The presented work combines two areas of research: cooperative game theory and lot size optimization. One of the most essential problems in cooperations is to allocate cooperative profits or costs among the partners. The core is a well known method from cooperative game theory that describes efficient and stable profit/cost allocations. A general algorithm based on the idea of constraint generation to compute core elements for cooperative optimization problems is provided. Beside its application for the classical core, an extensive discussion of core variants is presented and how they can be handled with the proposed algorithm. The second part of the thesis contains several cooperative lot sizing problems of different complexity that are analyzed regarding theoretical properties like monotonicity or concavity and solved with the proposed row generation algorithm to compute core elements; i.e. determining stable and fair cost allocations.

This book discusses important issues related to managing supply chain disruption risks from various perspectives. It explores the essence and principles relating to managing these risks and provides the framework and multi-goal model groups for managing such risks. The book also discusses research development of managing supply chain disruptive risks, supply chain risk conduction and loss assessment methods of supply chain disruptive events. It also includes the consideration of supply chain coordinating models in the cases of demand and supply disruption risks. It also deals on the subject of managing models of supply chain disruption risks by looking at manufacturers and responding decision methods oriented towards demand in disruption and coordination. It also summarizes the relevant findings and provides future research questions and orientations. The book will contributes significantly to the growing body of knowledge concerning the theory of managing supply chains.

​A major problem arising in airline alliances is to design allocation mechanisms determining how the revenue of a product should be shared among the airlines. The nucleolus is a concept of cooperative game theory that provides solutions for allocating the cost or benefit of a cooperation. This work provides fair revenue proportions for the airline alliances based on the nucleolus, which assumes a centralized decision making system. The proposed mechanism is used as a benchmark to evaluate the fairness of the revenue sharing mechanisms, where the alliance partners behave selfishly. Additionally, a new selfish revenue allocation rule is developed that improves the performance of the existing methods.

Cooperative game theory deals with situations where objectives of participants of the game are partially cooperative and partially conflicting. It is in the interest of participants to cooperate in the sense of making binding agreements to achieve the maximum possible benefit. When it comes to distribution of benefit/payoffs, participants have conflicting interests. Such situations are usually modelled as cooperative games. While the book mainly discusses transferable utility games, there is also a brief analysis of non-transferable utility games. Alternative solution concepts to cooperative game theoretic problems are presented in chapters 1-9 and the next four chapters present issues related to computations of solutions discussed in the earlier chapters. The proofs of all results presented in the book are quite explicit. Additionally the mathematical techniques employed in demonstrating the results will be helpful to those who wish to learn application of mathematics for solving problems in game theory.

This book gathers papers presented at the Logistik-Management-Konferenz 2013, which was organized by the VHB Wissenschaftliche Kommission Logistik and held in Bremen, Germany. The papers reflect the current state-of-the-art in logistics and supply chain management, focusing on environmental sustainability in logistics and supply chain network dynamics and control. The target audience primarily consists of researchers and practitioners in the field, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

Energy consumption and its management have been clearly identified as a challenge in computing and communication system design, where energy economy is obviously of paramount importance for battery powered devices. This thesis addresses the energy efficiency of mobile communication at the user end in the context of cellular networks. We argue that energy efficiency starts by energy awareness and propose EnergyBox, a parametrised tool that enables accurate and repeatable energy quantification at the user end using real data traffic traces as input. EnergyBox offers an abstraction of the underlying states for operation of the wireless interfaces and allows to estimate the energy consumption for different operator settings and device characteristics. The tool is used throughout the thesis to quantify and reveal inefficient data communication patterns of widely used mobile applications. We consider two different perspectives in the search of energy-efficient solutions. From the application perspective, we show that systematically quantifying the energy consumption of design choices (e.g., communication patterns, protocols, and data formats) contributes to a significantly smaller energy footprint. From the system perspective, we devise a cross-layer solution that schedules packet transmissions based on the knowledge of the network parameters that impact the energy consumption of the handset. These attempts show that application level decisions require a better understanding of possible energy apportionment policies at system level. Finally, we study the generic problem of determining the contribution of an entity (e.g., application) to the total energy consumption of a given system (e.g., mobile device). We compare the state-of-the-art policies in terms of fairness leveraging cooperative game theory and analyse their required information and computational complexity. We show that providing incentives to reduce the total energy consumption of the system (as part of fairness) is tightly coupled to the policy selection. Our study provides guidelines to select an appropriate policy depending on the characteristics of the system.