Sustainable scheduling of manufacturing and transportation systems

Scheduling has long been an active field in Operations Research (OR) due to its theoretical value for combinatorial optimisation and its practical relevance in the industrial and service sectors. Broadly speaking, scheduling concerns the allocation of limited resources to a number of competing agents in a way that certain performance measures are optimised for the system considered. Manufacturing and transportation represent two areas in which scheduling techniques have been most extensively used. Typical problems that have been widely studied in the literature include the job shop scheduling problem (for manufacturing) and the vehicle routing problem (for transportation). In the context of job shops, the order of processing jobs on each machine needs to be decided, while in the context of vehicle routing, decisions to be made include the allocation of orders to vehicles and also the delivery route for each vehicle.