Due to surgery duration variability and arrivals of emergency surgeries, the planned Operating Room (OR) schedule is disrupted throughout the day which may lead to a change in the start time of the elective surgeries. These changes may result in undesirable situations for patients, wards or...

We study the problem of minimizing the makespan on m parallel machines. We introduce a very large-scale neighborhood of exponential size (in the number of machines) that is based on a matching in a complete graph. The idea is to partition the jobs assigned to the same machine into two sets. This...

The integration of renewable energy generation leads to major challenges for distribution grid operators. When the feed-in of photovoltaic (PV), biomass and wind generators exceed significantly the local consumption, large investments are needed. To improve the knowledge on the interaction...

The connection and distribution of growing, decentralized electricity generation from renewable energy sources (RES-E) is leading to massive investment needs. Besides investing in additional ‘conventional’ assets (e.g. cables), grid operators can also invest in innovative ‘smart...

This paper studies planning problems for a group of heating systems which supply the hot water demand for domestic use in houses. These systems (e.g. gas or electric boilers, heat pumps or microCHPs) use an external energy source to heat up water and store this hot water for supplying the...