This paper studies an operational problem arising at a container terminal, consisting of scheduling a yard crane to carry out a set of container storage and retrieval requests in a single container block. The objective is to minimize the total travel time of the crane to carry out all requests....

The problem considered is that of forecasting demand for single-period products before the period starts. We study this problem for the case of a mail order apparel company that needs to order its products pre-season. The lack of historical demand data implies that other sources of data are...

Batching customer orders in a warehouse can result in considerable savings in order pickers’ travel distances. Many picker-to-parts warehouses have precedence constraints in picking a customer order. In this paper a joint order-batching and picker routing method is introduced to solve this...

Robust plans need to be developed for rapidly evacuating victims from a nuclear disaster site. Although nuclear plants are constructed with multiple redundant safety features, the chances of a leak can never be zero. In the event of a nuclear disaster, there is a need for an efficient evacuation...

Robust plans need to be developed for rapidly evacuating victims from a nuclear disaster site. Although nuclear plants are constructed with multiple redundant safety features, the chances of a leak can never be zero. In the event of a nuclear disaster, there is a need for an efficient evacuation...

This work describes the lifecycle of wood pallets as they move through the supply chain and compares the environmental impacts of the three predominant pallet management strategies: single-use expendable, reusable buy/sell, and reusable leased pool. The pallet lifecycle is characterized in five...

Doctors in a teaching hospital perform a variety of teaching, research, seminar, and in-patient care activities in addition to managing outpatient volumes. In this paper, we study the weekly activities of a doctor in a large teaching hospital in southern India, where the doctor's daily work load...