Since the introduction of exible manufacturing systems, researchers have investigated the various planning and scheduling problems that the users of such systems are facing. Several of these problems are not encountered in more classical production settings, and so called tool mamagement...

In this document we consider an optimization problem which origins from freight exchanges. The aim is to increase the utilization of already scheduled road transportation activities by accepting extra loads. Such utilization increase reduces costs for the freight sender, increases revenue for...

The customer contacts taking place after a sales transaction and the services involved are of increasing importance in contemporary business models. The responsiveness to service requests is a key dimension in service quality and therefore an important succes factor in this business domain. This...

This paper deals with the optimization of the flow of sterile instruments in hospital which takes place between the sterilization department and the operating theatre. This topic is especially of interest in view of the current attempts of hospitals to cut costs by outsourcing sterilization...

We study the problem of scheduling maintenance services. Given is a set of mmachines and integral cost-coefficients ai and bi for each machine i (1 i m). Timeis discretized into unit-length periods; in each period at most one machine can beserviced at a given service cost bi. The operating...

In this paper a typical situation arising in the assembly of printed circuit boards is investigated. The planning problem we face is how to assemble boards of different types using a single line of placement machines. From a practical viewpoint, the multiplicity of board types adds significantly...

Mixed model assembly systems assemble products (parts) of differenttypes in certain prespecified quantities. A minimal part set is a smallestpossible set of product type quantities, to be called the multiplicities,in which the numbers of assembled products of the various types are inthe desired...

ANWB, the Dutch automobile association, provides assistance, car repair andreplacement services to its nearly 4 million members. ANWB services around 1.3 millionrequests per year in The Netherlands. Historically, the operational planning process ofassigning requests to service men was regionally...

We consider a robotic flowshop model in which a single robot is responsible for the transportation of parts between machines and the amount of time that a part spends on a machine must be comprised in some predefined interval. The objective is to find a feasible schedule with minimal cycle time....