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...

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...

In this paper we develop a new conditional penalty for the fixed charge transportation problem. This penalty is stronger than both the Driebeek penalties and the Lagrangean penalties of Cabot and Erenguc. Computational testing shows that the use of these penalties leads to significant reductions...

Efficient production resettings are necessary to achieve production flexibility. For this reason, most modern companies are trying to reduce the setup time required to switch the production from one product type to another. One way to minimise these times is to schedule correctly the various...

In this paper, we consider the problem of scheduling tasks on two dedicated processors where some tasks need to be processed only by the first processor and some others by the second processor; the remaining tasks, however, need both processors simultaneously. Tasks have release dates and have...

This study is concerned with the problem of finding an optimal sequence that minimises the weighted sum of a quadratic function of job lateness on a single machine where an idle time is allowed to be inserted only before the processing of the first job begins. We first prove that the solution...