operational levels, such resource allocation (Lau
and Zhao, 2008) and route choices (Cordeau and
Laporte, 2007). Table 6 has summarized the main
topics covered by OR studies in this field. The
most attractive subject is crew planning, especially
in passenger transport industries. It can be at a
higher level of long-range manpower planning
(Sohoni et al., 2004) or a lower level of crew
rostering (Kohl and Karisch, 2004). Besides, OR
on intermodal transportation systems is an emerg-
ing hot topic (Macharis and Bontekoning, 2004).
Besides forecasting models and equilibrium
models, most of the studies developed optimiza-
tion models to represent their decisions. Even the
majority of problems can be modelled as classic
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Syst. Res.
optimization problems; the resulting models can
be challenging and very complex when the specific
characteristics in an actual industrial environment
are considered. Therefore, many reported works
have contributed to more efficient algorithms or
procedures to solve complex problems. Various
approximation approaches and heuristic algo-
rithms have been proposed to obtained near-
optimization solutions. Besides, some commercial
decision support systems have been developed.
Human Health and Social Assistance
Industries
In this section, OR work in human healthcare ser-
vices and social assistance services is surveyed.
The reason for merging these two industries is
that related OR is hard to distinguish from each
other. There are medical activities by hospitals
at one end and social work by special institutions
at the other end; moreover, there are some activi-
ties providing both services in between such as
residential care. The practitioners of OR, medical
personnel, or social workers all have the required
professional expertise. Right after World War II,
researchers observed the similarities of military
operations and OR in hospitals, that is, the timely
deployment of scarce resources to meet critical
and partly uncontrollable demands (Flagle,
2002). It was suggested that continuous research
and implementation should be performed to OR
in the healthcare application. OR in this field
was then expanded from those in hospitals to
public health services.
Whether in developed countries or underde-
veloped countries, the biggest problem is that
the resources of healthcare systems are always
in short supply compared with the demands
from citizens. Therefore, the emphasis of OR
studies in this field is on the optimal utilization
of all kinds of resources to improve the effective-
ness and efficiency of the system. In general, OR
is a vital tool to support effective planning and
management decisions (Brandeau et al., 2005)
for various activities, for example, from system
planning and organizing at a higher level to
delivering and distributing at a lower level.
System planning and organizing include the
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Table 6 Topics of OR in transportation and warehousing industries
Sub-industries
Airline industry
Public transportation
Logistic transportation industry
Transportation Facilities
Container terminals
Transportation Companies
Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Operations Research in Service Industries
RESEARCH PAPER
Examples
Flight scheduling (Barnhart and Cohn, 2004; Kim and Barnhart, 2007;
Lee et al., 2007; Yan et al., 2007; Abdelghany et al., 2008)
Runway planning (Hansen, 2004; Pinol and Beasley, 2006; Atkin et al.,
2007; Bäuerle et al., 2007)
Fleet planning (Rosenberger et al., 2004; Sherali et al., 2005; Belanger et
al., 2006; Grönkvist, 2006; Sherali et al., 2006; Smith and Johnson, 2006;
Pilla et al., 2008; Haouari et al., 2009)
Crew planning (Abdelghany et al., 2004; Freling et al., 2004; Hao et al.,
2004; Kohl and Karisch, 2004; Sohoni et al., 2004; Guo et al., 2006; Xu
et al., 2006; Lu
cić and Teodorović, 2007; Yang et al., 2008)
Terminal performance (Andreatta et al., 2007; Bazargan, 2007; Chu,
2007; Dorndorf et al., 2007; McLay et al., 2007; Drexl and Nikulin, 2008)
Seat-inventory policy (Zhang and Cooper, 2005; Cooper and Gupta,
2006; Mukhopadhyay et al., 2007; Schipper et al., 2007; Currie et al.,
2008; Marcus and Anderson, 2008; Zhang and Cooper, 2009)
Revenue management (Bish et al., 2004; Liu and van Ryzin, 2008; van
Ryzin and Vulcano, 2008; Yao et al., 2008a)
Other operations (Goto et al., 2004)
Strategic planning (Wen and Hsu, 2006)
Evaluation (Ouellette et al., 2010)
Vehicle scheduling (Calvo et al., 2004; Zhou and Zhong, 2005; Dessouky
et al., 2006; Fügenschuh and Martin, 2006; Kliewer et al., 2006;
Vansteenwegen and Oudheusden, 2006; Zhao et al., 2006; Maróti and
Kroon, 2007; Flamini and Pacciarelli, 2008; Liebchen, 2008; Chung et
al., 2009; Yan and Tang, 2009)
Driver scheduling (Walker et al., 2005; Yang et al., 2005; Gome et al.,
2006; Kwan and Kwan, 2007)
Parking assignment (Hamdouni et al., 2007)
Routing (Branke et al., 2005; Coslovich et al., 2006b; Cordeau and
Laporte, 2007; Jorgensen et al., 2007)
Integrated planning (Gunluk et al., 2006)
Pricing (Tavares-Pereira et al., 2007)
Public transit design (Schöbel, 2005; Nielsen and Frederiksen, 2006;
Quadrifoglio et al., 2006; Borndörfer et al., 2007; Sun and Gao, 2007;
Heilporn et al., 2008; Mateus et al., 2008; Delorme et al., 2009; Marín
and García-Ródenas, 2009; Mauttone and Urquhart, 2009; Yalcınkaya
and Bayhan, 2009)
Resource allocation (Alfieri et al., 2006; Fioole et al., 2006; Hamdouni
et al., 2007; Vaidyanathan et al., 2008)
Maintenance decisions (Carrese and Ottone, 2006)
Resource allocation (Dell’Olmo and Lulli, 2004; Kim and Park, 2004;
Lim et al., 2004b; Vis et al., 2005; Lim and Xu, 2006; Cordeau et al.,
2007; Hansen et al., 2008; Lau and Zhao, 2008; Caris and Janssens,
2009; Lee and Chen, 2009)
Load planning (Corry and Kozan, 2006; Zeng and Yang, 2009)
Manpower planning (Legato and Monaco, 2004)
Market behaviour(AgralI et al., 2008; Krajewska et al., 2008; Lim et al.,
2008; Mudrageda and Murphy, 2008)
Pricing (Lin and Liao, 2006; Figliozzi et al., 2007; Geunes et al., 2007;
Yano and Newman, 2007)
(Continues)
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Table 6 (Continued)
Sub-industries Examples

Network design (Cunha and Silva, 2007; Chen et al., 2008; Liu et al.,
2008; Campbell, 2009; Sim et al., 2009; Bock, 2010)
Revenue/Capacity management (Sambracos et al., 2004; Chew et al.,
2006; Coslovich et al., 2006a; Adelman, 2007; Ang et al., 2007; Li et al.,
2007a; Anderson and Christiansen, 2009; Li et al., 2009a; Sayarshad
and Ghoseiri, 2009)
Staff scheduling (Cheung et al., 2005; Kan and Hall, 2006; Genta and
Muñoz, 2007; Uster and Maheshwari, 2007; Erera et al., 2008)
Vehicle scheduling (BrZnmo et al., 2007; de Angelis et al., 2007; Ergun et
al., 2007; Kim and Lee, 2007; Kuo and Nicholls, 2007; Lo and Hall, 2008;
Root and Cohn, 2008; Schenk and Klabjan, 2008; Song and Earl, 2008;
Krajewska and Kopfer, 2009)
Transportation routing (Fleischmann et al., 2004; Larsen et al., 2004;
Sigurd et al., 2004; Thomas and White, 2004; Ichoua et al., 2006;
Thomas, 2007; Zhong et al., 2007; Agarwal and Ergun, 2008; Chang,
2008; Branchini et al., 2009; Caramia and Guerriero, 2009; Ceselli et al.,
2009; Groer et al., 2009; Si et al., 2009)
Integrated studies (Li and Tayur, 2005; Gendreau et al., 2006a, 2006b;
Cohn et al., 2007; Ceselli et al., 2008)
Vessel scheduling (Boros et al., 2008)
Postal service
Mail crew scheduling (Bard et al., 2007; Bard and Wan, 2008)
General Operations
Vehicle rescheduling (Li et al., 2007b; Song and Earl, 2008)
Vehicle routing (Bräysy et al., 2008; Sungur et al., 2008)

economics and structure of the system and Delivery in Healthcare Service

other healthcare-related public policies regarding
health care; service delivery involves planning
clinical practices and managerial operations of
healthcare work. It has been speculated from this
survey that the researches on these aspects have
been growing in recent years.
System Planning and Organizing
Rouse and Swales (2006) reported the success-
ful application of DEA in pricing public
healthcare services in the public health sector
of New Zealand since 1997. Chalabi et al.
(2008) proposed a two-stage stochastic mathe-
matical programming to allocate resources
within and between healthcare programmes
when the budget was exogenous and healthcare
models included variables and uncertainties.
McCleanh and Millard (2007) applied a Markov
reward model to transport patients within a
healthcare system.
Operations research in service delivery has been
classified into OR related to activities in clinical
practices, management practices, other location
problems, appointment scheduling, surgery plan-
ning, ambulance scheduling, human resource, cost
management, capability planning, and hybrid
problems.
(1) Clinical practices. A number of researches
have been conducted on clinical practices of
organ transplants to allocate organs to poten-
tial patients. Alagoz et al. (2004) focused on
the determination of the best time to conduct
the liver transplantation from a living donor
to maximize total pretransplant and post-
transplant reward of the patient. Su and
Zenios (2004) developed a queuing model to
examine the influence of patients’ choices on
the high rate of organ refusals in the kidney
transplant waiting system. Su and Zenios
(2006) considered a matching problem to find
the most suitable candidate to maximize the

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328 Yiting Xing et al.

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social welfare, which was represented by
aggregate utility for efficiency and minimum
utility over patients for equity. Kunene and
Weistroffer (2008) modelled the factors in
definitive care to maximize patient outcome
in brain trauma patients. Liu and Kapur
(2008) focused on the development of quan-
titative dynamic models to measure the life
quality of patients with multistage diseases
using disutility functions. Shechter et al.
(2008) presented a model of the
replacement of medical therapies to
maximize a patient’s expected lifetime (or
quality-adjusted lifetime) and developed a
general algorithm for scheduling therapies.
Preciado-Walters et al. (2004) investigated
the planning problem of the treatments of
intensity-modulated radiation therapy to
choose external beam angles and their
corresponding intensity maps to maximize
tumour dose subject to the tolerance of sur-
rounding healthy tissues. Kreke et al. (2008)
presented a general model to determine
when to discharge a patient with a
pneumonia-related sepsis from hospital.
Ceglowski et al. (2007) provided a discrete-
event simulation model incorporating core
patient treatments for operation analysis.
Cooper et al. (2008) modelled patient path-
ways in the treatment of coronary heart
disease to quantify the health gain and cost.
(2) Management practices. Araz et al. (2007)
studied the locations of emergency service
vehicles and proposed a multi-objective
model to determine the base locations for a
limited number of vehicles with the design
criteria of coverage, backup coverage, and to-
tal excess travel distance. Rajagopalan et al.
(2008) examined the dynamic relocation/
redeployment of ambulances in response to
fluctuating demands to determine the
minimum number of ambulances and their
locations. Tavakoli and Lightner (2004) pro-
posed a mathematical modelling approach
for locating/allocating emergency vehicles
and facilities to increase the number of
response calls within the 8-min national aver-
age. Erkut et al. (2008) proposed new location
models for emergency medical service
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Operations Research in Service Industries
RESEARCH PAPER
stations to maximize survival of patients.
Iannoni et al. (2009) presented a method to
support two combined configuration deci-
sions: locating ambulance bases along the
highway and districting response segments.
Gendreau et al. (2006b) provided a dynamic
relocation strategy for emergency vehicles to
maximize the demands to be covered.
(3) Other location problems. Galvão et al. (2006a)
studied the location of healthcare facilities
for maternal and perinatal assistance to
reduce perinatal mortality; a three-level
hierarchical model was developed to solve
the problem. Galvão et al. (2006b) provided
a capacitated model for the location
problem of perinatal facilities and solved it
by a Lagrangian heuristic algorithm.
Johnson et al. (2005) were concerned with
the problem of facility locations for the
elderly; the developed models were with
different objective functions: the minimiza-
tion of consumer disutility and unserved
demands and the maximization of utiliza-
tion. Ndiaye and Alfares (2008) formulated
the location problem of public services for
nomadic population groups as a binary-
integer programming model to determine
the number and locations of primary health
units. Sahin et al. (2007) developed several
mathematical models to solve the location
allocation decision problems in the regional-
ization of blood services. Doerner et al.
(2007) provided a multiobjective combinato-
rial optimization formulation for the loca-
tion routing problem of mobile healthcare
facilities. Smith et al. (2009) planned commu-
nity health schemes in rural areas of
developing countries. Zhang et al. (2009)
provided a methodology for designing a
network of preventive healthcare facilities
to maximize participation. Harper et al.
(2005a) applied a geographical simulation
as a location allocation model for the recom-
mendation of the configuration of a hub-
and-spoke policy. Silva and Serra (2008) pro-
posed a covering model of emergency ser-
vices with different priority levels of
patients. Harper et al. (2005b) developed a
simulation model of the geographical
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location allocation to evaluate the provision
of health services.
(4) Appointment scheduling. Green et al. (2006)
studied diagnostic facilities planning with
appointment schedule and real-time capac-
ity allocation. The problem was formulated
as a finite-horizon dynamic program, and
properties of the optimal policies were iden-
tified. As patients could miss appointments,
LaGanga and Lawrence (2007) considered
this situation and proposed appointment
overbooking as a means to reduce the
negative impact. Qu et al. (2007) presented
a closed-form approach to determine the
optimal percentage of open-access appoint-
ments and match daily provider capacity
to demand. Vissers et al. (2007) built a simu-
lation model to examine the impact of
the admission plan in a simplified hospital
setting. Vasilakis et al. (2007) compared two
methods of scheduling outpatient clinic
appointments in the setting where the
availability of surgeons for appointments
depended on other clinical activities.
Muthuraman and Lawley (2008) formulated
a stochastic overbooking model and devel-
oped an appointment scheduling policy for
outpatient clinics. Gupta and Denton (2008)
modelled a healthcare delivery system
with particular attention to the factors that
challenged appointment scheduling. Green
and Savin (2008) conceptualized an appoint-
ment system as a single-server queuing
system in which customers had a state-
dependent probability of not being served
and might rejoin the queue. Cayirli et al.
(2008) investigated two patient classification
approaches in the appointment system:
using patient classification only for sequenc-
ing patient appointments and using patient
classification for both sequencing and ap-
pointment interval adjustment.
(5) Surgery planning. Hans et al. (2008) considered
the problem of robust surgery loading for a
hospital’s operating department to maximize
capacity utilization and minimize the risk of
overtime. Cardoen et al. (2009) investigated
the sequencing of surgical cases in a day-
care facility and applied the column
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330
Syst. Res.
generation to solve the sequencing problem.
Beliën and Demeulemeester (2007) developed
several algorithms with mixed-integer
programming and heuristic approach to min-
imize the total bed shortage in scheduling
bed occupancies. Lamiri et al. (2008a) de-
scribed a stochastic model to plan operating
rooms with two types of surgery demands.
Pham and Klinkert (2008) proposed a new
approach to schedule surgical cases; the
multimode blocking job-shop scheduling
approach was extended to solve the problem
of surgery scheduling. Taking into consider-
ation the cases where operating rooms were
shared by elective and emergency patients,
Lamiri et al. (2008b) integrated a stochastic
mathematical programming model and a col-
umn generation approach to address the
problem of elective surgery planning. Persson
and Persson (2009) provided a simulation-
based approach to schedule a queue of
patients for surgery within a certain time
frame. Gupta (2007) identified a variety of ac-
tivities for mangers to deal with in surgical
suites, analysed three typical activities in de-
tail, and proposed the corresponding models
to support decision-making in these activities.
(6) Ambulance scheduling. Iannoni et al. (2008)
were concerned with the dispatching
scheme of ambulances on highways involv-
ing partial backups and multiple dispatches;
the confliction of the goals of the satisfactory
level of users and the utilization rate of
ambulances was discussed, and the hyper-
cube model was integrated into a genetic
algorithm to optimize the configuration and
operation of the system. Melachrinoudis
et al. (2007) proposed a double-request dial-
a-ride model to minimize total cost of vehicle
transportation and the inconvenience time of
patients in a healthcare organization.
(7) OR relating to other healthcare resources. Fei et al.
(2008) studied an ‘open strategy’ to schedule
operation rooms; their objectives were to
maximize the utilization of operating rooms
and to minimize overtime cost, and the
column-generation-based heuristic procedure
was proposed to obtain the best approximated
solution. Chern et al. (2008) applied a heuristic
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Yiting Xing et al.
Syst. Res.
algorithm to schedule health examinations
efficiently and effectively. Conforti et al.
(2010) presented an innovative solution to
schedule a set of patients needing radiother-
apy; their objective was to minimize the
mean waiting time or maximize the number
of treated patients. Goddard and Tavakoli
(2008) developed a queuing model for
waiting lists in public health service and
analysed the patient welfare of different
systems. Patrick and Puterman (2007) consid-
ered increasing the utilization of resources
and reducing waiting times of patients in
the presence of uncertain demands. To reduce
the anxiety experienced by the participants,
Pilgrim and Chilcott (2008) simulated and
analysed the options with a potential to facil-
itate a 7-day turnaround of cervical screening
results. Van Der Meer et al. (2005) discussed
and applied a discrete-event simulation to
reduce waiting times for patients with the first
outpatient appointment or the subsequent
commencement of in-patient treatment. Li
et al. (2009b) introduced a multi-objective
decision-assisting model to allocate beds in
hospital on the basis of the queuing theory
and goal programming.
(8) OR relating to human resource. Human
resource is another type of resource to be
scheduled. The problem of crew scheduling
have been studied since the 1950s; at that
time, nurses were in short supply. In recent
years, more complicated situations have
been considered for this area. Bertels and
Fahle (2006) addressed the problem of
rostering nurses for home care service to
minimize transportation cost and maximize
the satisfaction levels of patients and nurses.
Isken (2004) addressed the problem of staff
scheduling in healthcare institutions; an im-
plicit tour scheduling model was developed
to find a set of tours to minimize total cost of
the tours. Moz and Pato (2004) considered
rerostering nurses when the prescheduled
shifts could not be accomplished; two
integer flow models were presented and
compared in solving the problem. Parr and
Thompson (2007) introduced algorithms to
schedule nurses with the objectives of
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Operations Research in Service Industries
RESEARCH PAPER
ensuring sufficient nurses and reducing
cost; both the SAWing and noising with
simulated annealing were used to quantify
objective functions, and it was concluded
that noising produced better schedules.
Azaiez and Al Sharif (2005) developed a
nurse scheduling model with consideration
of benefits of both hospitals and nurses.
Gutjahr and Rauner (2007) proposed the
ant colony optimization approach
firstly for nurse scheduling. Ahmed and
Alkhamis (2009) presented a simulation-
based approach to determine the optimal
number of doctors, lab technicians, and
nurses to ensure the patient throughput
and reduce waiting time of patients
subject to budget restrictions. Beliën and
Demeulemeester (2006) described an exact
branch-and-price method to schedule
trainees. Eveborn et al. (2006) developed a
method to schedule visits of home cares
for care providers with consideration of
the restrictions and subjective objectives.
Topaloglu (2009) addressed the problem of
scheduling medical residents in different
clinical settings. Alexopoulos et al. (2008)
developed improved methods to model
and simulate the streams of patients arriv-
ing at a community clinic.
(9) Capacity planning. Cochran and Roche (2009)
derived an open queuing network model
for an emergency department to increase
the department capacity to treat patients, by
introducing a new paradigm to reduce
‘walk-away’ cases to increase the access rate.
Litvak et al. (2008) proposed a cooperative so-
lution by presenting a mathematical method
to compute the number of regional beds for
any given acceptance rate. Suthummanon
and Omachonu (2008) developed the models
for cost per admission and cost per patient
day in a teaching hospital to determine the
value of the length of stays; the purpose
was to minimize cost per patient day.
Seireich and Marmor (2005) introduced a
simulation tool for the cost control for
hospital management. Nicholson et al.
(2004) addressed the issue of managing
inventory costs in a healthcare setting.
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Katsaliaki and Brailsford (2007) modelled the
entire blood supply chain for the hospital to
improve blood inventory policy.
(10) Hybrid problems. Bertels and Fahle (2006)
studied the design of rosters in home health
care, and they took into account the staff
rostering and vehicle routing to minimize
transportation cost and maximize the satis-
faction of patients and nurses. Beliën and
Demeulemeester (2006) applied a column
generation technique to schedule nurses and
operation rooms simultaneously. Beraldi
et al. (2004) developed a stochastic program-
ming model with probabilistic constraints
to locate emergency service sites and select
the sizes of vehicles. Griffin et al. (2008) devel-
oped an optimization model to determine
the locations, number, and levels of service
of new community healthcare centres. Brent
et al. (2007) combined an analytic hierarchy
process with a life cycle management
approach to minimize infection of patients
and workers. Prior (2006) applied the EDA
and the Malnquist productivity index to ana-
lyse the efficiency and quality of hospitals.
Singer and Donoso (2008) used the queuing
theory to assess the performance of an
ambulance service and optimized the geo-
graphical coverage of bases. Takeda et al.
(2007) conducted a comparative analysis of
the effect of decentralizing ambulances and
adding new ambulances to the system in
contrast to the centralized system. Butler and
Li (2005) used EDA to assess the effectiveness
of the resource utilization in hospitals.
De Moraes et al. (2010) studied the insufficient
use of healthcare equipment and used the
multicriteria analysis methodology to obtain
benchmarkers and identify opportunities for
improvement. Filipe et al. (2008) provided a
critical review on the evaluation of primary
healthcare providers using DEA. Liberatore
and Nydick (2008) presented a literature re-
view of the analytic hierarchy process for its
application on decision-making in healthcare.
Nahra et al. (2009) conducted a two-stage anal-
ysis on efficiency of outpatient substance
abuse treatments. Oddoye et al. (2007, 2009)
described a combination of simulation model
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332
Syst. Res.
and goal programming for the assessment
and planning of healthcare resource alloca-
tions. Oliveira and Bevan (2008) developed a
generic model for the estimation of ‘unavoid-
able’ hospital costs. Ouellette and Vierstraete
(2004) modified the EDA by introducing
quasifixed inputs and applied it in a hospital
emergency service. Leonard et al. (2005)
elaborated the relationship of the investment
and the effectiveness of a healthcare system
and applied OR techniques to justify the
investment. Shaw and Marshall (2007)
proposed a special type of Markov model to
investigate the case mix of patients and the
expected patient turnovers. Shimshak et al.
(2009) discussed EDA as a benchmarking tech-
nique for nursing homes, taking account of the
quality of care.
Summary
The studies of OR in healthcare and social assis-
tance industries have focused on the healthcare
deliveries in recent years, which coincided with
some observations that there exist large chal-
lenges in the healthcare deliveries in both devel-
oped and developing countries (Brandeau et al.,
2005). The main topics appearing in the literature
are concluded in Tables 7 and 8. Nurse scheduling
is an important topic in this field. Other typical
topics include locating the limited facilities and
scheduling medical resources. Most of the OR
problems have been modelled as optimization
problems, and the optimization is generally
with multiple design criteria. Some researches
weighted multiple objectives into a single objec-
tive function in their formulations and solutions
(e.g. Araz et al., 2007), whereas others developed
the solutions from different objective functions
and compared their performances (e.g. Johnson
et al., 2005).
Because of the complication of the models,
solutions to majority of problems could not be
found within a reasonable time if an analytical
optimization approach is applied. Therefore,
many heuristic algorithms have been proposed
to find second-optimized solutions (e.g. Su and
Zenios, 2006; Iannoni et al., 2008).
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Table 7 Topics of operations research in human health and social assistance industries
Topics Examples

Health care system planning

and organizing
Pricing health care service (Rouse and Swales, 2006)
Resource allocation (Chalabi et al., 2008)
System design (McCleanh and Millard, 2007)
Health care delivery
Clinical practice
Optimal transplant (Alagoz et al., 2004; Su and Zenios, 2004, 2006)
Optimal care (Preciado-Walters et al., 2004; Kunene and Weistroffer,
2008; Liu and Kapur, 2008; Shechter et al., 2008)
Discharging decision (Kreke et al., 2008)
Evaluation (Ceglowski et al., 2007; Cooper et al., 2008)
Ambulance location (Tavakoli and Lightner, 2004; Gendreau et al., 2006b; Araz et al., 2007;
Erkut et al., 2008; Rajagopalan et al., 2008; Iannoni et al., 2009)
Facility location (Harper et al., 2005a, 2005b; Johnson et al., 2005; Galvão et al., 2006a,
2006b; Doerner et al., 2007; Sahin et al., 2007; Ndiaye and Alfares,
2008; Silva and Serra, 2008; Smith et al., 2009; Zhang et al., 2009)
Appointment scheduling (Green et al., 2006; LaGanga and Lawrence, 2007; Qu et al., 2007;
Vasilakis et al., 2007; Vissers et al., 2007; Cayirli et al., 2008; Green
and Savin, 2008; Gupta and Denton, 2008; Muthuraman and
Lawley, 2008)
Surgery planning (Beliën and Demeulemeester, 2007; Gupta, 2007; Hans et al., 2008;
Lamiri et al., 2008a, 2008b; Pham and Klinkert, 2008; Cardoen et al.,
2009; Persson and Persson, 2009)
Vehicle planning (Melachrinoudis et al., 2007; Iannoni et al., 2008)
Other Resource allocation (Van Der Meer et al., 2005; Patrick and Puterman, 2007; Chern et al.,
2008; Fei et al., 2008; Goddard and Tavakoli, 2008; Pilgrim and
Chilcott, 2008; Li et al., 2009b; Conforti et al., 2010)
Capacity planning (Litvak et al., 2008; Cochran and Roche, 2009)
Cost management (Seireich and Marmor, 2005; Suthummanon and Omachonu, 2008)
Inventory management (Nicholson et al., 2004; Katsaliaki and Brailsford, 2007)
Staffing (Isken, 2004; Moz and Pato, 2004; Azaiez and Al Sharif, 2005; Beliën
and Demeulemeester, 2006; Bertels and Fahle, 2006; Eveborn et al.,
2006; Gutjahr and Rauner, 2007; Parr and Thompson, 2007; Ahmed
and Alkhamis, 2009; Topaloglu, 2009)
Hybrid problems (Beraldi et al., 2004; Bertels and Fahle, 2006; Beliën and
Demeulemeester, 2008; Griffin et al., 2008)
Medical waste management (Brent et al., 2007)
Performance evaluation (Ouellette and Vierstraete, 2004; Butler and Li, 2005; Leonard et al.,
2005; Prior, 2006; Oddoye et al., 2007; Shaw and Marshall, 2007;
Takeda et al., 2007; Filipe et al., 2008; Liberatore and Nydick, 2008;
Oliveira and Bevan, 2008; Singer and Donoso, 2008; Nahra et al.,
2009; Oddoye et al., 2009; Shimshak et al., 2009; de Moraes et al., 2010)

Financial and Insurance Industries rapid development of economy, both external

In this section, OR relating to financial service activ-
ities, such as insurance, reinsurance, pension
funding, holding assets, trust agents, and those fa-
cilitating entities, will be surveyed and discussed.
Financial service activities are among the earli-
est areas in the introduction of OR. Because of the
and internal environmental changes have signifi-
cantly affected OR (Weingartner, 1971). Financial
service has especially been one of the most active
and innovative areas over the last two or three
decades (Sirilli, 1998). It implies that many chal-
lenges of OR have emerged from financial sys-
tems. Numerous applications of OR models and

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Operations Research in Service Industries 333

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Table 8 Topics of operations research in finance and insurance industries

Topic Examples

Portfolio management Optimal portfolio (Ballestero and Pla-Santamaria, 2004; Derigs and
Nickel, 2004; Çanakoğlu and Özekici, 2008)
Pension fund (Dupa
cová and Polívka, 2008; Josa-Fombellida and
Rincon-Zapatero, 2010)
Investment decision (Trappey et al., 2007; Wonglimpiyarat, 2009)
Portfolio balance (Abrache et al., 2005)
Business management Financial alliance (Hinojosa et al., 2005; Korhonen and Voutilainen,
2006; Korhonen et al., 2006)
Marketing (Prinzie and Van den Poel, 2006)
Business operations (Baesens et al., 2005; Geismar et al., 2007; Sanchis
et al., 2007; Viaene et al., 2007; Suresh and Richard, 2008)
Staffing (Kekre et al., 2009)
Other decision (Paisittanand and Olson, 2006)
Performance measure and (Brockett et al., 2004; Camanho and Dyson, 2005; Portela and
benchmarking Thanassoulis, 2005; Pastor et al., 2006; Sherman and Rupert, 2006;
Sherman and Zhu, 2006; Gutiérrez-Nieto et al., 2007; Ioannou and
Mavri, 2007; Bergendahl and Lindblom, 2008; Kao and Hwang, 2008;
Avkiran, 2009; Das et al., 2009; Ho and Wu, 2009; Lo and Lu, 2009;
Ray and Das, 2010)
Research on techniques (Sodhi, 2005; Brown, 2006; Sherman and Zhu, 2006)

algorithms have been reported in the financial
services (Breton, 2008); for example, the Journal
of Computers & Operations Research dedicated a
special issue in 2008 on OR in this field.
In this section, collected articles relate to
decision-making in the financial service industry,
rather than financial operations in any other
industries. These articles have been classified
into three broad areas: portfolio management,
asset valuation, and performance measure and
benchmarking.
Portfolio Management
Derigs and Nickel (2004) described a two-phase
simulated annealing approach for a special class
of portfolio management problems, that is, opti-
mizing a stock fund with respect to tracking
errors and transaction costs over time. Çanakoğlu
and Özekici (2008) considered selecting portfolios
in a multiple-period setting where the investor
maximized the utility of the terminal wealth in a
stochastic market. By searching for a portfolio
ranking based on compromise properties,
Ballestero and Pla-Santamaria (2004) selected the
mutual fund portfolios based on the statistics of
investor’s preferences. Dupa
cová and Polívka
(2008) described the scenario generation tech-
niques for stochastic programming in the Czech
pension fund. Josa-Fombellida and Rincon-
Zapatero (2010) studied the management of an
aggregated pension fund in the presence of a
stochastic interest rate to minimize deviations of
the unfunded actuarial liability from zero along
a finite-time horizon. Trappey et al. (2007)
analysed the internationalization process model
for investment decisions and expanded it to two
investment decision models. Wonglimpiyarat
(2009) proposed a process model to analyse the
influence of capital market laws and an initial
public offering process on venture capitals.
Abrache et al. (2005) proposed a new bundle-
based formulation for portfolio balancing in the
financing market.
Managerial Decisions
Korhonen and Voutilainen (2006) studied alterna-
tive alliances between banks and insurance com-
panies and used an expert panel and analytic
hierarchy process in searching the best alliance
model. Korhonen et al. (2006) investigated the
financial alliance compromise structure between
the executives and supervisory authorities of

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334 Yiting Xing et al.

Syst. Res.
banks and insurance companies in Finland.
Hinojosa et al. (2005) applied the core solution
concepts for multi-objective games in a bank
ATM network. Prinzie and Van den Poel (2006)
analysed purchase sequences to identify cross-
buying patterns, which might discover cross-
selling opportunities using Markov, MTD, and
MTDg models.
Viaene et al. (2007) studied automated detec-
tion systems in deciding whether or not to inves-
tigate questionable claims. Baesens et al. (2005)
discussed and compared statistical and neural
network approaches in survival analysis to
predict when customers will default in their
personal loans. Geismar et al. (2007) analyzed
two business models that captured the flow of
currency between a bank and the Federal Reserve
System (Fed) and provided bank managers with
optimal strategies to control the currency flow
for a variety of cost structures and demand
patterns. Sanchis et al. (2007) investigated finan-
cial stability using a banking crisis analysis and
the bankruptcy prediction model. Suresh and
Richard (2008) examined two methods for the
bank operating programs to minimize their
deposit inventories within the limits of the
Federal Reserve regulations. Kekre et al. (2009)
developed a simulation model to analyse the
risk–efficiency trade-off at a major commercial
bank and recommended guidelines for workforce
downsizing. Paisittanand and Olson (2006) ap-
plied the Monte Carlo simulation to evaluate
the financial risk of a decision-making system
for project selections.
Performance Measure and Benchmarking
Ho and Wu (2009) conducted performance mea-
surements for Internet banks by using EDA and
principal component analysis. Chen et al. (2009)
applied the DEA to evaluate the performance of
CEOs of US banks. Pastor et al. (2006) deployed a
complementary pair of nonparametric techniques
to evaluate the performances of the branch
offices of a large European bank. Bergendahl and
Lindblom (2008) applied DEA to develop the prin-
ciples to evaluate the efficiency of banks. Brockett
et al. (2004) assessed the efficiency of insurance
companies from the perspectives of solvency,
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Operations Research in Service Industries
RESEARCH PAPER
paying ability of claims, and return on investment.
Camanho and Dyson (2005) developed an estima-
tion method for the upper and lower bounds of the
cost efficiency measure. Kao and Hwang (2008)
used a two-stage DEA to evaluate the efficiency
of decision processes in Taiwanese insurance
companies. By integrating DEA with slacks-based
measures, Lo and Lu (2009) investigated the
efficiency performance of several small financial
holding companies. Ray and Das (2010) used the
nonparametric DEA to estimate cost and profit
efficiency of Indian banks. Sherman and Rupert
(2006) used the same approach to analyse the per-
formance of a banking network with 200 branches.
Portela and Thanassoulis (2005) measured the
profit efficiency to identify the sources of any
shortfall in profitability in Portuguese banking
systems. Avkiran (2009) illustrated an application
of DEA measure using the simulated data of profit
centres in domestic commercial banks in the
United Arab Emirates. Das et al. (2009) measured
the labour efficiency of individual branches of a
large public sector bank with a sizable network of
branches across India. Gutiérrez-Nieto et al.
(2007) applied the DEA measure in microfinance
institutions. Ioannou and Mavri (2007) presented
a decision support system to evaluate a branch
network and determine the number of branches
and the mix of services to maximize the revenue
of banks. Sherman and Zhu (2006) incorporated
the quality factor in DEA and applied it in a US
bank with a large number of branches.
Research on Techniques
Brown (2006) demonstrated the pitfalls and pro-
tocols of using DEA to enhance its application
performance in financial service sectors. Sodhi
(2005) reviewed dynamic linear programming
models and the challenges for asset–liability
management.
Summary
The studies of OR in financial and insurance indus-
tries have grown in recent years. The published
works have been classified into four areas, that is,
portfolio management, business management,
performance measure and benchmarking, and
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researches on techniques. The strengths of re-
searches in the first three areas are roughly equal,
whereas the solvers of practical problems in these
areas heavily depend on OR techniques; however,
the researches dedicated to the OR approaches
are rare (Sodhi 2005; Brown, 2006; Sherman and
Zhu 2006).
CONCLUSIONS
The OR studies in the service sector have been
very active in recent years; a close look into the
publications in 17 leading OR journals leads to
the conclusion that the five most active research
subjects are transportation and warehousing,
information and communication, human health
and social assistance, retails and wholesales,
and financial and insurance services; the papers
classified within these five sectors account for
more than 80% of the total papers in OR. Two
limitations can be observed from our literature
review:
The majority of the work has been customized
solutions dedicated to some specific applica-
tions and scenarios; generic solutions applied
in a broad scope of applications or the studies
on fundamentals of general solvers are lacking.
Conventional methodologies in ORs have
been widely used in supporting the decision-
making of OR in the service section. For exam-
ple, DEA and column generation methods are
applied for modelling and formulation; and
traditional analytical mathematical formula-
tion, genetic algorithms, simulated annealing
algorithms, and the Pareto sets are used as
the solvers of optimization.
The advances in OR theories and methodologies
are evolutional rather than revolutionary. In a
word, existing technologies are facing challenges
in dealing with ever-increasing scales, complexi-
ties, uncertainties, and dynamics of OR problems.
A comparison between the OR activities in
service industries and those in manufacturing
industries has shown that the OR application in
the service sector possess more challenges, in
the following sense:
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336
Syst. Res.
(1) The boundaries of an OR problem are not
well defined because the goals and participa-
tors involved in OR activities are usually
temporary and dynamic.
(2) Decision-making in the service sector is
more time sensitive, which prohibits one
from long-time planning and scheduling.
(3) The inputs and outputs of a decision-making
process are more subjective, which can be
hard to quantify in decision models; more-
over, some variables are closely related to
human behaviour and perceptions.
(4) The required information in decision-making
processes tends to be ambitious, fuzzy, ran-
dom, and rough.
(5) It becomes necessary to keep customers and
suppliers in the decision-making loop for
prompt and effective optimistic decisions.
With the rapid growth and spread of IT, we
anticipate that OR-related research directions will
be radically changed to address the aforemen-
tioned challenges and take into account the signif-
icant impact of the rapid advance of IT. More
specifically, we foresee that the following aspects
will be some of the attractive research subjects in
future studies of OR in the service sector: (1) the
development of data acquisition system capable
of acquiring real-time data from environment, cus-
tomers, and within the system with the adaption
of radiofrequency identification, wireless senor
networks, and geographic information systems
(Xu et al., 2008; Kumar et al., 2011; Li, 2012, 2013;
Li et al., 2013a, 2013b; Niu et al., 2013; Wang et al.,
2013); (2) new theories and methodologies for
planning and scheduling that deal with complex-
ity and dynamics of a system in real time, with
the adoption of distributed intelligence and cloud
computing; (3) new methodologies to take into ac-
count of fault or unreliable information and ensure
the robustness and reliability of decision-making
processes; and (4) the enabling technologies to deal
with the distributed nature, fuzziness, roughness,
and expert knowledge in decision-making. As a
summary, the emerging information technologies
such as the Internet of Things and cloud comput-
ing will play a significant role in promoting system
science for OR in various applications including
the service sector.
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