This paper focuses on production systems that consist of multiple parallel assembly lines. The main literature contributions are briefly described and used to present a summary of the state of the art. The advantages and disadvantages of adopting multiple lines are discussed and the multiple...

Purpose: Once a set of suppliers has been determined, according to criteria of quality, price and reliability, among others, there remains the problem of assigning orders to the selected suppliers, in order to cover the needs at the lowest cost. We consider the case in which the needs of a...

Purpose: This paper, devoted to the selection of strategic sourcing options as a part of the supply chain design, aims to provide supply chain designers with guidelines for selecting the best strategic sourcing option for each item (i.e., products, modules, parts and services)....

The annualisation of working hours (i.e., the irregular distribution of the total number of working hours over the course of a year) makes it possible to adapt production capacity to fluctuations in demand. The required capacity, which is an essential data for the optimal planning of working...

Gender equality is now a matter that concerns all European countries. Despite the great effort made by governments and the progress of laws, gender discrimination still exists in family, social, cultural, political and economic spheres. Even today, it is rare to find women at the top level in...

Purpose: This paper introduces a procedure for solving the staffing problem in a service system (i.e., determining the number of servers for each staffing period). Design/methodology: The proposed algorithm combines the use of queueing theory to find an initial solution with the use of...

Purpose: To estimate the transition rates corresponding to the 2010 and 2012 elections to the Catalan Parliament for the four constituencies in which Catalonia is divided for this purpose. The main features of the results, which are obtained by means of mathematical programming, are commented....

Purpose: The main purpose of the paper is to evaluate the impact of diverse personnel policies around personnel promotion in the design of the strategic staff plan for a public university. The strategic staff planning consists in the determination of the size and composition of the workforce for...