Fixed charges of arbitrary sign: what survives and what fails

For integer activities, conditioning on the support makes a fixed-charge objective affine. If every support-conditioned cell is integral, an optimal solution is a vertex of its cell for arbitrary fixed charges and marginal rates. A totally unimodular constraint matrix with integral data guarantees this condition. This surviving property is weaker than the classical conclusions. A … Read more

Integrated Master Planning and Demand Fulfillment in Multi-Echelon Supply Chains: Partial vs. All-or-Nothing Fulfillment

Modern supply chains differ in lead times, bottlenecks, and demand volatility. Advanced Planning Systems conventionally decouple Master Planning (MP) and Demand Fulfillment (DF) hierarchically, which improves tractability but ignores critical interdependencies between material availability, capacity utilization, and delivery promising. We propose an integrated MP‑DF model, formulate it as a Minimum‑Cost Multicommodity Flow (MCMCF) on a … Read more

Variable Selection for Feature-Based Newsvendor

Feature-based newsvendor models use observable covariates to tailor inventory decisions, aiming to balance holding and shortage costs under demand uncertainty. However, high-dimensional feature sets often hinder interpretability and inflate data collection and implementation costs. This paper studies variable selection for the feature-based newsvendor problem under a hard cardinality constraint on the number of selected features. … Read more

Optimizing Family Medicine Residency Schedules under the Clinic First Principles

Family medicine residency programs must balance educational and operational requirements while providing residents with consistent exposure to continuity clinics, a central principle of the Clinic First Model. We study the Family Medicine Residency Scheduling problem and develop a binary integer programming (BIP) framework that incorporates Clinic First principles through two criteria: Clinic Time Consistency (CTC), … Read more

Synthetic Population Generation and Georeferenced Household Allocation Via Iterative Proportional Fitting and Integer Programming

Georeferenced synthetic populations are essential inputs for agent-based simulations in epidemiology, transportation, and urban planning, yet existing methods for spatial allocation of households to residences lack formal optimality guarantees. We present a two-stage mathematical framework for generating such populations from publicly available census data. The first stage combines Iterative Proportional Fitting (IPF) with a mixed-integer … Read more

Case-Pack Allocation in Retail Distribution Networks

Many retail distribution networks use a hierarchical structure in which regional distribution centers replenish local distribution centers that are closer to customers. In such networks, products are often shipped in large quantities, as case packs, cases or pallets, to the regional distribution center, whereas local distribution centers may require quantities at the individual-unit level. Case … Read more

Congressional Apportionment

This book chapter is a gentle introduction to the mathematics of congressional apportionment. It emphasizes the connections between mathematical optimization and the classical apportionment methods (e.g., Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Webster, Huntington-Hill, Dean). CitationPrepared for a forthcoming book edited by Bruce Golden and Doug ShierArticleDownload View PDF

Beyond Isolated Operating Rooms: Risk-Aware Surgical Episode Scheduling in Single-Entry Networks

Long wait times for elective surgery are a persistent challenge in publicly funded health systems, where hospitals must coordinate limited capacity before, during, and after the operation under considerable uncertainty. We study how a network of collaborating hospitals, such as the University Health Network in the City of Toronto, can centralize intake and jointly schedule … Read more