On a very abstract level, an information system consists of a set of system elements which communicate with each other. Communication is an unproductive operation, so the time needed to communicate data should be kept as short as possible and, to put it in monetary terms, the opportunity costs...

While balancing straight assembly lines is a well-studied problem, the Situation where the assembly line has a U-shaped Iayout is a still emerging research field. The advantage of these lines is that workers may simply turn around to operate at two legs of the line. Hence, there is an additional...

Resource-constrained project scheduling under a net present value objective attracts growing interest. Because this is an NP-hard problem, it is unlikely that optimum solutions can be computed for large instances. Thus, heuristics have become a popular research field. Up to now, however, tight...