Vehicle Routing with Heterogeneous Time Windows

We consider a novel variant of the heterogeneous vehicle routing problem (VRP) in which each customer has different availability time windows for every vehicle. In particular, this covers our motivating application of planning daily delivery tours for a single vehicle, where customers can be available at different times each day. The existing literature on heterogeneous … Read more

An integrated assignment, routing, and speed model for roadway mobility and transportation with environmental, efficiency, and service goals

Managing all the mobility and transportation services with autonomous vehicles for users of a smart city requires determining the assignment of the vehicles to the users and their routing in conjunction with their speed. Such decisions must ensure low emission, efficiency, and high service quality by also considering the impact on traffic congestion caused by … Read more

Dual Bounds from Decision Diagram-Based Route Relaxations: An Application to Truck-Drone Routing

For vehicle routing problems, strong dual bounds on the optimal value are needed to develop scalable exact algorithms, as well as to evaluate the performance of heuristics. In this work, we propose an iterative algorithm to compute dual bounds motivated by connections between decision diagrams (DDs) and dynamic programming (DP) models used for pricing in … Read more

A Machine Learning Approach to Solving Large Bilevel and Stochastic Programs: Application to Cycling Network Design

We present a novel machine learning-based approach to solving bilevel programs that involve a large number of independent followers, which as a special case include two-stage stochastic programming. We propose an optimization model that explicitly considers a sampled subset of followers and exploits a machine learning model to estimate the objective values of unsampled followers. … Read more

Dynamic Rebalancing Optimization for Bike-sharing Systems: A Modeling Framework and Empirical Comparison

Bike-sharing systems have been implemented in multiple major cities, offering a low-cost and environmentally friendly transportation alternative to vehicles. Due to the stochastic nature of customer trips, stations are often unbalanced, resulting in unsatisfied demand. As a remedy, operators employ trucks to rebalance bikes among unbalanced stations. Given the complexity of the dynamic rebalancing planning, … Read more

Optimizing the Trade-Off Between Batching and Waiting: Subadditive Dispatching

Motivated by applications in e-commerce logistics where orders or items arrive at different times and must be dispatched or processed in batches, we propose the subadditive dispatching problem (SAD), a strongly NP-hard problem defined by a set of orders with release times and a non-decreasing subadditive dispatch time function. A single uncapacitated vehicle must dispatch … Read more

The Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows and Incompatibility Constraints in Cold Chain Transportation

This study investigates a new variant of the pickup and delivery problem with time windows (PDPTW) applied in cold chain transportation, which quantifies the effect of time on the quality of perishable products. Multiple commodities with incompatibility constraints are considered, where some types of products cannot be transported in a vehicle simultaneously due to their … Read more

Branch-and-price for clash-free periodic supply vessel planning problem with split delivery and variable service time

Efficient scheduling and routing of vessels are crucial in the oil and gas industries. In this paper, we consider a periodic supply vessel planning problem in which the weekly demands at multiple offshore facilities are satisfied with a fleet of heterogeneous vessels. Preemptive service at the base, variable service at facilities, and split delivery are … Read more

A Stochastic Optimization Approach to Energy-Efficient Underground Timetabling under Uncertain Dwell and Running Times

We consider a problem from the context of energy-efficient underground railway timetabling, in which an existing timetable draft is improved by slightly changing departure and running times. In practice, synchronization between accelerating and braking trains to utilize regenerative braking plays a major role for the energy-efficiency of a timetable. Since deviations from a planned timetable … Read more

A Sparse Interior Point Method for Linear Programs arising in Discrete Optimal Transport

Discrete Optimal Transport problems give rise to very large linear programs (LP) with a particular structure of the constraint matrix. In this paper we present an interior point method (IPM) specialized for the LP originating from the Kantorovich Optimal Transport problem. Knowing that optimal solutions of such problems display a high degree of sparsity, we … Read more