Postponable Acceptance and Assignment: A Stochastic Dynamic Programming Approach
研究按单生产或服务系统中，企业可策略性推迟订单接受与分配决策，以等待更有利订单或更高效服务器，同时承担订单流失和等待惩罚的风险，通过随机动态规划刻画最优策略结构并提炼管理启示。
We study a new dynamic order acceptance and assignment problem of a make-to-order manufacturing or service system that produces heterogeneous products or services using heterogeneous servers. Unlike traditional dynamic order acceptance and assignment problems, in our settings the system can strategically postpone acceptance and assignment decisions for orders in hand. The system does this while waiting for more profitable orders to come and/or more productive servers to become available, with the risk of losing orders in hand, low server utilization, and high waiting penalties. We formulate this problem as a stochastic dynamic program, characterize the structure of the optimal policy, and discuss managerial insights gained from the optimal policy. The paper also provides a methodological contribution by finding general structural properties and their preservation conditions, which can be reused in related future operations management studies.