Democratization of Complex-Problem Solving to Enhance Participation, Transparency, Accountability, and Fairness: An Optimization Perspective

Operations in critical areas of importance to society, such as healthcare, transportation and logistics, power systems, and emergency response, profoundly affect multiple stakeholders with diverse perspectives. These operations are often modeled using discrete programming methods to capture the various decision-making factors through centrally-selected objectives and constraints. Unfortunately, centralized modeling and solution methodologies may overlook the … Read more

Stochastic Programming Models for a Fleet Sizing and Appointment Scheduling Problem with Random Service and Travel Times

We propose a new stochastic mixed-integer linear programming model for a home service fleet sizing and appointment scheduling problem (HFASP) with random service and travel times. Specifically, given a set of providers and a set of geographically distributed customers within a service region, our model solves the following decision problems simultaneously: (i) a fleet sizing … Read more

Routing and resource allocation in non-profit settings with equity and efficiency measures under demand uncertainty

Motivated by food distribution operations for non-profit organizations, we study a variant of the stochastic routing-allocation problem under demand uncertainty, in which one decides the assignment of trucks for demand nodes, the sequence of demand nodes to visit (i.e., truck route), and the allocation of food supply to each demand node. We propose three stochastic … Read more

Fleet Sizing and Allocation for On-demand Last-Mile Transportation Systems

The last-mile problem refers to the provision of travel service from the nearest public transportation node to home or other destination. Last-Mile Transportation Systems (LMTS), which have recently emerged, provide on-demand shared transportation. In this paper, we investigate the fleet sizing and allocation problem for the on-demand LMTS. Specifically, we consider the perspective of a … Read more

Distributionally Robust Facility Location with Bimodal Random Demand

In this paper, we consider a decision-maker who wants to determine a subset of locations from a given set of candidate sites to open facilities and accordingly assign customer demand to these open facilities. Unlike classical facility location settings, we focus on a new setting where customer demand is bimodal, i.e., display, or belong to, … Read more

A Distributionally Robust Optimization Approach for Stochastic Elective Surgery Scheduling with Limited Intensive Care Unit Capacity

In this paper, we study the decision process of assigning elective surgery patients to available surgical blocks in multiple operating rooms (OR) under random surgery durations, random postoperative length-of-stay in the intensive care unit (ICU), and limited capacity of ICU. The probability distributions of random parameters are assumed to be ambiguous, and only the mean … Read more

Distributionally Robust Optimization Approaches for a Stochastic Mobile Facility Routing and Scheduling Problem

We study a mobile facility (MF) routing and scheduling problem in which probability distributions of the time-dependent demand for MF services is unknown. To address distributional ambiguity, we propose and analyze two distributionally robust MF routing and scheduling (DMFRS) models that seek to minimize the fixed cost of establishing the MF fleet and maximum expected … Read more

Analysis of Models for the Stochastic Outpatient Procedure Scheduling Problem

In this paper, we present a new stochastic mixed-integer linear programming model for the Stochastic Outpatient Procedure Scheduling Problem (SOPSP). In this problem, we schedule a day’s worth of procedures for a single provider, where each procedure has a known type and associated probability distribution of random duration. Our objective is to minimize the expectation … Read more