When partitioning a state into political districts, a common criterion is that political subdivisions like counties should not be split across multiple districts. This criterion is encoded into most state constitutions and is sometimes enforced quite strictly by the courts. However, map drawers, courts, and the public typically do not know what amount of splitting … Read more
In light of the recent pandemic and the shortage of vaccinations during their roll-out, questions arose regarding the best strategy to achieve immunity throughout the population by adjusting the time gap between the two necessary vaccination doses. This strategy has already been studied from different angles by various researches. However, the deliveries of vaccination doses … Read more
We study a two-stage stochastic combinatorial optimization problem that integrates fleet-sizing, assignment, routing, and scheduling problems. Although this problem has wide applicability, it arises in particular in the home healthcare industry where a service team of caregivers have to be assigned to patients and put in vehicle fleet that have to be routed amongst the … Read more
The timely transportation of goods to customers is an essential component of economic activities. However, heavy-duty diesel trucks that deliver goods contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions within many large metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. To facilitate freight electrification, this paper proposes joint routing and charging (JRC) scheduling for electric … Read more
Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is an emerging air transportation mode to alleviate the ground traffic burden and achieve zero direct aviation emissions. Due to the potential economic scaling effects, the UAM traffic flow is expected to increase dramatically once implemented, and its market can be substantially large. To be prepared for the era of UAM, … Read more
This paper focuses on prescriptive price optimization, which derives the optimal pricing strategy that maximizes future revenue or profit by using demand forecasting models for multiple products. Prescriptive price optimization requires accurate demand forecasting models because the accuracy of these models has a direct impact on pricing strategies aimed at increasing revenue or profit. However, … Read more
Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is extensively employed by healthcare policymakers to guide funding decisions and inform optimal design of medical interventions. In the CEA literature, willingness to pay (WTP) serves as a common metric for converting health benefits into monetary value and defining the net monetary benefit of an intervention. However, there is no universally accepted … Read more
As pressure on healthcare systems continues to increase, it is becoming more and more important for hospitals to properly manage the high workload levels of their staff. Ensuring a balanced workload allocation between various groups of employees in a hospital has been shown to contribute considerably towards creating sustainable working conditions. However, allocating work to … Read more
The growing proliferation of wind power into the power grid achieves a low-cost sustainable electricity supply while introducing technical challenges with associated intermittency. This paper proposes a fully adaptive distributionally robust multistage framework based on mixed decision rules (MDR) for generation scheduling under uncertainty to adapt wind power respecting non-anticipativity in quick-start unit status decision … Read more
In unsplittable network flow problems, certain nodes must satisfy a combinatorial requirement that the incoming arc flows cannot be split or merged when routed through outgoing arcs. This so-called “no-split no-merge” requirement arises in unit train scheduling where train consists should remain intact at stations that lack necessary equipment and manpower to attach/detach them. Solving … Read more