We consider a continuous time Principal-Agent model on a finite time horizon, where we look for the existence of an optimal contract both parties agreed on. Contrary to the main stream, where the principal is modelled as risk-neutral, we assume that both the principal and the agent have exponential utility, and are risk averse with … Read more
The Traveling Salesman Problem with Pickup and Delivery (TSPPD) describes the problem of finding a minimum cost path in which pickups precede their associated deliveries. The TSPPD is particularly important in the growing field of Dynamic Pickup and Delivery Problems (DPDP). These include the many-to-many Dial-A-Ride Problems (DARP) of companies such as Uber and Lyft, … Read more
The Vehicle Routing Problem with Probabilistic Customers (VRP-PC) is a fundamental building block within the broad family of stochastic routing models, and has two decision stages. In the first stage, a dispatcher determines a set of vehicle routes serving all potential customer locations, before actual requests for service realize. In the second stage, vehicles are … Read more
Cities are drivers of economic development, providing infrastructure to support countless activities and services. Today, the world’s 750 biggest cities account for more than 57% of the global GDP and this number is expected to increase to 61% by 2030. More than half of the world’s population lives in cities, or urban areas, and this … Read more
In this paper, we consider the two-stage extension of the one-dimensional cutting stock problem which arises when technical requirements inhibit the cutting of large stock rolls to demanded widths of finished rolls directly. Therefore, the demands on finished rolls are fulfilled through two subsequent cutting processes, in which the rolls produced in the former are … Read more
We study the existence and uniqueness of equilibria for perfectly competitive markets in capacitated transport networks. The model under consideration is rather general so that it captures basic aspects of related models in, e.g., gas or electricity networks. We formulate the market equilibrium model as a mixed complementarity problem and show the equivalence to a … Read more
In the analysis of complex stochastic dynamic programs, we often seek strong theoretical guarantees on the suboptimality of heuristic policies. One technique for obtaining performance bounds is perfect information analysis: this approach provides bounds on the performance of an optimal policy by considering a decision maker who has access to the outcomes of all future … Read more
This paper studies the problem of multi-plant manganese alloy production. The problem consists of finding the optimal furnace feed of ores, fluxes, coke, and slag that yields output products which meet customer specifications, and to optimally decide the volume, composition, and allocation of the slag. To solve the problem, a nonlinear pooling problem formulation is … Read more
This paper provides a first approach to assess gas market interaction on a network with nonconvex flow models. In the simplest possible setup that adequately reflects gas transport and market interaction, we elaborate on the relation of the solution of a simultaneous competitive gas market game, its corresponding mixed nonlinear complementarity problem (MNCP), and a … Read more
We propose and analyze two mathematical programming models for a production, inventory, distribution and routing problem considering real and relevant features from the furniture industry, such as production sequence-dependent setup times, heterogeneous fleet of vehicles, routes extending over one or more periods of the production planning horizon, multiple time windows and customers’ deadlines, among others. … Read more