Modeling Robust and Reliable Supply Chains

We present formulations for the strategic design of robust and reliable supply chains with long term contracting. The inability to deliver a supply part due to unexpected events in a complex supply chain can have a significant impact on the performance of a supply chain. Reliable and robust supply chains leverage cost and risk of … Read more

Shunting Minimal Rail Car Allocation

We consider the rail car management at industrial in-plant railroads. Demands for materials or empty cars are characterized by a track, a car type, and the desired quantity. If available, we assign cars from the stock, possibly substituting types, otherwise we rent additional cars. Transportation requests are fulfilled as a short sequence of pieces of … Read more

A hybrid genetic algorithm for the weight setting problem in OSPF/IS-IS routing

Intra-domain traffic engineering aims to make more efficient use of network resources within an autonomous system. Interior Gateway Protocols such as OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) and IS-IS (Intermediate System-Intermediate System) are commonly used to select the paths along which traffic is routed within an autonomous system. These routing protocols direct traffic based on link … Read more

A stochastic programming approach for supply chain network design under uncertainty

This paper proposes a stochastic programming model and solution algorithm for solving supply chain network design problems of a realistic scale. Existing approaches for these problems are either restricted to deterministic environments or can only address a modest number of scenarios for the uncertain problem parameters. Our solution methodology integrates a recently proposed sampling strategy, … Read more

Streaming Cache Placement Problems: Complexity and Algorithms

Virtual private networks (VPN) are often used to distribute live content, such as video or audio streams, from a single source to a large number of destinations. Streaming caches or splitters are deployed in these multicast networks to allow content distribution without overloading the network. In this paper, we consider two combinatorial optimization problems that … Read more

A Branch and Cut Algorithm for Hub Location Problems with Single Assignment

The hub location problem with single assignment is the problem of locating hubs and assigning the terminal nodes to hubs in order to minimize the cost of hub installation and the cost of routing the traffic in the network. There may also be capacity restrictions on the amount of traffic that can transit by hubs. … Read more

Maximising Revenue in the Airline Industry Under One-Way Pricing

This paper describes a methodology that has been implemented in a major British airline to find the optimal price to charge for airline tickets under one-way pricing. An analytical model has been developed to describe the buying behaviour of customers for flights over the selling period. Using this model and a standard analytical method for … Read more

Stable Sets of Weak Tournaments

The purpose of this paper is to obtain conditions on weak tournaments, which guarantee that every non-empty subset of alternatives admits a stable set. We show that every stable set always contains the core. We also show that there exists a unique stable set for each non-empty subset of alternatives which coincides with its core … Read more

A Study of the Lot-Sizing Polytope

The lot-sizing polytope is a fundamental structure contained in many practical production planning problems. Here we study this polytope and identify facet-defining inequalities that cut off all fractional extreme points of its linear programming relaxation, as well as liftings from those facets. We give a polynomial-time combinatorial separation algorithm for the inequalities when capacities are … Read more

Robust Option Modelling

This paper considers robust optimization to cope with uncertainty about the stock return process in one period portfolio selection problems involving options. The ro- bust approach relates portfolio choice to uncertainty, making more cautious portfolios when uncertainty is high. We represent uncertainty by a set of plausible expected returns of the underlyings and show that … Read more