The NP-hard Multi-Row Facility Layout Problem (MRFLP) consists of a set of one-dimensional departments and pairwise transport weights between them. It asks for a non-overlapping arrangement of the departments along a given number of rows such that the weighted sum of the horizontal center-to-center distances between the departments is minimized. We mainly focus on the … Read more
We study a new service network design problem for an urban same-day delivery system in which the number of vehicles that can simultaneously load or unload at a hub is limited. Due to the presence of both time constraints for the commodities and capacity constraints at the hubs, it is no longer guaranteed that a … Read more
We discuss a new facility layout problem, the so-called Directed Circular Facility Layout Problem (DCFLP). The DCFLP aims to find an optimal arrangement of machines on a circular material handling system such that the total weighted sum of the center-to-center distances between all pairs of machines measured in clockwise direction is minimized. Several real-world applications, … Read more
Quantifying extra functions, herein referred to as outcome functions, over optimal solutions of an optimization problem can provide decision makers with additional information on a system. This bears more importance when the optimization problem is subject to uncertainty in input parameters. In this paper, we consider linear programming problems in which input parameters are described … Read more
Concerns about greenhouse gas emissions and government regulations foster the use of electric vehicles. Several recently published articles study the use of electric vehicles (EVs) in node-routing problems. In contrast, this article considers EVs in the context of arc routing while also addressing practically relevant aspects that have not been addressed sufficiently so far. These … Read more
Some popular heuristics for combinatorial optimisation start by constructing a feasible solution to a dual of the problem. We show that such dual-based heuristics can exhibit highly counter-intuitive behaviour. In particular, for some problem classes, solving the dual exactly invariably leads to much worse primal solutions than solving the dual with a simple greedy heuristic. … Read more
Improving energy efficiency and lowering operational costs are the main challenges faced in systems with multiple servers. One prevalent objective in such systems is to minimize the number of servers required to process a given set of tasks under server capacity constraints. This objective leads to the well-known bin packing problem. In this study, we … Read more
Maintenance optimization has been extensively studied in the past decades. However, most of the existing maintenance models focus on single-component systems. Multi-component maintenance optimization, which joins the stochastic failure processes with the combinatorial maintenance grouping problems, remains as an open issue. To address this challenge, we study this problem in a finite planning horizon by … Read more
The purpose of this study is to give an exact formulation of optimization of volumetric-modulated arc therapy (VMAT) with sliding-window delivery, and to investigate the plan quality effects of decreasing the number of sliding-window sweeps made on the 360-degree arc for a faster VMAT treatment. In light of the exact formulation, we interpret an algorithm … Read more
We consider a lot-sizing problem in a single-item single-stage production system facing non-stationary stochastic demand in a nite planning horizon. Motivated by practice, the set-up times need to be deter- mined and frozen once and for all at the beginning of the horizon while decisions on the exact lot sizes can be deferred until the … Read more