Operational Research: methods and applications

This is the final version. Available on open access from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this recordThroughout its history, Operational Research has evolved to include methods, models and algorithms that have been applied to a wide range of contexts. This encyclopedic article consists of two main sections: methods and applications. The first summarises the up-to-date knowledge and provides an overview of the state-of-the-art methods and key developments in the various subdomains of the field. The second offers a wide-ranging list of areas where Operational Research has been applied. The article is meant to be read in a nonlinear fashion and used as a point of reference by a diverse pool of readers: academics, researchers, students, and practitioners. The entries within the methods and applications sections are presented in alphabetical order. The authors dedicate this paper to the 2023 Turkey/Syria earthquake victims. We sincerely hope that advances in OR will play a role towards minimising the pain and suffering caused by this and future catastrophes

Due-Date Based Multi-period Part Selection for Flexible Manufacturing Systems with Controllable Processing Times

Part 7: Knowledge Based Production Planning and ControlInternational audienceThis study addresses a multi-period part selection problem for flexible manufacturing systems in which processing times are controllable. The problem is to determine the set of parts and their processing times while satisfying the processing time and the tool magazine capacities in each period of a planning horizon. The objective is to minimize the sum of processing, earliness/tardiness, subcontracting and tool costs. Practical considerations such as available tool copies and tool lives are also considered. An integer programming model is developed, and two-phase heuristics are proposed in which an initial solution is obtained by a greedy heuristic under initial processing times and then it is improved using local search methods while adjusting processing times. Computational experiments were done on a number of test instances, and the results are reported