Invited Speakers

Professor Nicholas G. Hall (Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University, United States)

Title: A New Design for Tournaments
Abstract: The tournament designs that are used for numerous professional and amateur sports events all over the world suffer from a number of well documented deficiencies. These deficiencies typically reduce the fairness, excitement value, profitability, and credibility of those tournaments. We describe a new design that substantially reduces these problems. We validate our design using both data from professional sports tournaments and an extensive sensitivity analysis with simulated data.

Professor Erwin Pesch (Department of Management Information Science, University of Siegen and Center for Advanced Studies in Management, HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management, Germany)

Title: Conflict-Free Crane Scheduling in a Seaport Terminal
Abstract: In this talk, we focus on a container dispatching and conflict-free yard crane routing problem that arises at a storage yard in an automated, maritime container terminal. A storage yard serves as an intermediate buffer for import/export containers and exchanges containers between water- and landside of a maritime terminal. The problem is in which order and by which crane the containers are transported in order to minimize the makespan and prevent crane interferences.
First, we limit our attention to incoming containers only that are positioned by twin cranes. Containers are assigned to the cranes according to different policies. We show that some cases are polynomially solvable. Approximation algorithms with guaranteed absolute and relative deviations from the optimum are devised for others. The results translate for the case of outgoing containers.
In the second part we consider two rail mounted gantry cranes of different sizes, with the possibility to cross each other, that perform inbound, outbound and housekeeping requests. We solve this problem to optimality by a branch-and-cut approach that decomposes the problem into two problem classes and connects them via logic-based Benders constraints. We assess the quality of our solution method in a computational study.

J. Nossack, D. Briskorn, and E. Pesch. Container dispatching and conflict-free yard crane routing in an automated container terminal, Transportation Science, 52 (2018), 1059–1076.
M.Y. Kovalyov, E. Pesch, and A. Ryzhikov. A note on scheduling container storage operations of two non-passing stacking cranes, Networks 71 (2018), 271-280.

Professor Toshiya Kaihara (Graduate School of System Informatics, Kobe University, Japan)

Title: An innovative systems approach for designing Society 5.0
Abstract: Social infrastructures in Society 5.0 service platforms encompass a wide range of facilities and services, such as transportation, energy, communication, water, sewerage, logistics, education, disaster prevention, medical care, and welfare. Modifying these social infrastructures requires a great deal of planning, design, and management, as they can have a massive impact on residents’ well-being and environmental sustainability. Advanced social infrastructures are composed of multiple interdependent systems, which are integrated into a form of a System of Systems (SoS). Therefore, the systems approach has great potential to play an important role in smart integration. In this talk, an innovative systems approach is introduced to establish the best preconditions for designing Society 5.0.