Karen Smilowitz – Optimization Online

Approximations for Planar Covering Routes: an Analysis and Application to Public School Transportation

Published: 2026/02/09, Updated: 2026/09/17

Applications - OR and Management Sciences, Production and Logistics, Transportation Continuous approximation, covering routes, public sector operations, school bus routing

Public school administrators benefit from the ability to estimate future transportation needs on multi-year time scales, but student locations change from year to year. Continuous approximation (CA) methods are valuable for planning in similar settings where future spatial realizations of transportation demand are unknown. With this motivation in mind, this paper studies the use of … Read more

Dominance in Pricing Problems with Stochasticity

Published: 2015/08/03

Combinatorial Optimization, Integer Programming dominance, pricing problem, shortest path, uncertainty

Sequencing activities over time is a fundamental optimization problem. The problem can be modeled using a directed network in which activities are represented by nodes and pairs of activities that can be performed consecutively are represented by arcs. A sequence of activities then corresponds to a path in the directed network, and an optimal sequence … Read more