The number of papers on operational planning is remarkably
lower than on the tactical and the strategic planning problems,
opening many opportunities for future research. We presented
the highlights of the recent research. Operational planning problems
are huge, complex and heavily time consuming to solve. Huge
sets of data should be processed and new plans must be produced
in matter of minutes or even seconds. Better approximation, better
decomposition of the problem, and tighter formulations can improve
the performance of the DSS. Parallel computation and algorithms
also promise significant improvements in solving huge
problems in matter of both time and efficiency. Moreover, the decision
process and its timing might be also interesting. Usually the
decisions are made when the input data has arrived to the system.
For example, it is assumed that the arrival of a ship is announced
right when it arrives to a terminal. Planning the required operations
beforehand might save both computational and execution
times.