We propose a new framework to address the territory design problem of emergency services in collaboration with two police authorities in Europe. Our framework serves as a strategic decision support system to assess different districting layouts, department locations, staffing decisions and...

In recent years, more and more disasters occurred. Additionally, the amount of people affected by disasters increased. Because of this, it is of great importance to perform the relief operations efficiently in order to alleviate the suffering of the disaster victims. Immediately after the...

We consider the block relocation problem (BRP), a combinatorial optimization problem that may arise in storage systems where items are organized in stacks. The objective is to retrieve all items in a predefined order with a minimal number of relocations. It can be distinguished between a...