Janis Neufeld honored with "EURO Award for the Best EJOR Paper"

Janis Neufeld received a very great honour at this year's "European Conference on Operational Research" in Athens. Together with Liji Shen and Stéphane Dauzère-Pérèz, the paper "Solving the Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem with Sequence-Dependent Setup Times" was awarded the "EURO Award for the Best EJOR Paper" in the category "Theory and Methodology".

© Janis Neufeld

The selection was based on 1342 papers published in the Operations Research Flagship Journal "European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR)" in 2018 and 2019. From this pool, a list of 37 papers was compiled, which included papers that were cited most often and had the most downloads. A distinguished five-person jury evaluated the papers and agreed on a shortlist. In a further iterative process, one paper was finally selected by consensus for each of the three categories "Innovative Applications of OR", "Review" and "Theory and Methodology".

The team from the Chair of Industrial Management congratulates Janis very warmly on this truly exceptional honourable recognition! Of course, a hearty congratulations also goes to Liji Shen, who already visited Stéphane Dauzère-Pérèz during her time at the Chair and discussed initial ideas with him. A first version of the awarded paper was already presented by Janis in August 2013 in Ghent (Belgium) at the MISTA conference.

Abstract

This paper addresses the flexible job shop scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times and where the objective is to minimize the makespan. We first present a mathematical model which can solve small instances to optimality, and also serves as a problem representation. After studying structural properties of the problem using a disjunctive graph model, we develop a tabu search algorithm with specific neighborhood functions and a diversification structure. Extensive experiments are conducted on benchmark instances. Test results first show that our algorithm outperforms most existing approaches for the classical flexible job shop scheduling problem. Additional experiments also confirm the significant improvement achieved by integrating the propositions introduced in this study.

Award-winning paper

„Shen, Liji; Dauzère-Pérès, Stéphane; Neufeld, Janis S.: Solving the Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem with Sequence-Dependent Setup Times. In: European Journal of Operational Research 265 (2018), S. 503–516 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037722171730752X)