In spite of extraordinary support programs initiated by the European Union and other national authorities, the percentage of overall freight traffic moved by train is in steady decline. This development is driven by the fact that macro-economic benefits of rail traffic, such as relief of...

Assembly line balancing problems (ALBP) consist in assigning the total workload for manufacturing a product to stations of an assembly line as typically applied in automotive industry. The distribution of the tasks to the stations is due to restrictions which can be expressed in a precedence...