U-shaped assembly lines are an important configuration of modern manufacturing systems due to their flexibility to adapt to varying market demands. In U-shaped lines, tasks are assigned after their predecessors or successors. Some MILP models have been proposed to formulate the U-shaped assembly...

Owing to its theoretical as well as practical significance, the facility layout problem with unequal-area departments has been studied for several decades, with a wide range of heuristic and a few exact solution procedures developed by numerous researchers. In one of the exact procedures, the...

The Hunter Valley Coal Chain is the largest coal export operation in the world with a throughput in excess of 100 million tonnes per annum (Mtpa). Coal is delivered to the shipping terminal from 40 mines using 27 coal load points spread across the Hunter Valley region. This paper describes an...