This paper relates New York City's experience since 1975, a period characterized by local economic and fiscal crisis and a gradual recovery from it, to four prevailing themes in the contemporary literature of cities and public administration.
Many queueing situations such as computer, communications and emergency systems have the feature that customers may require service from several servers at the same time. They may thus be delayed until the required number of servers is avialable and servers may be idle when customers are waiting. We consider general server-completion-time distributions and derive approximation methods for the computation of the steady-state distribution of the number of customers in queue as well as the moments of the waiting-time distribution. Extensive computational results are reported.
How many patrol cars staffed with a single police officer are needed to provide equivalent police service to an existing system with n two-officer patrol cars? This question is explored for New York City using a multiple patrol car per call priority queueing model. It is shown that a one-officer patrol program is feasible, yet pitfalls exist which could adversely affect its performance. The paper details the process of data analysis and model building and emphasizes the subjective elements that remain in a highly technical OR study.
Group planning practices of leading American and Australian manufacturing firms are compared and contrasted. Despite some differences, a broad pattern of similarity emerges across many elements of the planning systems.
In this paper we study the determination of forward foreign exchange rates. An exchange rate is the price of one currency in terms of another currency, and a forward rate is a contractual exchange rate established at a point in time for a transaction that will take place at the maturity date on the contract in the future. Well-organized forward markets exist for all major currencies of the world for various maturities, with the most active contract lengths being one, three, six, and twelve months.