Fleet Sizing and Empty Freight Car Allocation

Empty freight car allocation problems as well as eet sizing problems depict highly important topics in the eld of railway cargo optimization. Fleet sizing is mainly used in order to nd the minimal number of freight cars ( xed costs) needed to operate the transportation network successfully (e.g. satisfy customer demands). After a consignment is transported … Read more

Leveraging Predictive Analytics to Control and Coordinate Operations, Asset Loading and Maintenance

This paper aims to advance decision-making in power systems by proposing an integrated framework that combines sensor data analytics and optimization. Our modeling framework consists of two components: (1) a predictive analytics methodology that uses real-time sensor data to predict future degradation and remaining lifetime of generators as a function of the loading conditions, and … Read more

Strictly and Γ-Robust Counterparts of Electricity Market Models: Perfect Competition and Nash-Cournot Equilibria

This paper mainly studies two topics: linear complementarity problems for modeling electricity market equilibria and optimization under uncertainty. We consider both perfectly competitive and Nash–Cournot models of electricity markets and study their robustifications using strict robustness and the Γ-approach. For three out of the four combinations of economic competition and robustification, we derive algorithmically tractable … Read more

Multistage Stochastic Demand-side Management for Price-Making Major Consumers of Electricity in a Co-optimized Energy and Reserve Market

In this paper we take an optimization-driven heuristic approach, motivated by dynamic programming, to solve a multistage stochastic optimization of energy consumption for a large manufacturer who is a price-making major consumer of electricity. We introduce a mixed-integer program that co-optimizes consumption bids and interruptible load reserve offers, for such a major consumer over a … Read more

Dynamic Scheduling of Home Health Care Patients to Medical Providers

Home care provides personalized medical care and social support to patients within their own home. Our work proposes a dynamic scheduling framework to assist in the assignment of patients to health practitioners (HPs) at a single home care agency. We model the decision of which patients to assign to HPs as a discrete-time Markov decision … Read more

Coordination of a two-level supply chain with contracts

We consider the coordination of planning decisions of a single product in a supply chain composed of one supplier and one retailer, by using contracts. We assume that the retailer has the market power: he can impose his optimal replenishment plan to the supplier. Our aim is to minimize the supplier’s cost without increasing the … Read more

Efficient Algorithms for Flow over Time Evacuation Planning Problems with Lane Reversal Strategy

The contraflow techniques have widely been effective in evacuation planning research. We present effcient algorithms to solve the evacuation network flow problems, namely, the maximum, earliest arrival, quickest and lex-maximum dynamic contraflow problems having constant attributes and their generalizations with partial contraflow recon guration. Moreover, the contraflow models with inflow dependent and load dependent transit times … Read more

An Enhanced Branch and Price Algorithm for the Time-Dependent Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

In this paper we implement a branch and price (BP) algorithm for a time dependent vehicle routing problem with time windows (TDVRPTW) in which the goal is to minimize the total route duration (DM-TDVRPTW). The travel time between two customers depends on the departure time and, thus, it need not remain fixed along the planning … Read more

A Dual Approximate Dynamic Programming Approach to Multi-stage Stochastic Unit Commitment

We study the multi-stage stochastic unit commitment problem in which commitment and generation decisions can be made and adjusted in each time period. We formulate this problem as a Markov decision process, which is “weakly-coupled” in the sense that if the demand constraint is relaxed, the problem decomposes into a separate, low-dimensional, Markov decision process … Read more

A Lagrange decomposition based Branch and Bound algorithm for the Optimal Mapping of Cloud Virtual Machines

One of the challenges of cloud computing is to optimally and efficiently assign virtual machines to physical machines. The aim of telecommunication operators is to mini- mize the mapping cost while respecting constraints regarding location, assignment and capacity. In this paper we first propose an exact formulation leading to a 0-1 bilinear constrained problem. Then … Read more