In modern rail-rail transshipment yards huge gantry cranes spanning all railway tracks allow for an efficent transshipment of containers between different freight trains. This way, multiple trains loaded with cargo for varying destinations can be consolidated to a reduced number of homogeneous...

A production system which consists of a number of parallel assembly lines is considered. On each line a certain product is manufactured observing a common cycle time. By arranging the lines in a favourable manner, it is possible to increase efficiency of the production system by combining...

Mixed-model assembly lines are widely used in a range of production settings, such as the final assembly of the automotive and electronics industries, where they are applied to mass-produce standardised commodities. One of the greatest challenges when installing and reconfiguring these lines is...

Transshipment yards, where gantry cranes allow for an effcient transshipment of containers between different freight trains, are important entities in modern railway systems and facilitate the general shift from point-to-point transport to hub-and-spoke railway systems. Modern rail-rail...

A mixed-model assembly line enables the joint production of dierent models of a common base product in intermixed model sequence (lot size one). Previous approaches for the short-term planning task of model sequencing either aim at minimizing work overload (mixed-model sequencing and car...

A mixed-model assembly line requires the solution of a short-term sequencing problem which decides on the succession of different models launched down the line. A famous solution approach stemming from the Toyota Production System is the so called Level Scheduling, which aims at distributing the...

At cross docking terminals, shipments from inbound trucks are unloaded, sorted and moved to dispatch points where they are directly loaded onto outbound trucks for an immediate delivery elsewhere in the distribution system. This warehouse management concept aims at realizing economies in...

Assembly line balancing problems (ALBPs) arise whenever an assembly line is configured, redesigned or adjusted. An ALBP consists of distributing the total workload for manufacturing products among the work stations along the line. On the one hand, research has focussed on developing effective...

Component commonality, the use of the same version of a component across multiple products, is increasingly considered as a promising way to offer high external variety while retaining low internal variety in operations. However, increasing commonality has both positive and negative cost...

Production processes in a wide range of industries rely on modern mixed-model assembly systems, which allow an efficient manufacture of various models of a common base product on the same assembly line. In order to facilitate a just-in-time supply of materials, the literature proposes various...