This paper is concerned with confidentiality of vertical information sharing in a supply chain consisting of one manufacturer in the upstream and two or more retailers in the downstream engaging in a Bertrand competition. Each retailer has some private information about the uncertain demand and...

Part-orienting systems are employed in many manufacturing environments to feed work parts in correct orientation for proper operations. A part-orienting system is a serial arrangement of orienting devices; the selection and ordering of these devices is an important design aspect that is...

We establish the computational complexity of the problem of minimizing makespan in a flowshop, where each jobs requires a pallet the entire time, from the start of its first operation until the completion of the last operation. We prove that the problem is NP-hard in the strong sense for m =2...

In many manufacturing systems, parts must be fed to automatic machines in a specific orientation. This is often accomplished by what are known as part-orienting systems (POSs). A POS consists of one or more separate devices that orient parts, usually with multiple orientations. A theoretical...

A heuristic procedure is developed for minimizing makespan in flow-shop scheduling problems. In comparison with current algorithms, our algorithm seems to result in an improved makespan with a small additional computational effort. An algorithm is also developed to minimize the required number...

We consider the problem of scheduling n jobs in a pallet-constrained two-machine flowshop so as to minimize the makespan. In such a flowshop environment, each job needs a pallet the entire time, from the start of its first operation until the completion of the last operation, and the number of...

Intermodal rail/road freight transport constitutes an alternative to long-haul road transport for the distribution of large volumes of goods. The paper introduces the intermodal transportation problem for the tactical planning of mode and service selection. In rail mode, shippers either book...

In this paper, we give an overview of state-of-the-art OperationsResearch models and techniques used in passenger railway transportation. For each planning phase (strategic, tactical and operational), we describe the planning problems arising there and discuss some models and algorithms to solve...

We study the optimal policies of capacitated two-echelon serial inventory systems. For a system with smaller downstream capacity, we fully characterize the optimal policy using an intuitive backward induction. The key lies in two inductive assumptions: (a) if initially the stock level at the...

Blockchain is a form of distributed ledger technology. While it has grown in prominence, its full potential and possible downsides are not fully understood yet, especially with respect to Operations Management (OM). This article fills this gap. After briefly reviewing the technical foundations,...