A bi-objective model for civil court scheduling problem with pragmatic procedures and factors under uncertainty

Lashgari, Zeinab; Vahdani, Behnam; Gholami, Habib Reza; Amiri, Maghsoud

doi:10.22070/jqepo.2025.20339.1298

A bi-objective model for civil court scheduling problem with pragmatic procedures and factors under uncertainty

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Zeinab Lashgari ¹

Behnam Vahdani ¹

Habib Reza Gholami ¹

Maghsoud Amiri ²

¹ Department of Industrial Engineering, QA.C., Islamic Azad University, Qazvin, Iran

² Department of Industrial Management, Faculty of Management and Accounting, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran

10.22070/jqepo.2025.20339.1298

Abstract

This study introduces a novel framework for planning and scheduling the handling of litigation cases in a judicial system. For this purpose, an unprecedented, bi-objective optimization model is proposed for scheduling family and civil cases in different courts, including primary, review, and supreme. In this regard, a broad range of pragmatic procedures and factors are considered, including different courts, the structuring of the process of judicial cases, the diversity of lawsuits and their miscellaneous cases, specialized chambers in courts, judges with different specializations, the frequency of reviewing cases in courts, filing objections, priority of cases, and permissible waiting time for handling cases and issuing their verdicts. More importantly, a sharing mechanism is embedded within the scheduling procedure to provide a balanced workload among the chambers of the primary court due to the high volume and variety of cases. Furthermore, since the uncertainty of the handling time of cases is an undeniable concern in planning such a problem, the set-induced robust optimization approach is applied to cope with this concern. Finally, a real case study of Iran's judicial system is examined to illustrate the applicability and validation of the proposed model. The obtained results revealed that the considered sharing mechanism can reduce 28% excess service capacity.

Keywords

Court scheduling

Civil cases

Sharing

Judicial system

Uncertainty