Component commonality, the use of the same version of a component across multiple products, is increasingly considered as a promising way to offer high external variety while retaining low internal variety in operations. However, increasing commonality has both positive and negative cost...

In spite of extraordinary support programs initiated by the European Union and other national authorities, the percentage of overall freight traffic moved by train is in steady decline. This development is driven by the fact that macro-economic benefits of rail traffic, such as relief of...

Nowadays, mixed-model assembly lines are applied in a wide range of industries to mass-produce customized products to order, e.g., in automobile industry. An important decision problem in this context receiving a lot of attention from researchers and practitioners is the sequencing problem,...

This paper studies a new class of single-machine scheduling problems, that are faced by Just-in-Time-suppliers satisfying a given demand. In these models the processing of jobs leads to a release of a predefined number of product units into inventory. Consumption is triggered by predetermined...

Assembly line balancing is a well-known and extensively researched decision problem which arises when assembly line production systems are designed and operated. A large variety of real-world problem variations and elaborate solution methods were developed and presented in the academic...

Die vorliegende Übersicht enthält in knapper Form eine Aufstellung von kommerziellen Softwarepaketen, die Entscheidungsträger beim Treffen von Entscheidungen unterstützen sollen. Dabei beschränkt sich die Aufstellung auf Endbenutzersysteme, mit deren Hilfe die Abbildung und Analyse von...

In recent years, more and more automobile producers adopted the supermarket-concept to enable a flexible and reliable Just-in-Time (JIT) part supply of their mixed-model assembly lines. Within this concept, a supermarket is a decentralized in-house logistics area where parts are intermediately...

Marketing lacks comprehension on the increasingly important segment of mature consumers in regards of their behaviors and respective reasons for certain behaviors. This study on the desire for alternative products or brands within the domain of fast moving consumer goods was capable to verify...

Assembly line balancing problems (ALBP) consist in assigning the total workload for manufacturing a product to stations of an assembly line as typically applied in automotive industry. The distribution of the tasks to the stations is due to restrictions which can be expressed in a precedence...

A mixed-model assembly line requires the solution of a short-term sequencing problem, which decides on the succession of different models launched down the line. A famous solution approach stemming from the Toyota Production System is the so-called Level Scheduling (LS), which aims to distribute...