Purpose – In today’s’ highly competitive market, outsourcing logistic activities have become a global trend as it offers wide range of services including transportation, distribution, packaging, labeling, warehousing, freight forwarding and order fulfillment. The demand of third-party...

Purpose – Robot selection is one of the critical decision-making tasks frequently performed by various industries in order to choose the best suited robot for specific industrial purposes. In recent marketplace, the number of robot manufacturers has increased remarkably offering a wide range...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a holistic decision support system based on condition-based maintenance which utilizes meteorological forecasting information to support decision-making process in services of wind power enterprises. Design/methodology/approach – A pilot...

Blending biofuels into fossil fuels allows for emission reductions in the transportation sector. However, biofuels are not yet competitive due to high production costs and investments and thus, legal requirements like blending quotas or emission thresholds must be issued if biofuels are to...

We propose a profit maximization model for the decision support system of a firm that wishes to establish or rationalize a multinational manufacturing and distribution network to produce and deliver finished goods from sources to consumers. The model simultaneously evaluates all traditional...

A decision-support tool that automatically selects an age-specific target weight for beef heifers and specifies the daily liveweight gain (DLWG) required to achieve this target weight within 3 months was developed as an aid for farmers to use to promote calving at 24 months of age in the...

A problem of increasing the efficiencies of inefficient decision-making units (DMUs) with known marginal costs of reducing inputs is considered. It is shown that the problem is difficult to solve exactly, and has exponential computational complexity. Two heuristics (Heuristic-I and Heuristic-II)...

This paper describes an employee scheduling system for retail outlets; it is a constraint-based system that exploits forecasts and stochastic techniques to generate schedules meeting the demand for sales personnel. Uncertain scenarios due to fluctuating demand are taken into account to develop a...

In this paper we define a new problem, the aim of which is to find a set of k dissimilar solutions for a vehicle routing problem (VRP) on a single instance. This problem has several practical applications in the cash-in-transit sector and in the transportation of hazardous materials. A min–max...