Dirk Briskorn

• University of Wuppertal

To relieve congested city centers, cargo tunnels are a recently revitalized last-mile delivery concept that is currently evaluated in various capability studies in different parts of the world. Under the cargo tunnel concept, freight is lifted into a tunnel at an easy-to-access outskirt depot and loaded onto electrically-powered autonomous cargo ve...

To streamline their fulfillment processes, many e-commerce retailers today use automated packaging machines for their outbound parcels. An important performance–waste tradeoff is associated with these machines: To reduce packaging waste when handling different sized goods, packaging machines should be able to handle different carton sizes. However,...

In view of success stories of unicorn startups from the sharing and gig economy such as Airbnb, DiDi, or Uber, it is not surprising that postal service providers try to transfer the sharing idea toward their last-mile delivery services: owners of under-used assets (here private crowdshippers traveling anyway) are connected with users willing to pay...

Underground passageways for the transport of goods and people have fascinated mankind throughout the centuries. Recent initiatives in different parts of the world aim at rekindling the freight tunnel concept for urban logistics. According to this concept, freight is lifted into a tunnel, moved via electrically powered vehicles, rail cars, or maglev...

Among the most crucial organizational challenges of free-floating carsharing is the question how to cope with regional demand imbalance. Because users are allowed to leave a rented car anywhere in the service district, it regularly occurs that too many cars are left behind in low-demand regions whereas other regions face a demand surplus. In this p...

Due to high real estate costs in urban areas, shop floor space is scarce in most brick‐and‐mortar stores. Maneuvering newly arrived merchandise through narrow aisles during shelf replenishment is time‐consuming for the sales staff and impedes customers. Therefore, many retail chains nowadays aim for store‐friendly shipments (SFS). By mirroring the...

More and more people live in urban areas in general and in “megacities”, with 10 million inhabitants and more, in particular. One innovative instrument to reduce surface traffic and its negative impact on health, congestion, environment, and safety when supplying these urban inhabitants with goods is a cargo tunnel. Within the cargo tunnel concept,...

Electrifying road-based long-haul transportation is an intricate task. Given the current state of battery technology, either the driving ranges of electric commercial vehicles (ECVs) are too short or high-capacity batteries are costly and so heavy that payloads are limited. An old, yet recently revitalized, charging infrastructure currently evaluat...

This paper treats a variant of the famous Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), which is extended to cover the peculiarities of a novel, drone-based distribution concept in last-mile logistics. In this context, the salesman represents the driver of a home delivery truck. Given a set of customers to be visited, the truck has a limited capacity, so that...

This paper deals with the capacity planning and production network planning in plastics processing factories. We lay emphasis on the opportunity and – potentially – necessity to move machines, tools and material. Furthermore, we consider the option to outsource production to external suppliers. Demand is deterministic and has to be satisfied in the...

Single machine scheduling with sequence-dependent setup times is one of the classical problems of production planning with widespread applications in many industries. Solving this problem under the min-makespan objective is well known to be strongly NP-hard. We consider a special case of the problem arising from products having a modular design. Th...

Dieser Beitrag behandelt ein quantitatives Optimierungsmodell, das eine Problemstellung bei der kurzfristigen Produktionsplanung abbildet.

We consider the distributed scheduling problem on parallel machines with the central objective of maximizing the number of on-time jobs. Jobs are self-interested utility-maximizers that can choose the machines they are processed on and are exclusively interested in reducing their own private objective function. Each machine processes the jobs accor...

To enable the efficient division of labor in container yards, many large ports apply twin cranes, two identical automated stacking cranes each dedicated to one of the transfer zones on the seaside and landside. The use of a handshake area, a bay of containers that separates the dedicated areas of the two cranes, is a simple means to avoid crane int...

High-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes are restricted traffic lanes that are reserved for vehicles with multiple car occupants. Depending on the current number of passengers, a driver must either travel slower on the often-congested general-purpose lane or can access the faster HOV lane. In this paper, we provide optimization approaches for matching su...

Given the current state of battery technology, applying electric trucks for long-haul transportation is a cumbersome task. Either the driving ranges are too short or high-capacity batteries are so heavy that payloads are limited. An old, yet recently revitalized charging infrastructure, currently evaluated on multiple test tracks all around the glo...

The scheduling of gantry cranes with respect to mutual interference has received considerable attention in recent years. We consider a subproblem which arises when each crane has a sequence of tasks to be assigned. The problem is concerned with resolving the interference between two cranes by determining which crane avoids the other in order to let...

Motivated by evidence that parliament seatings are relevant for decision making, we consider the problem to assign seats in a parliament to members of parliament. We prove that the resulting seating assignment problem is strongly NP-hard in several restricted settings. We present a Mixed Integer Programming formulation of the problem, we describe t...

To realize economies of scale in transportation, hubs are important entities in today’s distribution networks. Hubs, such as cross docks for trucks, central ports for container vessels, transshipment yards for freight trains, and air hubs for airplanes, allow to consolidate less-than-vehicle-load shipments and to improve the utilization of transpor...

This paper treats a replenishment problem where an order in a single period is to be determined. Demand is assumed to be known for multiple periods. The first periods’ demands are required to be satisfied by the order, satisfying remaining demand is optional. Furthermore, a threshold needs to be satisfied, e. g., a minimum total order volume is giv...

A moving walkway (also denoted as moving sidewalk, travelator, autowalk, pedestrian conveyor, or skywalk) is a slow moving conveyor that transports standing or walking people horizontally over a short to medium distance. Constantly moving walkways have a long-lasting tradition especially inside large buildings, such as airport terminals and railway...

The resource-constrained project scheduling problem is to schedule activities subject to precedence and resource constraints such that the makespan is minimized. It has become a standard problem in the context of project scheduling which has attracted numerous researchers who developed both exact and heuristic scheduling procedures. However, it is...

This paper studies the complexity of single-machine scheduling with an external resource, which is rented for a non-interrupted period. Jobs that need this external resource are executed only when the external resource is available. There is a cost associated with the scheduling of jobs and a cost associated with the duration of the renting period...

Operational planning at transshipment nodes is a wide and challenging field of research that covers a vast number of distinct relevant applications, spanning from seaport container terminals to rail terminals to cross-docks. In this work, we study the feasibility version of a fundamental synchronization problem that assigns incoming vehicles to doc...

In recent years, more and more disasters occurred. Additionally, the amount of people affected by disasters increased. Because of this, it is of great importance to perform the relief operations efficiently in order to alleviate the suffering of the disaster victims. Immediately after the occurrence of a disaster, there is an urgent need for delive...

In order to increase the productivity of sea port container storage yards, a triple-crossover-stacking-crane setting can be deployed. Although this setting yields promising results, there is increasing risk of cranes interfering. Coping with interference is a key factor for exploiting the potential of triple-crossover-stacking-cranes to increase ov...

In diesem Kapitel werden fundamentale Konzepte und Verfahren der Graphentheorie vorgestellt. Dabei legen wir den Fokus auf populäre Probleme in diesem Bereich, die zum einen unmittelbare Anwendungen haben und zum anderen auch häufig als Teil- oder Subprobleme in übergeordneten Lösungsverfahren zu finden sind.

In diesem Kapitel werden verschiedene Modellierungskonzepte zur Abbildung von Problemen im Bereich Operations Research vorgestellt. Zunächst befassen wir uns kurz damit, was Modelle überhaupt sind. Danach werden Graphenmodelle und abschließend mathematische Optimierungsmodelle vorgestellt und an Beispielen erläutert.

In diesem Kapitel werden fundamentale Konzepte und Verfahren der linearen Optimierung vorgestellt. Wir befassen uns zunächst mit einem Spezialfall, der uns erlaubt, die zentralen Ideen und Vorgehensweisen des Simplex-Algorithmus grafisch darzustellen. Anschließend verallgemeinern wir diese Vorgehensweisen zu dem Simplex-Algorithmus für allgemeine P...

In diesem Kapitel werden fundamentale Konzepte und Verfahren der kombinatorischen und (gemischt-)ganzzahligen Optimierung vorgestellt. Wir gehen auf drei generische Ansätze ein und betonen dabei die Verwendung von Konzepten der linearen Optimierung als eine wichtige konkrete Ausgestaltung. Abschließend gehen wir auf Kombinationen verschiedener Konz...

Operations Research ist bei der immer noch zunehmenden Durchdringung betrieblicher und anderer Prozesse durch IT omnipräsent. Dieses Buch richtet sich an Studierende und Praktiker, die keine tiefe mathematische Ausbildung genossen haben, und dennoch die Konzepte und Funktionsweisen der behandelten Modelle und Verfahren im Detail durchdringen möchte...

In this paper, we propose a production scheme for a two-step packaging system as part of a make-and-pack production process including parallel production units in all stages. In the first stage of the packaging system, flavored liquids are filled into cans of different sizes which are immediately palletized in the second stage, i.e., work-in-progre...

Cranes are a key element in construction projects as they are the primary lifting equipment and among the most expensive construction equipment. Thus, crane selection and location are important factors for a construction project’s operational and economic success. In this research, we focus on a site with supply and demand areas that have to be con...

We introduce and investigate the problem of scheduling a single lock with parallel chambers. Special cases of this problem are related to interval scheduling. We focus on the existence of no-wait schedules and characterize their feasibility for a lock consisting of two chambers using new graph-theoretical concepts. We obtain a linear time algorithm...

The sharing economy, i.e., the cooperative consumption of goods and services offered by private households or companies via online market places, gains more and more attention. Most sharing platforms coordinate transactions by generating each consumer an individual list of suited and available resources to choose from. If plenty online requests arr...

We present a test data generator that can be used for simulating processes of cranes handling containers. The concepts originate from container storage areas at seaports, but the generator can also be used for other applications, particularly for train terminals. A key aspect is that one or multiple cranes handle containers, that is, they store con...

In order to reduce waiting times of trucks or other container transport vehicles in terminals storage blocks in seaport container terminals may be equipped with three stacking cranes. With an increasing number of cranes, however, the determination of conflict‐free schedules not only becomes more challenging but also is a key factor for the overall...

This paper treats an automated warehousing system, known as the KIVA system, where mobile robots lift complete racks and autonomously move them to stationary pickers. This innovative parts-to-picker system relieves the pickers from unproductive walking times without requiring high investment costs into inflexible hardware such as conveyors, storage...

Last mile deliveries with unmanned aerial vehicles (also denoted as drones) are seen as one promising idea to reduce excessive road traffic. To overcome the difficulties caused by the comparatively short operating ranges of drones, an innovative concept suggests to apply trucks as mobile landing and take‐off platforms. In this context, the paper on...

Das Kapitel vermittelt zunächst Strukturwissen über verschiedene Auktionsformate. Dabei wird die Versteigerung von einzelnen Gütern sowie die simultane Versteigerung mehrerer homogener Güter und mehrerer heterogener Güter unterschieden. Im Anschluss stellt das Kapitel auf Anwendungsbeispiele im Kontext logistischer Planungsprobleme ab. Diese belege...

Global trends such as just-in-time, containerization, and e-commerce have led to an ever increasing freight volume to be transported under tight delivery schedules. Many supply chains, thus, apply fully-automated sorting systems as one basic component of their distribution processes. Examples range from baggage handling in airports, over parcels so...

We consider the problem to find a cycle in an undirected graph such that a maximum number of nodes is in the cycle or adjacent to a node in the cycle. The problem is known to be NP-hard and we strengthen this result by showing that there is no constant factor approximation algorithm unless (Formula presented.).

Cranes have a major impact on a construction project from both an operational and an economic perspective as they are the primary lifting equipment and among the most expensive construction equipment. In this research we, thus, focus on two inter-related decisions regarding tower cranes, namely their selection and their on-site location. On a given...

In this research, we focus on a container dispatching and conflict-free yard crane routing problem that arises at a storage yard in an automated, maritime container terminal. A storage yard serves as an intermediate buffer for import/export containers and exchanges containers between the waterside and landside of a maritime terminal. The considered...

Platooning has been identified as a promising way to reduce the carbon footprint and fuel consumption of freight transportation. Recent technological developments connecting a platoon via digital data transmission even allow that the driver of the front truck controls all (unmanned) follower vehicles. Existing research mainly focuses on the technol...

High hopes are put in electric vehicles to lower global green house gas emissions. From an operational perspective, however, their limited range and the long recharging times add considerable complexity to the decision tasks planning their efficient application. In this context, we treat a problem setting where a single electric vehicle executes tr...

Integrating far-distant suppliers, e.g., from low-wage countries and other currency areas, into concerted just-in-time (JIT) supply concepts is a delicate planning task. One enabler, e.g., often applied in the automotive industry, is an intermediate cross-docking terminal. Such a cross-dock located in close vicinity to the targeted plant is supplie...

Quantitative methods and techniques from operations research (OR) are well-accepted in many industries, e.g. the manufacturing industry or the transportation industry. Similarly, numerous applications in the field of construction can be found in the academic literature. This paper gives an extensive overview on a number of popular fields where OR m...

This paper considers machine scheduling that integrates machine deterioration caused by jobs and, consequently, maintenance activities. The maintenance state of the machine is represented by a maintenance level which drops by a certain, possibly job-dependent, amount while jobs are processed. A maintenance level of less than zero is associated with...

This paper treats a special parts-to-picker based order processing system, where mobile robots hoist racks and bring them directly to stationary pickers. This technological innovation – known as the Kiva system – heavily influences all traditional planning problems to be solved when operating a warehouse. We, specifically, tackle the order processi...

At the very core of most automated sorting systems— for example, at airports for baggage handling and in parcel distribution centers for sorting mail—we find closed-loop tilt tray sortation conveyors. In such a system, trays are loaded with cargo as they pass through loading stations, and are later tilted upon reaching the outbound container dedica...

In synchronous production lines it may be beneficial to leave machines idle instead of processing the next job immediately. In this paper, the effects of inserting voluntary idle times are discussed in more detail for different objective functions (minimization of makespan, total completion time, maximum lateness). Besides deriving theoretical boun...

In combinatorial auctions, items are sold simultaneously. A substantial component of an auction mechanism is the pricing scheme. Prices determine the auctioneer’s revenue and, ideally, justify the outcome of the auction to the bidders. Each bidder should be able to see why he won or lost a certain bundle by comparing the determined price of a bundl...

A growing population and increasing real estate costs in many urbanized areas have made space for roomy warehouses with single-deep storage and wide aisles scarce and expensive. Mobile rack warehouses increase the space utilization by providing only a few open aisles at a time for accessing the racks. Whenever a stock keeping unit (SKU) is to be re...

This article treats an elementary optimization problem, where an inbound stream of successive items is to be resequenced with the help of multiple parallel queues in order to restore an intended target sequence. Whenever early items block the one item to be currently released into the target sequence, they are withdrawn from their queue and interme...

Nowadays, many industries rely on cranes for efficiently executing storage and retrieval operations of goods. Areas of application are, for instance, container logistics in seaports and warehousing operations in automated storage and retrieval systems. Therefore, it is not astounding that plenty scientific papers on crane scheduling in many differe...

In combinatorial auctions not only single items but also bundles of items are sold simultaneously. A substantial ingredient to an auction mechanism is the way prices of bundles are determined. Prices determine the auctioneer׳s revenue and, ideally, justify the outcome of the auction to the bidder. Each bidder should be able to see why he won or los...

This paper treats the crane scheduling in a container port where two cooperative gantry cranes (denoted as twin cranes) jointly store import containers arriving from the seaside in a storage yard. We aim to minimize the makespan while non-crossing constraints among cranes need to be considered and preemptive container moves are allowed, i.e., the s...

In this paper we present an approach to generate cyclic production schemes for multiple products with stochastic demand to be produced on a single production unit. This scheme specifies a fixed and periodic production sequence, called a cycle, where each product may occur more than once in the sequence. In order to stabilize the cycle length altern...

This paper deals with assigning hierarchically skilled technicians to jobs by considering preferences. We investigate stability definitions in multi-skill workforce assignments stemming from the notion of blocking pairs as stated in the Marriage model of Gale–Shapley. We propose a Branch-and-Price approach to find a stable workforce assignment in w...

Inland waterways form a natural network infrastructure with capacity for more traffic. Transportation by ship is widely promoted as it is a reliable, efficient and environmental friendly way of transport. Nevertheless, locks managing the water level on waterways and within harbors sometimes constitute bottlenecks for transportation over water. The...

The warehouse-on-wheels (WOW) policy is a widespread concept to implement material supply in just-in-time production systems. Instead of storing part inventories directly on the shop-floor where space is notoriously scare, the transport vehicles that deliver the materials serve as mobile storages, either while waiting in the trailer yard or while d...

With the proliferation of multi-gantry automated stacking cranes, the already difficult crane scheduling problem in container terminals has become even more challenging. In this paper we present an efficient algorithm that can solve a sub-problem that arises in this context, namely the prioritization of crane gantry movements once transportation ta...

We investigate the scheduling of series of consecutive locks. This setting occurs naturally along canals and waterways. Our contribution is to (i) provide two distinct mathematical programming formulations and compare them empirically, (ii) investigate the trade-off between reducing flow time and reducing emissions, and (iii) compare the results of...

This article treats a scheduling problem where timely departures of vehicles executing Just-In-Time (JIT) deliveries between a single supplier and a single receiver along with the assignment of supplies to vehicles are to be determined. This problem, for instance, arises in the automotive industry where parts are to be delivered JIT from a central...

Dieser Beitrag behandelt ein quantitatives Optimierungsmodell, das eine Problemstellung bei der kurzfristigen Produktionsplanung abbildet. Dieses Modell lässt sich bezugnehmend auf das hierarchische Produktionsplanungskonzept, das von Drexl et al. (1994) vorgestellt wurde, in die segmentspezifische Feinplanung einordnen. Der Detaillierungsgrad der...

The capacity of a runway system represents a bottleneck at many international airports. The current practice at airports is to land approaching aircraft on a first-come, first-served basis. An active rescheduling of aircraft landing times increases runway capacity or reduces delays. The problem of finding an optimal schedule for aircraft landings i...

During a typical stay in a hospital patients visit multiple wards to receive therapy and other treatment, so that a large number of intra-hospital transportation jobs are to be accomplished each day. Transporting patients in wheelchairs or beds causes ergonomic stress for the workforce, which depends, for instance, on the conveyance vehicle, the to...

Round robin tournaments (RRTs) cover a huge variety of different types of sports league schedules arising in practice. The focus in this paper is on single RRTs where scheduling is temporally constrained, which means that matches have to be scheduled in a given minimum number of periods. We consider a set T of n teams. If n is odd, we easily can ad...

This article provides an efficient heuristic based on decomposition for the twin robots scheduling problem (TRSP). TRSP concerns two moving robots executing storage and retrieval requests in parallel along a shared pathway. The depots are located at both ends of the line and a dedicated robot is assigned to each of them. While moving goods between...

We investigate the scheduling of series of consecutive locks. This setting occurs naturally along canals and waterways. We describe a problem that generalizes different models that have been studied in literature. Our contribution is to (i) provide two distinct mathematical programming formulations, and compare them empirically, (ii) show how these...

The berth allocation problem (BAP), which defines a processing interval and a berth at the quay wall for each ship to be (un-)loaded, is an essential decision problem for efficiently operating a container port. In this paper, we integrate mobile quay walls into the BAP. Mobile quay walls are huge propelled floating platforms, which encase ships moo...

This article focuses on the aircraft landing problem that is to assign landing times to aircraft approaching the airport under consideration. Each aircraft’s landing time must be in a time interval encompassing a target landing time. If the actual landing time deviates from the target landing time additional costs occur which depend on the amount o...

This paper considers a scheduling problem motivated by transshipment terminals. Trucks delivering or picking up items at the terminal have to be sequenced. Here, inventory constraints must be considered, that is the current inventory level implied by initial inventory level, total pick up quantity up to this moment and total delivery quantity up to...

The paper “Multistage Methods for Freight Train Classification” by Jacob et al. [Networks 57 (2011) 87–105] provides great insight into the theory and practice of sorting procedures at shunting yards. In Jacob et al. [Networks 57 (2011) 87–105] many relevant shunting situations (e.g., single or multiple inbound trains, single or multiple outbound t...

In this work, we consider a Fiber To The Home (FTTH) network design problem in a local area with several thousands of subscribers. We present a compact Integer Programming (IP) formulation to employ Column Generation (CG). The columns to be generated are well-defined parts of the FTTH network. The complexity of the pricing problems are established....

This paper focuses on a machine scheduling problem having applications in truck scheduling at transshipment terminals. Jobs increase and decrease, respectively, the level of a central inventory. Naturally, jobs decreasing the inventory level can be processed only if the level of the inventory is high enough not to drop below zero. We consider the p...

This paper focuses on single machine scheduling subject to inventory constraints. Jobs add or remove items to or from the inventory, respectively. Jobs that remove items cannot be processed if the required number of items is not available. We consider scheduling problems on a single machine where the objective is to minimize the total weighted comp...

This paper considers single machine scheduling that integrates machine deterioration. The current maintenance state of the machine is determined by a maintenance level which drops by a certain, possibly job-dependent, amount while jobs are processed. A maintenance level of less than zero is associated with the machine’s breakdown and is therefore f...

Bin packing problems are at the core of many well-known combinatorial optimization problems and several practical applications alike. In this work we introduce a novel variant of an abstract bin packing problem which is subject to a chaining constraint among items. The problem stems from an application of container handling in rail freight terminal...

We consider the problem of transporting containers from one port to another using a fleet of ships. Each ship has a capacity constraint that limits the total number of containers it can carry; each ship calls on a specific set of ports that is referred to as its route and each ship follows a fixed route with a fixed departure time at each port. Eac...