Flow production lines with finite buffer capacities are used in practice for mass production, e.g., in the automotive and food industries. The decision regarding the allocation of buffer capacities to mitigate throughput losses from stochastic processing times and unreliable stations is known as...

In the present paper, we consider the demand management decisions of a manufacturer facing stochastic demand. While in the previous literature, either the order release decisions are fixed upon arrival or a single-stage production environment is assumed, we make online order acceptance and order...

In this study, we analyze a task scheduling problem with small time windows and care workers with different levels of qualification in a nursing home. A set of care tasks has to be assigned to a given number of care workers, so that the total earliness and tardiness from the nursing home...

Many production systems cannot produce to stock and utilize capacity management to cope with variability in demand, for example Make-to-order (MTO) systems. Often, regular capacity can be increased through a flexible workforce, but the decision about the additional capacity must be made before...

This paper treats the problem of setting the inventory level and optimizing the buffer allocation of closed-loop flow lines operating under the constant-work-in-process (CONWIP) protocol. We solve a very large but simple linear program that models an entire simulation run of a closed-loop flow...