To path indicator Subpages of “Newsdetails“ To navigation To quick access To footer with other services
To content
Students walk across the campus north. A large red sculpture in the shape of large gears can be seen. © Roland Baege​/​TU Dortmund

New Publications on Machine Layout in High-Impact Journals

A production line with several machines lined up in a row in a modern factory. © Homa Appliances​/​unsplash
Two new publications on machine layout have been published at the Professorship of Management Science in the International Journal of Production Research and in Discrete Applied Mathematics.

Accounting for Uncertainty in Factory Planning

Factory planning has a significant impact on the costs incurred by a company. Given the increasing uncertainties and fluctuations in today's business environment, it is essential to account for these uncertainties when planning factory layouts.

In their paper in the International Journal of Production Research, Anja Fischer and Louisa Semrau develop a method to incorporate uncertain input data into layout planning by combining two approaches from the literature: the Single-Row Facility Layout Problem (SRFLP) and the concept of chance constraints. The approach is easy to implement, requires no specialised software, and was computationally validated on a newly generated library of test instances.

The paper was also featured on the TU Dortmund's page of current high-impact publications.

Fischer, A., & Semrau, L. (2026). The Single-Row Facility Layout Problem with chance constraints. International Journal of Production Research, 1–22.

https://doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2026.2721536 

Exact Solutions for Larger Machine Layout Problems

Prof. Dr. Anja Fischer and Dr. Frank Fischer have significantly improved existing solution approaches for the Single-Row Facility Layout Problem – a specific machine layout problem. They derived new classes of inequalities for the well-studied betweenness model in the literature. The heuristic separation of these cutting planes, combined with a newly developed construction heuristic, enables the exact solution of instances with up to 60 machines for the first time. Previously, only instances with a maximum of 42 machines could be solved exactly.

The paper was published in the renowned journal Discrete Applied Mathematics (VHB Ranking 2024, Operations Research sub-ranking, Rating A).

Fischer, A., & Fischer, F. (2026). A strengthened lower bound for the single-row facility layout problem. Discrete Applied Mathematics, 395, 250–265. 
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dam.2026.08.015 

Link to Professorship

Back