In the context of manufacturing servitization, manufacturing enterprises offer not only products but also associated services according to customer demands, which is the so-called Product Service System (PSS). In PSS configuration, enterprises need to jointly determine the selected modules with corresponding prices to improve sales profit and customer satisfaction. Better customer satisfaction can

Customers in the manufacturing sector, especially in the automotive industry, have a high demand for individualized products at price levels comparable to traditional mass-production. The contrary objectives of providing a variety of products and operating at minimum costs have introduced a high degree of production planning and control mechanisms based on a stable order sequence for mixed-model assembly

This paper investigates a dynamic and stochastic shipment matching problem faced by network operators in hinterland synchromodal transportation. We consider a platform that receives contractual and spot shipment requests from shippers, and receives multimodal services from carriers. The platform aims to provide optimal matches between shipment requests and multimodal services within a finite horizon

This study examines a mobile phone network in three models: (1) mobile network model: one mobile operator, one mobile phone manufacturer, and one mobile application developer, (2) mobile network model with application competition: one mobile operator, one mobile phone manufacturer, and two mobile application developers, (3) mobile network model with operator competition: two mobile operators, one mobile

In a context where companies are striving to produce highly customised goods in small batches and within short lead times, increasing attention is being put on the design and management of part feeding systems. This research is the first to model automated part feeding to supermarkets in a factory environment, considering an innovative technology called vertical robotic storage and retrieval systems

In this study, we address workload balancing in Emergency Department Physician Rostering Problems. We propose a two-phase approach to deal with two common workload balancing issues: (1) the even distribution of worked weekends and weekend night shifts across physicians in the long term, and (2) the even distribution of morning and afternoon shifts in the medium term. To implement such an approach,

Fast delivery is one of the most popular services in e-commerce retail. It consists in shipping the items ordered on-line in short times. Customer orders in this segment come with deadlines, and respecting this latter is pivotal to ensure a high service quality. The most time-consuming process in the warehouse is order picking. It consists in regrouping orders into batches, assigning those batches

Operating room managers are facing increasingly complex challenges, namely in complying with waiting time targets before surgery. This paper proposes a framework that combines optimization and simulation to generate dynamic master surgery schedules for a long planning horizon, in which the schedules are optimized by an integer programming model and the demand levels are modelled using the simulation

Container slot allocation for liner shipping services is to allocate the limited container slots of ships to different segments of demands in order to maximize the total revenue over a shipping network. This study focuses on a planning-level container slot allocation problem with uncertain demand, which is essential in container shipping revenue management. Due to the challenge of calibrating/formulating

The retail industry is becoming increasingly competitive; as a result, companies are seeking to reduce inefficiencies in their supply chains. One way of increasing the efficiency of operations inside a warehouse is by better allocating products in the available spaces. In this paper, we propose a new heuristic approach to solving the storage location assignment problem (SLAP) considering precedence

This paper proposes a multi-objective integrated optimization model of production scheduling and machine maintenance to find the optimal production sequence and preventive maintenance (PM) decisions. This model considers the setup time, the learning-forgetting effects and the multi-degradation effects. The setup time and the learning-forgetting effects are associated with jobs' similarities and PM

Strong interactions between decisions in the maintenance and production scheduling domains, and their impacts on the equipment yield rates necessitate maintenance and production decisions being optimized concurrently, with considerations of yield dependencies on the equipment conditions and production rates. This paper proposes an integrated decision-making policy for production and maintenance operations

Within the framework of continuous-review \((S-1, S)\) inventory systems with rationing and backorders, there are two streams of studies in the literature that involve optimization models. In the first stream, service level optimizations are studied for which exact optimization routines are provided. The second stream of studies involves cost optimization models, which relies on optimizing approximate

Consumers’ strategic behavior and psychological perception have impact on supply chains. In this paper, we consider a supply chain with one supplier and one retailer to study the influence of disappointment-aversion strategic (DAS) consumers on supply chain members’ decisions and performance. The results of this study show that strategic consumers can reduce the profit levels of such a supply chain

In the presence of different service times of regular patients and nonpreemptive priority of emergency patients at the same day, this paper considers an advance appointment-scheduling problem of medical resources in which a finite amount of same-day service capacity should be allocated to different patients. This booking problem is modeled as a dynamic programming (DP) problem. The structural properties

This paper studies the scheduling problem of jobs with release times, non-identical sizes, and incompatible job families on unrelated parallel batch machines. The capacities of batch machines and the processing times of each job on the batch machines are different. The processing time of one batch is equal to the longest processing time of jobs in this batch. Different types of jobs are not allowed

The growing demand for outpatient departments and prolonged waiting time of patients in recent years has made physician scheduling necessary to provide timely medical services. This study focused on the problem of scheduling physicians in an outpatient system with a nonhomogeneous patient arrival and priority queue, which exists in many Asian hospitals. In such a system, both patients with appointments

Optimizing Home Care Services is receiving a great attention in Operations Research. We address arrival time consistency, person-oriented consistency and demand uncertainty in Home Care, while jointly optimizing assignment, scheduling and routing decisions over a multiple-day time horizon. Consistent time schedules are very much appreciated by patients who, in this setting, are very sensitive to changes

In this paper, we study the \(M_n/M_n/c/(K_1+K_2)+M_n\) system with two finite-size queues where underlying exponential random variables have state-dependent rates. When all servers are busy, upon arrival customers may join the online or the offline/callback queue or simply balk. Customers waiting in the online queue are impatient and if their patience expires, they may choose to join the callback

In healthcare management, one important problem is how to efficiently allocate resources with limited capacities. From the point of view of a central decision maker with a long planning horizon, many healthcare resources such as appointment slots, operation rooms, and hospital beds can be regarded as reusable resources. Motivated by this observation, we study a new version of the assignment problem

We develop a model of free gift card promotions in a two-product supply chain. We analyze three cases with different gift card strategies based on whether the wholesale and retail prices are changed or unchanged. The results indicate that, in the strategy of unchanged wholesale and retail prices, the retailer and two manufacturers are better off. The gift card promotions can effectively stimulate the

Modeling the arrival process to an Emergency Department (ED) is the first step of all studies dealing with the patient flow within the ED. Many of them focus on the increasing phenomenon of ED overcrowding, which is afflicting hospitals all over the world. Since Discrete Event Simulation models are often adopted to assess solutions for reducing the impact of this problem, proper nonstationary processes

Motivated by the increasing demand of mass customisation in production systems, this paper proposes a robust and adaptive scheduling and dispatching method for high-mix human-robot collaborative manufacturing facilities. Scheduling and dispatching rules are derived to optimally track the desired production within the mix, while handling uncertainty in job processing times. The sequencing policy is

Due to rapid advancement of the society, recently many manufacturing and retailing companies are showing their interests in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in addition to maximizing their profits. This study introduces CSR activity of the retailer, and develops an integrated model (Model I) and three manufacturer-led decentralized models (Model M, R, and C) depending on different collection options

In this paper, flexible preventive maintenance (PM) activities are incorporated into two-stage assembly flow shop scheduling where m dedicated machines in the fabrication stage and one machine in the assembly stage. The operational status of each machine is described by a continuous variable, maintenance level. The maintenance level value is inversely proportional to the processing time. Once a PM

With the popularization and application of technologies such as monitoring and sensing, the application of condition-based maintenance has become increasingly widespread. However, most traditional condition-based maintenance strategies focus on a component or system, which is too large for fault diagnosis and location. Moreover, imperfect maintenance is seldom considered and most of them only optimize

In most of the literature on emergency medical service (EMS) system design and analysis, arrivals of EMS calls are assumed to follow Poisson process. However, it is not uncommon for real-world EMS systems to experience batch arrivals of EMS requests, where a single call involves more than one patient. Properly capturing such batch arrivals is needed to enhance the quality of analyses, thereby improving

We explore the value of information sharing for smoothing the dynamics of supply chains when some echelons do not collaborate. To this end, we study seven information sharing structures in a four-echelon supply chain using a system dynamics approach. We find that the overall propagation of the bullwhip effect in supply chains decreases as the number of echelons sharing information grows, but it is

In the past decade, subsidy policies aimed at demand-side of photovoltaic (PV) supply chains have created a dilemma. While they foster the growth of the PV industry, they also induce overcapacity problems to the society. As a result, many governments have cut back subsidies to PV system users. These subsidy reductions hurt PV enterprises and their supply chains that are now facing lost business. To

The last decades have seen a tremendous amount of research being devoted to effectively managing vehicle fleets and minimizing empty mileage. However, in contrast to, e.g., the air transport sector, the question of how to best assign crews to vehicles, has received very little attention in the road transport sector. The vast majority of road freight transport in Europe is conducted by single drivers

We examine a parallel machine scheduling problem with a job splitting property, sequence-dependent setup times, and limited setup operators, for minimizing makespan. Jobs are split into arbitrary (job) sections that can be processed on different machines simultaneously. When a job starts to be processed on a machine, a setup that requires an operator is performed, and the setup time is sequence-dependent

We study supplier–buyer relationships in smallholder agri-food supply chains with equity concerns and under stakeholder engagement. We develop a game theoretic model to study the impact of these socially responsible practices in investment and pricing decisions. We model this as a Stackelberg game and study the impacts of the power structure in the outcomes. Our work was motivated by the business model

Workload control (WLC) is a lean oriented system that reduces queues and waiting times, by imposing a cap to the workload released to the shop floor. Unfortunately, WLC performance does not systematically outperform that of push operating systems, with undersaturated utilizations levels and optimized dispatching rules. To address this issue, many scientific works made use of complex job-release mechanisms

Overcrowding at emergency departments in Hong Kong has been a critical issue for hospital managers recently. In this study, we focus on optimizing the medical staff configuration to alleviate overcrowding. According to the service requirements proposed by the Hong Kong government, 90% of urgent patients should receive treatment within 30 min. However, this condition is rarely satisfied in the practical

The cargo fare class mix (CFCM) problem aims to find the optimal fare class mix for a given intermodal transportation network based on known client demands. It is based on a revenue management problem for aviation passengers, the fare class mix problem, but considering intermodal cargo transportation, two major differences apply. Firstly, the CFCM’s premise is that long-term commitments to customers

To improve the efficiency of the container terminals, we propose a simulation optimization iteration approach to integrate the yard allocation problem (YAP) with the vehicle congestion problem. YAP is formulated as a mixed integer programming model to reduce the total job travel time. A discrete event simulation model is developed to simulate the terminal operation and traffic movement within the terminal

Increased customization has strengthened the importance of make-to-order companies. The advent of lean management and the introduction of smart and flexible technologies has enabled many of these companies to create flow shop routings. Order review and release (ORR) research, which originally focused on job shops, has started paying attention to flow shops. However, the results have not provided clarity

We consider the problem of designing a logistics system to assure efficient urban construction processes for an innovative urban building area in the city of Vienna. We address the challenges of coordinating workers and the timely delivery and storage of material with the objective of optimizing resource-efficiency as well as reducing traffic related to construction tasks. The problem is formulated

Emergency departments (EDs) are continuously exploring opportunities to improve their efficiency. A new opportunity lies in revising the patient–physician assignment process by limiting the number of patients simultaneously assigned to a single physician, which is defined as the application of a case manager approach with limited caseloads. The potential of introducing a case manager approach with

The manufacturing industry has evolved in the past few years due to the competitive global economy where the performance of its assembly line operations is primarily dependent upon optimum resource utilization. The assembly line operations are balanced among the available resources to obtain an equal amount of workload to achieve optimum resource utilization, called the assembly line balancing (ALB)

Conventional approaches to layout design of block stacked warehouses assume perfect staggering of product inflow leading to perfect sharing of space among products. Since such an assumption is seldom true, we argue that warehouses designed using the conventional approach may result in choking situations with large quantities of inventory waiting outside the storage areas. On the other hand, liberal

The size of container ships and the number of containers being transshipped at container terminals have steadily increased over the years. Consequently, it is important to make efficient use of the hinterland capacity. A concept that is used to do this is synchromodal transportation, in which at the very last moment the mode of transportation for a container is decided. Unfortunately, some deep-sea

The drying of sawn lumber is one of the major processing steps in sawmills with high production volumes. Existing publications on kiln drying analyse and improve technological conditions, while this paper focuses on the scheduling and loading planning with time availability of the individual dried packages. To improve dry kiln scheduling for multiple and identical kilns in large softwood processing

Over the past decades, container transportation has achieved considerable growth, and maritime trade now constitutes 80% of the global trade. The vessel sizes increased in parallel, up to 21,400 TEU (Twenty-foot-equivalent unit container). Accordingly, global containerized trade reached up to 150 million TEU in 2017 (UNCTAD 2018). This growth brings the need to use scientific methods to manage and

Supply chain system experiences variance amplification in order replenishment and inventory level, leading to severe inefficiencies of the system. Information distortion is universally known as a fundamental reason for the variance amplification phenomenon. The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of demand information sharing in reducing bullwhip effect and improving the robustness of supply

In this paper, we analyze the impact of indirect network effects and competition on two firms each offering two complementary products. We first formulate the pricing game with general network effects and show that it is neither a supermodular nor a submodular game. We then derive the closed-form Nash equilibrium with linear demand functions. Furthermore, we examine a model with two symmetric firms

Building robust logistics networks against facility disruptions has been gaining more attention from both researchers and practitioners. However, in pursuit of high built-in network robustness, one usually has to increase the network redundancy and complexity, which adds to the difficulty of management and induces additional operating costs. In this paper, we aim to balance the trade-off between robustness

Shift design is an essential step in workforce planning in which staffing requirements must be obtained for a set of shifts which best cover forecasted demand given as a demand pattern. Existing models for this challenging optimization problem perform well when these demand patterns fluctuate around an average without any strong variability in demand. However, when demand is irregular, these models

In this paper, we study a service parts inventory management system for a single product at a parts distribution center serving two priority-demand classes: critical and non-critical. Distribution center keeps a common inventory pool to serve the two demand classes, and provides differentiated levels of service by means of inventory rationing. We assume a continuous review one-for-one ordering policy

Remanufacturing capacities are constrained by the collected amount of end-of-life (EOL) products resulting in the make-from-stock model for remanufacturing industries. Remanufacturers may select quality choices in a strategic manner to improve their remanufacturing capacities. Thus, we examine a Cournot duopoly in which an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) sells new products and an independent

This paper develops an integrated imperfect production-inventory system consisting of a retailer and a manufacturer who produces breakable items. As breakable items are very sensitive to transport, in this paper, to stimulate the retailer, the manufacturer offers (1) free transportation subject to the condition that the retailer must have to order a minimum replenishment quantity specified by the manufacturer

The purpose of this paper is to explore the cooperation issues in a consignment supply chain with complementary products under Online to Offline Business Mode (O2O mode). The centralized, decentralized and cooperative game-theoretic decision models are developed, analyzed and compared for a generic consignment supply chain with complementary products under O2O mode. Similar models are also developed

In this study, we address safety stock positioning when demand per period is a known constant but supply is uncertain. The supply is either available or not available, while the setting is that of a periodically reviewed, serial system following a base stock policy. Each stage is allowed to operate according to the guaranteed or stochastic service model. We use a Discrete Time Markov Chain model for

In radiotherapy, treatment needs to be delivered in time. Long waiting times can result in patient anxiety and growth of tumors. They are often caused by inefficient use of radiotherapy equipment, the linear accelerators (LINACs). However, making an efficient schedule is very challenging, especially when we have multiple types of patients, having different service requirements and waiting time constraints

In this paper, we address the multiple operating room (OR) surgical case sequencing problem (SCSP). The objective is to maximise total OR utilisation during standard opening hours. This work uses a case study of a large Australian public hospital with long surgical waiting lists and high levels of non-elective demand. Due to the complexity of the SCSP and the size of the instances considered herein

Maintenance and production are frequently managed as separate activities although they do interact. Disruptive events such as machine failures may find the company unready to repair the machine immediately leading to time waste. Preventive Maintenance may be carried out and maintenance time reduced to the effective task duration, in order to prevent time waste. Companies and researchers have been focusing

Analyzing a retail layout accounting for how a shopper visually interacts with racks along their shopping path can help the retailer identify hot-warm-cold spots and better allocate products to racks in order to maximize revenue. We focus on estimating exposure (which locations are likely to be seen) and the intensity of exposure (how long are they seen) by accounting for the dynamic interaction between

Cost-effectiveness analysis is an important topic in public health, which can provide valuable information for medical decisions. Several modeling methods are available for conducting cost-effectiveness analysis. However, it is difficult when the data is incomplete. To solve this problem, a Markov model is proposed to model patients’ health states transition, and two hybrid metaheuristics are proposed

Liner shipping plays a major role for freight transportation and international seaborne trade. The economic development of different countries is significantly dependent on the movement of a containerized cargo. One of the most challenging decision problems, tackled by liner shipping companies, is the design of vessel schedules. At the vessel scheduling stage, the liner shipping company aims to determine

Increasing international maritime transport drives the need for efficient container terminals. The speed at which containers can be processed through a terminal is an important performance indicator. In particular, the productivity of the quay cranes (QCs) determines the performance of a container terminal; hence QC scheduling has received considerable attention. This article develops a comprehensive