This study explores the optimal pricing and investment decision for two competing green supply chains, both consisting of a manufacturer and an exclusive retailer. Our focus is to explore, does the strategic integration decision with rivals at the horizontal level or with partners at the vertical level have any effect on green product types? The results reveal the following insights: retailer-retailer strategic integration at downstream level leads to a sub-optimal total supply chain profit and green quality level for a development-intensive green product. Two competing manufacturers can produce products at a higher level if they are vertically integrated with respective retailers. Manufacturer-manufacturer integration at upstream level sometimes leads to higher profits and product quality level if cross price-elasticity of consumers is high. However, an opposite phenomenon is observed while they are selling for a marginal-intensive green product, horizontal integration can improve green quality levels, but supply chain members will receive a lower profit. Therefore, selection of green product types and strategic integration decision are interrelated to achieve the profit maximization goal along with the aim to offer products at a higher green quality level. Vertical integration strategy can outperform horizontal integration strategy, especially if cross-price elastic for green products remain high.

This paper addresses scheduling challenges in software development organizations, specifically focusing on a novel version of the software project scheduling problem (SPSP). This enhanced model incorporates the dynamics of learning and forgetting phenomena, crucial in maintaining employee competencies, particularly when unexpected events such as absenteeism or shifts in project priorities occur. The paper introduces a new declarative reference model for SPSP, aimed at proactively managing the assignment of versatile programmers to tasks within an portfolio of IT projects, while considering the effects of forgetting. Implemented within a constraints programming environment, this model facilitates decision making in project management for software companies. It serves to find feasible solutions and identify conditions necessary to meet specified expectations. The effectiveness of the proposed SPSP model is demonstrated through numerical examples.

In order to deal with unexpected events such as employee absenteeism and/or a demand for personnel that is higher or lower than expected, organizations need to adopt proactive and reactive scheduling strategies to protect the personnel roster and to respond to this operational variability, respectively. In this paper, we discuss a proactive approach that exploits the concept of employee substitutability to improve the flexibility of a personnel shift roster to respond to schedule disruptions. With a view to developing a DSS-driven method dedicated to competence allocation planning robust to unexpected staff absenteeism, we present the concept of the so-called robust employee competence structure. A declarative model of the concept allows to find an employee competence structure robust to a given set of disruptions while guaranteeing an admissible personnel allocation to the assumed set of tasks. Since the problem of designing such a robust structure is NP-hard, another goal of the present study is to propose a sufficient condition the fulfilment of which will guarantee the validity of calculations. Potential applications of the proposed solution are discussed using examples

Highly qualified staff are the key to successful operations management in any organization. In this paper, the emphasis is put on the problem of planning the rotational assignment of work tasks to a multi-skilled staff to guarantee maintaining their competencies at the required level. The aim of this study is to propose a novel declarative model for proactive planning of staff allocation whilst taking into account the forgetting effect. Sufficient conditions are proposed that allow for the cyclical rotation of employees between different tasks in order to keep their competencies at a constant level. The numerical experiments prove that the presented approach allows for finding a trade-off between a robustness to absenteeism and maintaining staff competency levels. The proposed method is suitable for human resource-related decision making in an interactive mode.