This paper studies the business process known as project management. This process has exhibited a remarkable growth in business interest over the last 15 years, as demonstrated by a 1000% increase in membership in the Project Management Institute since 1996. This growth is largely attributable to the emergence of many new diverse business applications that can be successfully managed as projects. The new applications for project management include IT implementations, research and development, new product and service development, corporate change management, and software development. The characteristics of modern projects are typically very different from those of traditional projects such as construction and engineering, which necessitates the development of new project management techniques. We discuss these recent practical developments. The history of project management methodology is reviewed, from CPM and PERT to the influential modern directions of critical chain project management and agile methods. We identify one important application area for future methodological change as new product and service development. A list of specific research topics within project management is discussed. The conclusions suggest the existence of significant research opportunities within project management.

Supply-driven chain’s production is different from traditional demand-driven production because its supplies must guide the full production flow toward the markets and respond actively to customer demand. According to the control theory, a novel multi-variable operation model of supply-driven chain is discussed here, integrating suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and market demands. Especially the coordination problem between suppliers and manufacturers is discussed where suppliers play more important role than manufacturers. Because defect is common in real production system, the production operation of supply-driven chain with imperfect quality is described on the basis of fuzzy set to model the ambiguity of quality and to provide appropriate supply coordination mechanism. In a designed numerical example, it is apparent that both response and robustness performances of supply-driven production system on demand with imperfect quality are improved by a fuzzy proportional-integral-differential regulator. The proposed model may apply to similar productions with imperfect quality.

Kutani-ware is a famous traditional craft which is so significant not only from the economic perspective, but also from the cultural viewpoint. It had a prosperous time in the last decades; however it has been shrinking recently due to the changes of lifestyle or the appearance of more functional products. Compared with the function, the brand image and style of products have become much more important in purchasing; moreover, technology is no longer the sole driving force in the development of products. As the spread of marketing appealing to consumers’ emotion, many methods treating human’s feeling have been developed and applied in many fields. Since human’s emotion has both linear and non-linear characteristics, and it is changing by every moment, a method which fits better is essential. This paper develops a new evaluation model by comparing statistical, fuzzy and pseudo-fuzzy approaches based-on an emotional evaluation database to find a better approach for recommendation of products.

This paper presents an assignment method to solve the group decision making problem with uncertain preference information. The uncertain preference information is given as uncertain preference ordinals by decision makers. We first address the concept and calculation formulae of preference ordinal frequency, and then, uncertain preference ordinals are transformed into preference ordinal frequencies accordingly. Furthermore, a linear assignment model is built based on the derived preference ordinal frequencies, and the ranking of alternatives can be obtained by solving the model. Finally, a numerical example is used to illustrate the use of the proposed method.

This paper optimizes the electricity and renewable energy credit (REC) purchasing process for energy distribution. Electricity is traded in deregulated time-sequential markets at fluctuating prices. Optimal electricity purchasing under price and demand uncertainty is a challenging task for electricity distributors, and the recently implemented renewable portfolio standards (RPS) further complicate the purchasing process. Government regulatory decisions concerning the RPS require distributors to purchase corresponding certificates, namely RECs, equivalent to a certain percentage of their electricity sales. This paper formulates and optimizes the joint purchasing process for electricity and RECs. It also analyzes the effect of RPS policy on electricity distributors.

In this paper, we analyze the pricing decision and the compensation strategy of a firm that relies on a heterogeneous sales force to sell its product in two periods. The sales agents’ selling abilities are their private information and will determine the effectiveness of the agents’ selling efforts. We introduce three compensation contract strategies, i.e. pooling, semi-separating and separating that the firm can adopt in period one and by applying principle-agent theory, derive the optimal compensation contracts and optimal price for the firm in two periods in each strategy. Comparing these three contract strategies, we found that the optimal strategy for the firm depends on the discount factor. We show that the firm will surely offer separating contracts in period one for some small discount factor, and for some large discount factor pooling contract is certain to be provided in period one. However, semi-separating contracts may be considered for some mediate discount factor, and also may not appear for all discount factors in period one. Our analysis also reveals that the optimal price decreases with the discount factor when pooling contract is offered in period one and increases with the discount factor when separating contracts is offered in period one.

The paper investigates the pricing decisions of two competing supply chains under the different information structures. Each retailer has private information about the market demand and has the right to decide whether or not to share the information with the manufacturer. Three demand-information structures, i.e., information sharing in both supply chains, information sharing in only one supply chain and information sharing in neither supply chain, are considered. We investigate the value of information by comparing the information structures, and find that the information value not only works in the channel directly, but also does in the competing channel indirectly. Information sharing in a supply chain always benefits its manufacturer, but hurts its retailer; while it benefits both the manufacturer and the retailer of competing supply chain, regardless of whether this competing supply chain has information sharing. From the perspective of channel, when the competition is more intense, information sharing in a supply chain makes this supply chain better off, and when the competition is less intense, the information sharing in a supply chain makes this supply chain worse off. However, it always makes the competing supply chain better off regardless of whether the competing supply chain has information sharing.