Inspired by a case study, this paper reports a successful application of VNS to the production planning and scheduling problem that arises in the glass container industry. This is a multi-facility production system, where each facility has a set of furnaces where the glass paste is produced in...

Empty repositions are a major problem for car rental companies that deal with special types of vehicles whose number of units is small. In order to meet reservation requirements concerning time and location, companies are forced to transfer cars between rental stations, bearing significant costs...

The nesting problem, also known as irregular packing problem, belongs to the generic class of cutting and packing (C&P) problems. It differs from other 2-D C&P problems in the irregular shape of the pieces. This paper proposes a new mixed-integer model in which binary decision variables are...

Integrated production and distribution planning have received a lot of attention throughout the years and its economic advantages are well documented. However, for highly perishable products this integrated approach has to include, further than the economic aspects, the intangible value of...

Joint production and distribution planning at the operational level has received a great deal of attention from researchers. In most industries these processes are decoupled by means of final goods inventory that allow for a separated planning of these tasks. However, for example, in the...

Cutting and packing problems have been extensively studied in the literature in recent decades, mainly due to their numerous real-world applications while at the same time exhibiting intrinsic computational complexity. However, a major limitation has been the lack of problem generators that can...

The nesting problem is a two-dimensional cutting and packing problem where the small pieces to cut have irregular shapes. A particular case of the nesting problem occurs when congruent copies of one single shape have to fill, as much as possible, a limited sheet. Traditional approaches to the...

We propose two exact algorithms for two-dimensional orthogonal packing problems whose main components are simple mixed-integer linear programming models. Based on the different forms of time representation in scheduling formulations, we extend the concept of multiple time grids into a second...

The classical multi-level capacitated lot-sizing problem formulation is often not suitable to correctly capture resource requirements and precedence relations. Depending on lead time assumptions, either the model provides infeasible production plans or plans with costly needless inventory. We...

In this paper, we investigate a two-stage lot-sizing and scheduling problem in a spinning industry. A new hybrid method called HOPS (Hamming-Oriented Partition Search), which is a branch-and-bound based procedure that incorporates a fix-and-optimize improvement method is proposed to solve the...