In the wake of e-commerce and its successful diffusion in most commercial activities, last-mile distribution causes more and more trouble in urban areas all around the globe. Growing parcel volumes to be delivered toward customer homes increase the number of delivery vans entering the city...

Single machine scheduling with sequence-dependent setup times is one of the classical problems of production planning with widespread applications in many industries. Solving this problem under the min-makespan objective is well known to be strongly NP-hard. We consider a special case of the...

Due to high real estate costs in urban areas, shop floor space is scarce in most brick‐and‐mortar stores. Maneuvering newly arrived merchandise through narrow aisles during shelf replenishment is time‐consuming for the sales staff and impedes customers. Therefore, many retail chains...

To enable the efficient division of labor in container yards, many large ports apply twin cranes, two identical automated stacking cranes each dedicated to one of the transfer zones on the seaside and landside. The use of a handshake area, a bay of containers that separates the dedicated areas...

Spotters (also denoted as switchers) are specialized terminal tractors, which are dedicated to the rapid maneuvering of semitrailers between parking lot and dock doors in large trailer yards. This paper is dedicated to spotter scheduling, i.e., the assignment of predefined trailer movements to a...

Component commonality - the use of the same version of a component across multiple products - is being 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...

The car sequencing problem determines sequences of different car models launched down a mixed-model assembly line. To avoid work overloads of workforce, car sequencing restricts the maximum occurrence of labor-intensive options, e.g., a sunroof, by applying sequencing rules. We consider this...