Almost ever since freight has been transported via rail, shunting yards (also called classification or marshaling yards) are operated in order to separate freight trains and reassemble new trains. The efficient use of shunting yards has a deep impact on the efficiency and reliability of rail...

Assembly line balancing problems (ALBPs) arise whenever an assembly line is configured, redesigned or adjusted. An ALBP consists of distributing the total workload for manufacturing products among the work stations along the line. On the one hand, research has focussed on developing effective...

To enable rapid container transshipment between freight trains in modern rail-rail transshipment yards efficient computerized scheduling procedures are indispensable. This paper proposes a dynamic programming approach, which determines yard areas for gantry cranes, so that the workload is evenly...

The generation of leveled production schedules is of high importance for mixed-model assembly lines whose parts and materials are supplied just-in-time by multi-level production processes. The Output Rate Variation problem is the standard mathematical representation of this complex level...

At rail-road transshipment yards, gantry cranes move containers from freight trains to trucks and vice versa. They constitute important entities in today's intermodal transportation systems. Real-world yards are often partitioned into several disjunct crane areas, so that crane interferences...

At cross docking terminals incoming deliveries of inbound trucks are unloaded, sorted, moved across the dock and finally loaded onto outbound trucks, which immediately leave the terminal towards their next destination in the distribution chain. Accordingly, a cross dock is a consolidation point...

Mixed-model assembly lines are of great practical relevance and are widely used in a range of industries, such as the final assembly of the automotive and electronics industries. Prior research mainly selected and discussed isolated problems rather than considering the whole planning process. In...

The sequence-dependent assembly line balancing problem Abstract Assembly line balancing problems (ALBP) arise whenever an assembly line is configured, redesigned or adjusted. An ALBP consists of distributing the total workload for manufacturing any unit of the products to be assembled among the...

Assembly lines are flow-line production systems which are of great importance in the industrial production of high quantity standardized commodities and more recently even gained importance in low volume production of customized products. Due to high capital requirements when installing or...