Planning for Mining Operations with Time and Resource Constraints

We study a daily mine planning problem where, given a set of blocks we wish to mine, our task is to generate a mining sequence for the excavators such that blending resource constraints are met at various stages of the sequence. Such time-oriented resource constraints are not traditionally handled well by automated planners. On the … Read more

Minimum Cost Path Problem for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles

We introduce a practically important and theoretically challenging problem: finding the minimum cost path for PHEVs in a road network with refueling and charging stations. We show that this problem is NP-complete and present a mixed integer quadratically constrained formulation, a discrete approximation dynamic programming heuristic, and a shortest path heuristic as solution methodologies. Practical … Read more

Constraint Programming for LNG Ship Scheduling and Inventory Management

We propose a constraint programming approach for the optimization of inventory routing in the liquefied natural gas industry. We present two constraint programming models that rely on a disjunctive scheduling representation of the problem. We also propose an iterative search heuristic to generate good feasible solutions for these models. Computational results on a set of … Read more

Approaches to a real-world train timetabling problem in a railway node

We consider the Train Timetabling Problem (TTP) in a railway node (i.e. a set of stations in an urban area interconnected by tracks), which calls for determining the best schedule for a given set of trains during a given time horizon, while satisfying several track operational constraints. In particular, we consider the context of a … Read more

Price of Anarchy for Non-atomic Congestion Games with Stochastic Demands

We generalize the notions of user equilibrium and system optimum to non-atomic congestion games with stochastic demands. We establish upper bounds on the price of anarchy for three different settings of link cost functions and demand distributions, namely, (a) affine cost functions and general distributions, (b) polynomial cost functions and general positive-valued distributions, and (c) … Read more

Optimization Models for Differentiating Quality of Service Levels in Probabilistic Network Capacity Design Problems

This paper develops various chance-constrained models for optimizing the probabilistic network design problem (PNDP), where we differentiate the quality of service (QoS) and measure the related network performance under uncertain demand. The upper level problem of PNDP designs continuous/discrete link capacities shared by multi-commodity flows, and the lower level problem differentiates the corresponding QoS for … Read more

Two-Stage Decomposition Algorithms for Single Product Maritime Inventory Routing

We present two decomposition algorithms for single product deep-sea maritime inventory routing problems (MIRPs) that possess a core substructure common in many real-world applications. The problem involves routing vessels, each belonging to a particular vessel class, between loading and discharging ports, each belonging to a particular region. Our algorithms iteratively solve a MIRP by zooming … Read more

MIRPLib – A library of maritime inventory routing problem instances: Survey, core model, and benchmark results

This paper presents a detailed description of a particular class of deterministic single product maritime inventory routing problems (MIRPs), which we call deep-sea MIRPs with inventory tracking at every port. This class involves vessel travel times between ports that are significantly longer than the time spent in port and require inventory levels at all ports … Read more

Convergence Analysis of DC Algorithm for DC programming with subanalytic data

DC Programming and DCA have been introduced by Pham Dinh Tao in 1986 and extensively developed by Le Thi Hoai An and Pham Dinh Tao since 1993. These approaches have been successfully applied to solving real life problems in their large scale setting. In this paper, by using the Lojasiewicz inequality for nonsmooth subanalytic functions, … Read more

Approximate Dynamic Programming for a Class of Long-Horizon Maritime Inventory Routing Problems

We study a deterministic maritime inventory routing problem with a long planning horizon. For instances with many ports and many vessels, mixed-integer linear programming (MIP) solvers often require hours to produce good solutions even when the planning horizon is 90 or 120 periods. Building on the recent successes of approximate dynamic programming (ADP) for road-based … Read more