Planning Out-of-Hours Services for Pharmacies

The supply of pharmaceuticals is one important factor in a functioning health care system. In the German health care system, the chambers of pharmacists are legally obliged to ensure that every resident can find an open pharmacy at any day and night time within an appropriate distance. To that end, the chambers of pharmacists create … Read more

Multi-objective optimization models for many-to-one matching problems

This paper is concerned with many-to-one matching problems for assigning residents to hospitals according to their preferences. The stable matching model aims at finding a stable matching, and the assignment game model involves maximizing the total utility; however, these two objectives are incompatible in general. We also focus on a situation where there are predetermined … Read more

Exact Multiple Sequence Alignment by Synchronized Decision Diagrams

This paper develops an exact solution algorithm for the Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) problem. In the first step, we design a dynamic programming model and use it to construct a novel Multi-valued Decision Diagrams (MDD) representation of all pairwise sequence alignments (PSA). PSA MDDs are then synchronized using side constraints to model the MSA problem … Read more

Day-Ahead Contingency-Constrained Unit Commitment with Co-Optimized Post-Contingency Transmission Switching

Transmission switching has been previously shown to offer significant benefits to power system operation, such as cost savings and the reduction of power imbalance levels. Within the context of co-optimized electricity markets for energy and reserves, this paper addresses the incorporation of transmission switching in the contingency-constrained unit commitment problem. The proposed generation scheduling model … Read more

Team as a Service: Team Formation on Social Networks

Team as a Service (TaaS) is a new outsourcing service that enables on-demand creation and management of distributed teams for fast growing companies. The companies that use the TaaS model form a team according to the needs of a given project and provide managerial service throughout. Motivated by this new application, we study the Team … Read more

An Iterative Graph Expansion Approach for the Scheduling and Routing of Airplanes

A tourism company that offers fly-in safaris is faced with the challenge to route and schedule its fleet of airplanes in an optimal way. Over the course of a given time horizon several groups of tourists have to be picked up at airports and flown to their destinations within a certain time-window. Furthermore the number … Read more

Multi-Objective Optimization for Politically Fair Districting: A Scalable Multilevel Approach

Political districting in the United States is a decennial process of redrawing the boundaries of congressional and state legislative districts. The notion of fairness in political districting has been an important topic of subjective debate, with district maps having consequences to multiple stakeholders. Even though districting as an optimization problem has been well-studied, existing models … Read more

A Decomposition Heuristic for Mixed-Integer Supply Chain Problems

Mixed-integer supply chain models typically are very large but are also very sparse and can be decomposed into loosely coupled blocks. In this paper, we use general-purpose techniques to obtain a block decomposition of supply chain instances and apply a tailored penalty alternating direction method, which exploits the structural properties of the decomposed instances. We … Read more

A Robust Optimization Approach for the Unrelated Parallel Machine Scheduling Problem

In this paper, we address the Unrelated Parallel Machine Scheduling Problem (UPMSP) with sequence- and machine-dependent setup times and job due-date constraints. Different uncertainties are typically involved in real-world production planning and scheduling problems. If ignored, they can lead to suboptimal or even infeasible schedules. To avoid this, we present two new robust optimization models … Read more

Vehicle Routing Problem with Steep Roads

Most routing decisions assume that the world is flat meaning that routing costs are modelled as a weighted sum of total distance and time spend by delivery vehicles. However, this assumption does not apply for urban logistics operations in cities with significant altitude differences. We fill a space in the VRP literature and model routing … Read more