Denis Becker

Becker, Denis & Gaivoronski, Alexei A. (2017)

Optimisation approach to target costing under uncertainty with application to ICT-service

International Journal of Production Research, 56(5), s. 1904- 1917. Doi: 10.1080/00207543.2016.1275870 - Full text in research archive

Target costing is a modern approach applied during product development that defines cost targets for products and its components. These cost targets are driven by customer requirements and achievable revenues. The intention of this paper is the integration of target costing with modern concepts of modelling uncertainty and management of risk based on optimisation. Contrary to the traditional focus of target costing on cost targets, this paper prefers a strategy for achieving a target profit. Moreover, in this paper target costing is understood as a continuous process with incremental changes of cost drivers, product and component design as well as product prices. Therefore, the change in costs and profit with respect to aforementioned control parameters is modelled by linear approximations. Hence, improved decisions concerning design and prices are derived by linear programming models. In practice, information concerning product and component costs, demand or customer preferences are not given with certainty. Therefore, we apply a stochastic programming approach to manage the risk inherent in the target costing process. After a general presentation, we apply our approach to the provision of an information and communication technology service where the level of uncertainty is considerable.

Gonzalez, Andres J.; Helvik, Bjarne Emil, Tiwari, Prakriti, Becker, Denis & Wittner, Otto J. (2015)

GEARSHIFT: Guaranteeing availability requirements in SLAs using hybrid fault tolerance

Fahmy, Sonia; Li, Baochun & John, Lui (red.). 2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM)

Becker, Denis & Gaivoronski, Alexei A. (2014)

Stochastic optimization on social networks with application to service pricing

Computational Management Science, 11(4), s. 531- 562. Doi: 10.1007/s10287-013-0201-7

Gaivoronski, Alexei A. & Becker, Mike Denis (2011)

Differentiated Service Pricing on Social Networks Using Stochastic Optimization

Jacobsen, Hans-Arno; Wang, Yang & Hung, Patrick (red.). Proceedings — 2011 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing • SCC2011

This paper develops a combined simulation and optimization model that allows to optimize different service pricing strategies defined on the social networks under uncertainty. For a specific reference problem we consider a telecom service provider whose customers are connected in such network. Besides the service price, the acceptance of this service by a given customer depends on the popularity of this service among the customer's neighbors in the network. One strategy that the service provider can pursue in this situation is to stimulate the demand by offering the price incentives to the most connected customers whose opinion can influence many other participants in the social network. We develop a simulation model of such social network and show how this model can be integrated with stochastic optimization in order to obtain the optimal pricing strategy. Our results show that the differentiated pricing strategies can increase substantially the revenue of a service provider operating on a social network.

Becker, Denis; Gaivoronski, Alexei A. & Nesse, Per Jonny (2016)

Activity Based Service Portfolio Optimization of Cloud Broker

[Academic lecture]. ICSP 2016: XIV International Conference on Stochastic Programming.

This paper represents a model for managing the service portfolio of a cloud broker. More precisely, we presume a cloud broker that operates a platform for integrating, aggregating and sales of cloud services. The cloud broker faces a limited amount of human resources which are necessary to deal with the legal, technical and economic activities that are required for this kind of endeavor. Hence, the cloud broker needs to decide which services, service bundles and markets to focus on. For this situation we develop an optimization problem that can be used to select the service program with the highest profit potential. Moreover, sales numbers, service prices and resource usage cannot be estimated with certainty, which implies the risk of missing financial and operational targets. The model therefore allows for balancing the expected profit against this risk. The resulting model can be classified as a combined stochastic assignment and knapsack-problem with several capacity constraints. The paper points out the short comings of traditional activity based management for this kind of practical problem.

Berg, Terje & Becker, Denis (2015)

Cost-Based Pricing by Means of Cost Allocation under Uncertainty and Risk

[Academic lecture]. 12th Annual Conference for Management Accounting Research.

Gaivoronski, Alexei A. & Becker, Mike Denis (2008)

Quantitative Networks Analysis and Modeling of Networked Multiagent Environment

[Article in business/trade/industry journal]. Telektronikk, s. 76- 94.