This article presents a mathematical model for barge transport planning on the river Rhine, which is part of a decision support system (DSS) recently taken into use by the Swiss company Omya. The system is operated by Omya's regional office in Cologne, Germany, responsible for distribution...

When considering fairness one must ask two fundamental questions. Firstly, what does it mean to be fair? And secondly, how does one measure that fairness? Different authors have offered different notions and metrics to address these questions. We provide arguments identifying where past metrics...

Facing harsh competition in global marketplaces, management must construct the best possible supply chains to meet client requirements of quality, timely, and diverse products. To accelerate the fabrication rate can help shorten the length of the refilling cycle, and the reworking of repairable...

Traditionally, mathematical optimization methods have been applied in manufacturing industries where production scheduling is one of the most important problems and is being actively researched. Extant studies assume that processing times are known or follow a simple distribution. However, the...

In transportation via containers, unbalanced movement of loaded containers forces shipping companies to reposition empty containers. This study addresses the problem of empty container repositioning (ECR) in the distribution network of a European logistics company, where some restrictions impose...

This article applies game theory in the company under study, in order to optimize the competitive strategy with respect to its main competitor in the bicycle and motorcycle market. Once the problem is defined, the zero-sum matrix between the competitors is established, then the model is...

Minimum-cost spanning tree problems are well-known problems in the operations research literature. Some agents, located at different geographical places, want a service provided by a common supplier. Agents will be served through costly connections. Some part of the literature has focused,...

Lack of rapidly available neurological expertise, especially in rural areas, is one of the key obstacles in stroke care. Stroke care networks attempt to address this challenge by connecting hospitals with specialized stroke centers, stroke units, and hospitals of lower levels of care. While the...

Primary care systems are a cornerstone of universally accessible health care. The planning, analysis, and adaptation of primary care systems is a highly non-trivial problem due to the systems' inherent complexity, unforeseen future events, and scarcity of data. To support the search for...

The intensive care unit (ICU) is one of the most crucial and expensive resources in a health care system. While high fixed costs usually lead to tight capacities, shortages have severe consequences. Thus, various challenging issues exist: When should an ICU admit or reject arriving patients in...