Optimal advertising duration for profit maximization

The current research elucidates the advertising scheme of automotive innovation by incorporating the various stages of the product life cycle.The study proposes an empirical model for the automotive industry to evaluate a time-point known as a switch-point or a take-off point at which firms should modify the advertising and sales promotion strategies to boost sales volume.The problem applies a time-series innovation diffusion model wherein adoption rate changes when a product enters a growth stage and then again when the company stops the advertising campaign in the maturity stage.The present paper develops a profit maximization problem,which optimizes the overall advertising duration and advertising take-off point.A numerical illustration is provided using the actual sales data of automobile industries,and sensitivity analysis is further performed to validate the effect of critical parameters on the optimization problem.

Condition-based Maintenance Optimization for Gamma Deteriorating Systems under Performance-based Contracting

With the further development of service-oriented,performance-based contracting(PBC)has been widely adopted in industry and manufacturing.However,maintenance optimization problems under PBC have not received enough attention.To further extend the scope of PBC’s application in the field of maintenance optimization,we investigate the condition-based maintenance(CBM)optimization for gamma deteriorating systems under PBC.Considering the repairable single-component system subject to the gamma degradation process,this paper proposes a CBM optimization model to maximize the profit and improve system performance at a relatively low cost under PBC.In the proposed CBM model,the first inspection interval has been considered in order to reduce the inspection frequency and the cost rate.Then,a particle swarm algorithm(PSO)and related solution procedure are presented to solve the multiple decision variables in our proposed model.In the end,a numerical example is provided so as to demonstrate the superiority of the presented model.By comparing the proposed policy with the conventional ones,the superiority of our proposed policy is proved,which can bring more profits to providers and improve performance.Sensitivity analysis is conducted in order to research the effect of corrective maintenance cost and time required for corrective maintenance on optimization policy.A comparative study is given to illustrate the necessity of distinguishing the first inspection interval or not.

Repatriation and Maximization Of Profits in China

When setting up in China, foreign investors are confronted with myriad complex issues, from local regulatory variances, to confusing tax compliance issues

A Variant of Multi-task n-vehicle Exploration Problem: Maximizing Every Processor's Average Profit

We discuss a variant of the multi-task n-vehicle exploration problem. Instead of requiring an optimal permutation of vehicles in every group, the new problem requires all vehicles in a group to arrive at the same destination. Given n tasks with assigned consume-time and profit, it may also be viewed as a maximization of every processor＇s average profit. Further, we propose a new kind of partition problem in fractional form and analyze its computational complexity. By regarding fractional partition as a special case, we prove that the average profit maximization problem is NP-hard when the number of processors is fixed and it is strongly NP- hard in general. At last, a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm for the average profit maximization problem and the fractional partition problem is presented, using the idea of the pseudo-polynomial time algorithm for the classical partition problem.