Scheduling – Transportation – Pricing

Tobias Wiens investigates three selected problems in the fields of scheduling, transportation and pricing, with the aim of introducing appropriate analytical methods as a basis for better decision making. The author first introduces the new research field of team assignment and scheduling, taking into account team production effects. In contrast to the opinions prevalent in literature on job splitting, a given job’s processing time is not simply its default processing time on one machine divided by the number of machines assigned to that job. Synergies may lead to non-linear relations between the number of assigned machines and the resulting processing times. The author’s second research investigates the optimization potential of vehicle repositioning between locations within a city. Nowadays, almost every worldwide operating car rental company provides the service of delivering vehicles to customers and picking them up after the rental period. The use of vehicle trailers for this purpose within a city is in most cases too expensive and very time consuming. This poses new challenges for planning departments, as the determination of a set of routes for the vehicle repositioning problem exhibits special characteristics. The last part of this dissertation contributes to the concept of almost stochastic dominance and shows how the concept of almost stochastic dominance can be applied to analyze price limits as a decision making aid for identifying favorable and unfavorable contracts from the perspective of a selling firm.