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This chapter investigates the relative magnitude of the benefits of global diversification from the viewpoint of domestic investors in various countries by forming time-rolling efficient frontiers. To enhance feasibility of asset allocation strategies, the constraints of short-sales and over-weighting investments are taken into account. The empirical results suggest that local investors in less developed countries, particularly in Latin America, East Asia, and Southern Europe, comparatively benefit more from global diversification. Investors in the countries of civic-law origin tend to benefit more from global investment than the ones in the common-law states. Although the global market has become more integrated over the past decades, diversification benefits for domestic investors declined but did not vanish. The results of this chapter are useful for asset management professionals to determine target markets to promote the sales of international funds.

Uses negotiation concepts as a basis to investigate issues concerning the development of logistics partnerships for international and global operations. Presents a negotiation model as an investigative structure to illustrate the global issues that logistics managers face in creating partnership arrangements. The model includes environmental constraints, objectives for negotiation, negotiation strategy, and the outcome of the negotiation. Develops several hypotheses that suggest potential conceptual relationships between the elements of the model and, from these relationships, introduces managerial implications for consideration of strategy development and implementation.

This paper deals with the collaborative design of electromagnetic devices over the internet network. The design is made by both mechanical and electrical engineers. So, the paper tries to show the importance but also constraints to size such a system using a collaborative optimisation process.

The paper compares two approaches in order to size an electromechanical actuator between mechanical and electrical engineers. In the first one, each profession designs its part, and only common constrained are negotiated. This can result in a design process with many iterations. In the second one, electrical and mechanical engineers built together a common model of the structure and a common list of specifications: this allows a global optimisation that is more efficient.

The main result of the paper is that the second approach in which a global model is built between electrical and mechanical engineers is more efficient.

The originality of the paper is to explore the problems and difficulties of an optimisation of an electromechanical device between engineers of different culture working together over the internet network.

Extensible Markup Language (XML)‐based data integration systems (DIS) aim to support global updates. Data consistency among data sources is not yet enforced at the integration level or enforced in an ad hoc manner which leads to redundant checking of consistency or unrepairable mistakes. This paper aims to provide XQuery trigger service to enforce data integrity and data consistency in the DIS at the integration level.

Data consistency is enforced among data sources through providing XQuery trigger service for the XML‐DIS. An XQuery trigger model is defined and shown how to use this model to define different integrity constraints and triggers at the integration level. The paper proposes the architecture of the XQuery trigger service and shows how to enforce data consistency in the DIS. Important components including event detection, condition evaluation and action firing are discussed. Necessary algorithms including how to produce ChangeRecord, how to find activated triggers, how to process LET and FOR clauses and how to create data objects from XML fragment are proposed. Trigger termination and failure handling are also discussed.

XQuery trigger can express miscellaneous data integrity constraints and triggers in the DIS and is highly abstract, refined and easy to understand. XQuery trigger service provides an easy‐to‐maintain method of the data consistency rules and a uniform, nonredundant and centralized enforcement of data consistency.

An XQuery trigger model with namespace annotations, which can define constraints and triggers among different data sources. An XQuery trigger service architecture for the XML‐DIS, which can enforce data consistency at the integration level. For DIS administrators, who want to enforce data consistency when permitting updates at the integration level.

Airspace sectorization is an important task, which has a significant impact in the everyday work of air control services. Especially in recent years, because of the constant increase in air traffic, existing airspace sectorization techniques have difficulties to tackle the large air traffic volumes, creating imbalanced sectors and uneven workload distribution among sectors. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new approach to find optimal airspace sectorization balancing the traffic controller workload between sectors, subject to airspace requirements.

A constraint programming (CP) model called equitable airspace sectorization problem (EQASP) relies on ordered weighted averaging (OWA) multiagent optimization and the parallel portfolio architecture has been developed, which integrates the equity into an existing CP approach (Trandac et al., 2005). The EQASP was evaluated and compared with the method of Trandac et al. (2005), according to the quality of workload balancing between sectors and the resolution performance. The comparison was achieved using real air traffic low-altitude network data sets of French airspace for five flight information regions for 24 h a day and the Algerian airspace for three various periods (off peak hours, peak hours and 24 h).

It has been demonstrated that the proposed EQASP model, which is based on OWA multicriteria optimization method, significantly improved both the solving performance and the workload equity between sectors, while offering strong theoretical properties of the balancing requirement. Interestingly, when solving hard instances, our parallel sectorization tool can provide, at any time, a workable solution, which satisfies all geometric constraints of sectorization.

This study can be used to design well-balanced air sectors in terms of workload between control units in the strategic phase. To fulfil the airspace users’ constraints, one can refer to this study to assess the capacity of each air sector (especially the overloaded sectors) and then adjust the sector’s shape to respond to the dynamic changes in traffic patterns.

This theoretical and practical approach enables the development and support of the definition of the “Air traffic management (ATM) Concept Target” through improvements in human factors specifically (balancing workload across sectors), which contributes to raising the level of capacity, safety and efficiency (SESAR Vision of ATM 2035).

In their approach, the authors proposed an OWA-based multiagent optimization model, ensuring the search for the best equitable solution, without requiring user-defined balancing constraints, which enforce each sector to have a workload between two user-defined bounds (W_min, W_max).

As the world is becoming more volatile and uncertain, organizations face much complexity in their daily operations. Further, there is a much ambiguity in business operations to achieve the effective utilization of resources. The work optimizes a novel constraint programming model approach of the utilization of shuttle services vehicle while considering cost savings, employee wellbeing and other real an Information Technology enabled service (ITES) industry constraints.

The present work considers a novel extension of the vehicle routing problem related to the shuttle service operation in an ITES industry in VUCA context. Additionally, the model considers the women safety aspects, which engages the company to provide a security guard for women employees in the night shift.

Numerical experiments were conducted on real instances data of ITES industrial partner. The results show that the vehicle utilization increased from 75% up to 96% while ensuring in parallel the wellbeing of employees and women safety during the night shift. Finally, the proposed model is converted to a decision support application allowing ITES partner to plan employees shuttle service operations efficiently.

Study has evaluated the shuttle services optimization for ITES industry using data from industrial which makes it a unique contribution to literature in shuttle operations. Further, the study used constraint programming to evaluate the vehicle utilization and security allocation, thereby introducing new parameter on security allocation in open VRP problem.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel methodology based on budget constrained Min-Cut theorem to solve constrained topology optimization (TO).

This paper establishes a weighted network with budget, which is derived from the sensitivity with respect to the constraint function. The total budget carried by the topology evaluates the extent to which the constraint is satisfied. By finding the Min-Cut under budget constraint in each step, the proposed method is able to solve constrained TO problem.

The results obtained from a magnetic actuator including a yoke, a coil and an armature have demonstrated that the proposed method is effective to solve constrained TO problem.

A novel methodology based on budget constrained Min-Cut is proposed to solve constrained TO problem.

This paper presents a methodology for the development of a new tool for the formation of a virtual enterprise. The formation phase mainly deals with inviting potential collaborators to virtual enterprise, and developing a supply chain; supply chain development is done collaboratively by all the collaborating enterprises. The methodology for realizing a new e‐commerce tool is primarily aimed at satisfying the needs of small‐to‐medium‐sized enterprises, and has the following features: Web‐based; inexpensive; supports collaboration; and increases pipeline visibility and demand visibility.

The COVID-19 pandemic has showcased the lack of resilience found in the global value chains (GVCs) of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Existing evidence shows that MNEs have only recently and slowly started recovering and attempting to rebuild the resilience of their GVCs. This paper analyzes the challenges/inhibitors faced by MNEs in building their resilience through their GVCs.

A four-stage hybrid model was used to identify the interrelationship among the identified inhibitors and to distinguish the most critical ones by ranking them. In the first stage, we employed a modified total interpretive structural modeling (m-TISM) approach to determine the inter-relationship among the inhibitors. Additionally, we identified the inhibitors' driving power and dependency by performing a matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) analysis. In the second stage, we employed the Pythagorean fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (PF-AHP) method to determine the weight of the criteria. The next stage followed, in which we used the Pythagorean fuzzy combined compromise solution (PF-CoCoSo) method to rank the inhibitors. Finally, we performed a sensitivity analysis to determine the robustness of the framework we had built based on the criteria and inhibitors.

We find business sustainability to have the highest importance and managerial governance as the most critical inhibitor hindering the path to resilience. Based on these insights, we derive four research propositions aimed at strengthening the resilience of such GVCs, followed by their implications for theory and practice.

Our findings contribute to the extant literature by uncovering key inhibitors that act as barriers to MNEs. We link out our findings with a number of propositions that we derive, which may be considered for implementation by MNEs and could help them endow their GVCs with resilience.