Rapid delivery systems where an order is delivered to a customer from a local distribution point within minutes or hours have experienced rapid growth recently and often rely on gig economy couriers. The prime example is a meal delivery system. During an operating day, couriers in such a system are used to deliver orders placed … Read more
Planning of trajectories, i.e. paths over time, is a challenging task. Thereby, the trajectories for involved commodities often have to be considered jointly as separation constraints have to be respected. This is for example the case in robot motion or air traffic management. Involving these discrete separation constraints in the planning of best possible continuous … Read more
We propose a new universal framework for multi-stage decision making under limited information availability. It is developed as part of a larger research project which aims at providing analytical methods to compare and evaluate different models and algorithms for multi-stage decision making. In our setting, we have an open time horizon and limited information about … Read more
Mathematical optimization problems including a time dimension abound. For example, logistics, process optimization and production planning tasks must often be optimized for a range of time periods. Usually, these problems incorporating time structure are very large and cannot be solved to global optimality by modern solvers within a reasonable period of time. Therefore, the so-called … Read more
The supply of pharmaceuticals is one important factor in a functioning health care system. In the German health care system, the chambers of pharmacists are legally obliged to ensure that every resident can find an open pharmacy at any day and night time within an appropriate distance. To that end, the chambers of pharmacists create … Read more
We introduce the Stochastic multistage fixed charge transportation problem in which a producer has to ship an uncertain load to a customer within a deadline. At each time period, a fixed transportation price can be paid to buy a transportation capacity. If the transportation capacity is used, the supplier also pays an uncertain unit transportation … Read more
We introduce, discuss, and solve a hard practical optimization problem which we call the ship traffic control problem (STCP). Since we plan bi-directional traffic, STCP relates to, and in fact generalizes train timetabling on single-track networks. The objective of finding quickest routes motivates the integration of recent algorithmic ideas from dynamic collision-free routing of automated … Read more