Robust Mask-Based Appointment Scheduling in Primary Care Practices

In most health care systems, a primary care physician (PCP) is both the first instance consulted by patients with medical concerns and the instance coordinating patients’ continued access to medical care. Due to the PCP’s pivotal role, we address challenges of a high-quality primary care service by interday appointment scheduling on a tactical decision level. Our … Read more

Robust planning of production routing problem in closed-loop supply chain of beverage glass bottles

Closed-loop supply chains (CLSC) integrate forward and reverse flows of products and information. This integration helps companies to manage their supply chains better as they have more control and a broader view of the whole chain. Also, companies can have economic and environmental benefits from the returned products. Despite these advantages, managing CLSCs can be … Read more

Robust Vehicle Routing under Uncertainty via Branch-Price-and-Cut

This paper contemplates how branch-price-and-cut solvers can be employed along with the robust optimization paradigm to address parametric uncertainty in the context of vehicle routing problems. In this setting, given postulated uncertainty sets for customer demands and vehicle travel times, one aims to identify a set of cost-effective routes for vehicles to traverse, such that … Read more

Fleet Sizing and Allocation for On-demand Last-Mile Transportation Systems

The last-mile problem refers to the provision of travel service from the nearest public transportation node to home or other destination. Last-Mile Transportation Systems (LMTS), which have recently emerged, provide on-demand shared transportation. In this paper, we investigate the fleet sizing and allocation problem for the on-demand LMTS. Specifically, we consider the perspective of a … Read more

Distributionally Robust Optimization Approaches for a Stochastic Mobile Facility Routing and Scheduling Problem

We study a mobile facility (MF) routing and scheduling problem in which probability distributions of the time-dependent demand for MF services is unknown. To address distributional ambiguity, we propose and analyze two distributionally robust MF routing and scheduling (DMFRS) models that seek to minimize the fixed cost of establishing the MF fleet and maximum expected … Read more

Robust Optimization of a Broad Class of Heterogeneous Vehicle Routing Problems under Demand Uncertainty

This paper studies robust variants of an extended model of the classical Heterogeneous Vehicle Routing Problem (HVRP), where a mixed fleet of vehicles with different capacities, availabilities, fixed costs and routing costs is used to serve customers with uncertain demand. This model includes, as special cases, all variants of the HVRP studied in the literature … Read more

The Value of Flexibility in Robust Location-Transportation Problems

This article studies a multi-period capacitated fixed-charge location-transportation problem in which, while the location and capacity of each facility need to be determined immediately, the determination of final production and distribution of products can be delayed until actual orders are received in each period. In contexts where little is known about future demand, robust optimization, … Read more