A Unified Analysis for Assortment Planning with Marginal Distributions

In this paper, we study assortment planning under the marginal distribution model (MDM), a semiparametric choice model that only requires information about the marginal noise in the utilities of alternatives and does not assume independence of the noise terms. It is already known in the literature that the multinomial logit (MNL) model belongs to the … Read more

Measures of Balance in Combinatorial Optimization

The concept of balance plays an important role in many combinatorial optimization problems. Yet there exist various ways of expressing balance, and it is not always obvious how best to achieve it. In this methodology-focused paper, we study three cases where its integration is deficient and analyze the causes of these inadequacies. We examine the … Read more

Exact and heuristic approaches to reschedule helicopter flights for personnel transportation in the oil industry

This paper addresses a real-life short-term rescheduling problem of helicopter flights from one onshore airport to several maritime units in the context of the oil industry. This is a complex and challenging problem to solve because of the particular characteristics observed in practice, such as pending flights transferred from previous days with different recovering priorities, … Read more

An Integer L-shaped algorithm for the vehicle routing problem with time windows and stochastic demands

This paper addresses the vehicle routing problem with time windows and stochastic demands (VRPTWSD). The problem is modeled as a two-stage stochastic program with recourse, in which routes are designed in the first stage and executed in the second. A failure occurs if the load of the vehicle is insufficient to meet the observed demand … Read more

The Cost of Decoupling Trade and Transport in the European Entry-Exit Gas Market with Linear Physics Modeling

Liberalized gas markets in Europe are organized as entry-exit regimes so that gas trade and transport are decoupled. The decoupling is achieved via the announcement of technical capacities by the transmission system operator (TSO) at all entry and exit points of the network. These capacities can be booked by gas suppliers and customers in long-term … Read more

Branch-and-Refine for Solving Time-Dependent Problems

One of the standard approaches for solving time-dependent discrete optimization problems, such as the traveling salesman problem with time-windows or the shortest path problem with time-windows, is to derive a so-called time-indexed formulation. If the problem has an underlying structure that can be described by a graph, the time-indexed formulation is usually based on a … Read more

Modeling Multi-stage Decision Making under Incomplete and Uncertain Information

We propose a new universal framework for multi-stage decision making under limited information availability. It is developed as part of a larger research project which aims at providing analytical methods to compare and evaluate different models and algorithms for multi-stage decision making. In our setting, we have an open time horizon and limited information about … Read more

Sufficient condition on Schrage conjecture about the completion time variance

We consider a single machine scheduling problem to minimize the completion time variance. This roblem is known to be NP-hard. We prove that if $p_{n-1} = p_{n-2$, then there is an optimal solution of the form $(n,n-2,n-3,…,n-4,n-1)$. A new lower bound are proposed for solving the problem. The test on more than 4000 instances shows … Read more

An algorithm for the Microaggregation problem using Column Generation

The field of Statistical Disclosure Control aims at reducing the risk of re-identification of an individual when disseminating data, and it is one of the main concerns of national statistical agencies. Operations Research (OR) techniques were widely used in the past for the protection of tabular data, but not for microdata (i.e., files of individuals … Read more

Vehicle Repositioning under Uncertainty

We consider a general multi-period repositioning problem in vehicle-sharing networks such as bicycle-sharing systems, free-float car-sharing systems, and autonomous mobility-on-demand systems. This problem is subject to uncertainties along multiple dimensions – including demand, travel time, and repositioning duration – and faces several operational constraints such as the service level and cost budget. We propose a … Read more