In many retail industries, the retailer can choose the inventory location or fulfillment center (FC) that fulfills an order, yielding opportunities for inventory pooling and product selection expansion. However, fulfillment decisions are complex and must consider cost and speed, among various factors. With the unprecedented growth of the retail industry, companies must look for strategies … Read more
We consider a two-stage optimization problem with sparsity constraints, motivated by a common challenge in packaging logistics: minimizing the volume of transported air by optimizing the size and number of available packaging boxes, given the demand for order items. In the first stage, we select the optimal dimensions of the boxes, while in the second … Read more
Transportation network design, or the problem of optimizing infrastructure for a societal goal, subject to individual travelers optimizing their behavior for their own preferences arises frequently in many contexts. However, it is also an NP-hard problem due to the leader-follower or bi-level structure involving a follower objective that is different from yet significantly affects the … Read more
We introduce a two-stage robust optimization (RO) framework for the integrated planning of a drone-based disaster relief operations problem (DDROP). Given sets of demand points, candidate locations for establishing drone-supported relief facilities, facility types, drone types, and relief items types, our first-stage problem solves the following problems simultaneously: (i) a location problem that determines the … Read more
In the aftermath of an earthquake, one of the most critical needs is medical care for the injured. A large number of individuals require immediate attention, often overwhelming the available healthcare resources. The sudden surge in demand, coupled with limited resources, route congestion and infrastructure damage, makes immediate medical care provision a significant challenge. This … Read more
The rapid growth of online meal delivery has introduced complex logistical challenges, where platforms must dynamically assign orders to couriers while accounting for demand uncertainty, courier autonomy, and service efficiency. Traditional dispatching methods, often focused on short-term cost minimization, fail to capture the long-term implications of assignment decisions on system-wide performance. This paper presents a … Read more
Tsunamis, primarily triggered by earthquakes, pose critical threats to coastal populations due to their rapid onset and limited evacuation time. Two main protective actions exist: sheltering in place, which requires substantial retrofitting investments, and evacuation, which is often hindered by congestion, mixed travel modes, and tight inundation times. Given pedestrians’ slower movement and restricted evacuation … Read more
Abstract: Crowdshipping has gained attention as an emerging delivery model thanks to advantages such as flexibility and an asset-light structure. Yet, it chronically suffers from a lackof mechanisms to create and exploit consolidation opportunities, limiting its efficiency and scalability. This work contributes to the literature in two ways: first, by introducing a novel consolidation concept … Read more
We study a broad class of vehicle routing problems in which the cost of a route is allowed to be any nonnegative rational value computable in polynomial time in the input size. To address this class, we introduce a unifying framework that generalizes existing integer L-shaped (ILS) formulations developed for vehicle routing problems with stochastic … Read more
Recent advancements in drone technology have expanded drone applications in logistics, humanitarian aid, and infrastructure surveillance. Motivated by the demand for drone-based infrastructure inspection and the emerging design of drone battery swapping stations, this paper introduces the location routing problem with heterogeneous stations and drones (LRPHSD). In the problem, two types of stations are considered: … Read more