In this paper we consider a real-time, dynamic pickup and delivery problem with timewindows where orders should be assigned to one of a set of competing transportation companies. Our approach decomposes the problem into a multi-agent structure where vehicle agents are responsible for the routing and scheduling decisions and the assignment of orders to vehicles is done by using a second-price au...

This paper considers a three-stage assembly flowshop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup < /div> times at the first stage and blocking times between each stage in such a way that the weighted mean completion time and makespan are minimized. Obtaining an optimal solution for this type of complex, large-sized problem in reasonable computational time using traditiona...

In this paper we consider a real-time, dynamic pickup and delivery problem with timewindows where orders should be assigned to one of a set of competing transportation companies. Our approach decomposes the problem into a multi-agent structure where vehicle agents are responsible for the routing and scheduling decisions and the assignment of orders to vehicles is done by using a second-price au...

We consider a problem of optimal order allocation faced for example by an internet trading agent who seeks to ful…l an order for speci…ed amounts of several products from a pre-arranged list of suppliers, taking into account availability and price. We present a mixed integer programming (MILP) formulation for the case that suppliers impose a …xed charge which is waived or discounted on orders a...

Business-to-Consumer e-commerce has not only increased the demand for package delivery services, such as those offered by Federal Express and UPS, but has also led to the development of new home delivery service models and activities such as grocery delivery services. By bringing goods “the last mile” to the customer’s front door, home delivery is seen by many as the ultimate value-added servic...

This paper studies optimal pricing and demand management policies for a firm that faces two streams of order types: one is composed of recurring regular jobs with pre-determined prices (exogenous prices) and the other involves big deals that require pricing proposals (endogenous prices). The probability to secure the big deals diminishes with the quoted price. The authors develop and compare op...

In this paper the long-term scheduling of a real world multi-product single stage continuous process for manufacturing glass is studied. This process features long minimum run lengths, and sequence dependent changeovers of the order of days, with high transition costs. The long-term scheduling involves extended time horizons that lead to large scale mixed integer linear programming (MILP) sched...