Julius Hoffmann awarded with GOR Master Thesis Award

Julius Hoffmann was awarded the GOR Master Thesis Award 2022 for his thesis entitled "Solving Customer Order Scheduling Problems with an Iterated Greedy Algorithm" at the OR 2022 conference in Karlsruhe. The whole chair congratulates Mr. Hoffmann on this special award.

Summary

Julius Hoffmann's work focuses on the so-called customer order scheduling problem. It is characterized by customers ordering several different products at the same time. Each product is manufactured on a dedicated machine, and different products of an order can be processed in parallel. Since the order is considered complete only when all products have been manufactured, the goal typically pursued is to minimize the sum of the completion times of all orders. This problem is encountered in many industries, such as paper, pharmaceuticals, and assembly operations in general. In his work, Mr. Hoffmann not only considered problems with so-called dedicated machines, in which each product is processed on a specific machine but also investigated a flow-shop environment for the first time. His iterated-greedy algorithm, which he developed, was able to generate solutions with excellent quality in computational experiments.