In the paper, an innovative approach to deal with the Mixed Model Assembly Line Balancing Problem (MALBP) with stochastic task times and parallel workstations is presented. At the current stage of research, advances in solving realistic and complex assembly line balancing problem, as the one...

The buffer allocation problem (BAP) and the assembly line balancing problem (ALBP) are amongst the most studied problems in the literature on production systems. However they have been so far approached separately, although they are closely interrelated. This paper for the first time considers...

The purpose of this study is to test empirically for the first time the general hypothesis that inventory to sales ratios have decreased over time in the German economy. Although inventory reduction has been a prevalent topic in the production and operations management literature, there is a...

In modern-day production systems, ever-rising product variety poses a great challenge for the internal logistics systems used to feed mixed-model assembly lines with the required parts. As an answer to this challenge many manufacturers especially from automobile industries have identified the...

This paper considers a new variant of the two-dimensional bin packing problem where each rectangle is assigned a due date and each bin has a fixed processing time. Hence the objective is not only to minimize the number of bins, but also to minimize the maximum lateness of the rectangles. This...

The decision whether to use all the available machines in the shop becomes very relevant when the capacity exceeds the demand. In such cases, it might be optimal to use only a subset of the machines. We study this option in a two-stage flowshop environment. Jobs are assumed to be identical, and...