A two-stage optimization approach for selecting electric-flight airports

The decarbonization of short-haul air transport has gained increasing attention, with electric aircraft emerging as a promising alternative to conventional short-haul aviation. However, given the substantial investment anticipated for the necessary infrastructure, a strategic and globally coordinated selection of airports is imperative. The aim of this paper is to address this problem and determine the … Read more

A Traveling Salesman Problem with Drone Stations and Speed-Optimized Drones

With e-commerce expanding rapidly, last-mile delivery challenges have been exacerbated, necessitating innovative logistics to reduce operational costs and improve delivery speed. This paper investigates a traveling salesman problem with drone stations, where a truck collaborates with multiple drones docked at candidate drone stations to serve customers. In contrast to existing studies that typically assume fixed … Read more

Integrated Bus Fleet Electrification Planning Through Accelerated Logic-Based Benders Decomposition and Restriction Heuristics

To meet sustainability goals and regulatory requirements, transit agencies worldwide are planning partial and complete transitions to electric bus fleets. This paper presents the first comprehensive and computationally efficient multi-period optimization framework integrating the key planning decisions necessary to support such electrification initiatives. Our model, formulated as a two-stage integer program with integer subproblems, jointly … Read more

An exact approach for the Train Single-Routing Selection Problem

Given a set of train routes with route costs and a set of compatible route pairs with pairing costs, the Train Single-Routing Selection Problem (TSRSP) seeks to assign one route to each train, minimizing the total cost while ensuring pairwise compatibility among the selected routes. This problem is of significant practical relevance in rail traffic … Read more

Arc-Based Dynamic Discretization Discovery for Continuous-Time Service Network Design

In the continuous time service network design problem, a freight carrier decides the path of shipments in their network as well as the dispatch times of the vehicles transporting the shipments. State-of-the-art algorithms to solve this problem are based on the dynamic discretization discovery framework. These algorithms solve a relaxation of the problem using a … Read more

Recursive Partitioning and Batching for Network Design with Service Time Guarantees at Massive Scale

Motivated by the parcel delivery industry, we study a network design problem with service time guarantees at industrial scale. This tactical service network design problem determines primary paths and delivery schedules for commodities to minimize transportation and handling costs while ensuring committed service times. To construct a solution for a real-world instance with over 1,000 … Read more

Strategic design of collection and delivery point networks for urban parcel distribution

Collection and delivery points (CDPs) allow logistics operators to consolidate multiple customer request deliveries on a single vehicle stop, reducing distribution costs. However, for customers to adopt CDPs, they must be willing to travel to a nearby CDP to pick up their parcels. This choice depends on the customer’s personal preferences, the proximity of CDPs, … Read more

Operationalizing Experimental Design: Data Collection for Remote Ocean Monitoring

Problem definition: To collect data on ocean plastic pollution and build more accurate predictive models, we need to manually take high-resolution pictures of the sea surface via floating or flying drones. Operating these vehicles, like many data collection problems in agriculture or environmental science, challenges the traditional optimal experimental design (OED) formulation from statistics by … Read more

An Oracle-based Approach for Price-setting Problems in Logistics

We study a bilevel hub location problem where on the upper level, a shipment service provider –the leader–builds a transportation network and sets the prices of shipments on each possible transportation relation. Here, the leader has to take into account the customers’ reaction — the follower — who will only purchase transport services depending on … Read more