With growing worldwide trade, container terminals have grown in number and size. Many new terminals are now automated to increase operational efficiency. The key focus is on improving seaside processes, where a distinction can be made between single quay crane operations (all quay cranes are...

In this article we focus on product return handling and warehousing issues. In some businesses return rates can be well over 20% and returns can be especially costly when not handled properly. In spite of this, many managers have handled returns extemporarily. The fact that quantitative methods...

Factory Gate Pricing (FGP) is a relatively new phenomenon in retail distribution. Under FGP, products are no longer delivered at the retailer distribution center, but collected by the retailer at the factory gates of the suppliers. Owing to both the asymmetry in the distribution networks (the...

Many high-tech products and durable goods exhibit exactly one significant price cut some time after their launch. We call this sudden transition from high to low prices the price landing. In this paper we present a new model that describes two important features of price landings: their timing...

In this article the authors describe their comprehensive analysis of moderating factors of cross-brand effects of price changes and contribute to the literature in five major ways. (1) They consider an extensive set of potential variables influencing cross-brand effects of price changes. (2)...

In this study we consider a pick-to-pack orderpicking system, in which batches of orders are picked simultaneously from different(work) zones by a group of order pickers. After picking, the orders are transported by a conveyor to the next station for packing. Our aim is to determine the optimal...

This paper presents a dynamic approach to the vehicle scheduling problem. We discuss the potential benefit of our approach compared to the traditional one, where the vehicle scheduling problem is solved only once for a whole period and the travel times are assumed to be fixed. In our dynamic...

In this paper we consider the capacitated lot-sizing problem (CLSP) with linear costs. It is known that this problem is NP-hard, but there exist special cases that can be solved in polynomial time. We derive a backward algorithm, based on the forward algorithm by Chen et al. (1994), to solve the...

Although high frequency diffusion data is nowadays available, common practice is still to only use yearly figures in order to get rid of seasonality. This paper proposes a diffusion model that captures seasonality in a way that naturally matches the overall S-shaped pattern. The model is based...

Although the possibility to combine column generation and Lagrangian relaxation has been known for quite some time, it has only recently been exploited in algorithms. In this paper, we discuss ways of combining these techniques. We focus on solving the LP relaxation of the Dantzig-Wolfe master...