News

Presentation at the Summer Meeting of the VHB Scientific Commission on Logistics (WK LOG): Focus on Exchange and Research

This year’s summer meeting of the VHB’s Scientific Commission on Logistics (WK LOG), which is dedicated to promoting logistics in research and teaching, provided an excellent platform for professional exchange.

Special thanks go to the organizers, led by Frank Meisel, for the successful event in Kiel.

On Saturday, Janis Neufeld presented the research paper “A Decomposition Approach for Large-Scale Rolling Stock Scheduling with Heterogeneous Fleets,” co-authored with Paul Päprer, Martin Scheffler, and Udo Buscher from TU Dresden. The paper highlights innovative approaches to the efficient scheduling of large, heterogeneous rolling stock fleets in rail transport.

Thank you very much for the interesting discussions and valuable insights!

At the Faculty of Economics and Managemement's summer festival, Prof. Dr. Neufeld was awarded the Master’s Programs Teaching Award for his outstanding commitment to teaching during the winter semester 2025/2026.

Congratulations!

(photo: Florian Harkenthal)

Neue Publikation in OMEGA and Computers & Industrial Engineering

At the beginning of the year, we are pleased to announce two new publications by our chair in leading international scientific journals.

The journal Omega published the article “Multi-objective optimization with order acceptance for the cumulative job shop scheduling problem in agribusiness” (Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305048325002300). In this joint work with Mike Hewitt (Loyola University Chicago), Florian Linß, and Udo Buscher (both TU Dresden), Janis Neufeld developed a novel optimization approach for complex scheduling problems in greenhouses, such as those arising in the development of new plant varieties.

In collaboration with Martin Schönheit and Rainer Lasch (both TU Dresden), we investigated the impact of the locations of production facilities and customers on CO₂ emissions in distributed manufacturing systems in the article “Towards holistic environmental awareness in distributed permutation flowshop scheduling: Integrating production and transportation emissions” (Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360835225009453). In contrast to existing approaches, this study also accounts for country-specific energy mixes in electricity generation as well as transportation-related emissions. The proposed self-configuring Iterated Greedy algorithm is capable of efficiently solving this highly complex scheduling problem. This article was published in Computers & Industrial Engineering.

In early September, Janis Neufeld was invited by Prof. Qan-Ke Pan (Shanghai University) and Prof. Xuan He (Shanghai Maritime University) to visit Shanghai. Prof. Pan is recognized as a leading scholar in the field of scheduling of production systems. During the multi-day stay, Janis Neufeld conducted a doctoral course together with our long-time research collaborator Prof. Jatinder ND Gupta (University of Huntsville, Alabama). The course focused on best practices for high-quality research in Operations Research and on strategies for successful publication.

The visit also provided valuable opportunities for exchange with doctoral students and colleagues from both Shanghai University and Shanghai Maritime University. Discussions centered on ongoing projects as well as ideas for future research collaborations. We sincerely thank our hosts for their warm hospitality and look forward to continuing and strengthening this fruitful cooperation.

Picture: Participants of the exchange and doctoral course at Shanghai University

Neue Publikation in OR Proceedings

We are pleased to announce a new high-ranking publication with the participation of Janis Neufeld as a book chapter in Operations Research Proceedings 2023! 

Beitrag:

Order acceptance and scheduling in capacitated job shops

Linß, Florian; Hewitt, Mike; Neufeld, Janis S.; Buscher, Udo; In: Operations Research Proceedings 2023 , 1st ed. 2025. - Cham : Springer Nature Switzerland ; Voigt, Guido, S. 341-347

Abstract:

We consider a capacitated job shop problem with order acceptance. This research is motivated by the management of a research and development project pipeline for a company in the agricultural industry whose success depends on regularly releasing new and innovative products. The setting requires the consideration of multiple problem characteristics not commonly considered in scheduling research. Each job has a given release and due date and requires the execution of an individual sequence of operations on different machines (job shop). There is a set of machines of fixed capacity, each of which can process multiple operations simultaneously. Given that typically only a small percentage of jobs yield a commercially viable product, the number of potential jobs to schedule is in the order of several thousands. Due to limited capacity, not all jobs can be started. Instead, the objective is to maximize the throughput. Namely, to start as many jobs as possible. We present a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) formulation of this problem and study how resource capacity and the option to delay jobs can impact research and development throughput. We show that the MIP formulation can prove optimality even for very large instances with less restrictive capacity constraints, while instances with a tight capacity are more challenging to solve.