Security agencies throughout the world use bodyguards to protect government officials and public figures. In this paper, we consider a two-person zero-sum game between a defender who allocates such bodyguards to protect several targets and an attacker who chooses one target to attack. Because the number of feasible bodyguard allocations grows quickly as either the … Read more
In this paper, a novel approach is presented to address a challenging optimization problem known as Generalized Order Acceptance Scheduling. This problem involves scheduling a set of orders on a single machine with release dates, due dates, deadlines, and sequence-dependent setup times judiciously to maximize revenue. In view of resource constraints, not all orders can … Read more
Given a set of jobs (or items), each of which being characterized by its resource demand and its lifespan, and a sufficiently large number of identical servers (or bins), the busy time minimization problem (BTMP) requires to find a feasible schedule (i.e., a jobs-to-servers assignment) having minimum overall power-on time. Although being linked to the … Read more
Over the last fewyears, the efficient design of processes in hospitals and medical facilities has received more and more attention, particularly when the improvement of the processes is aimed at relieving theworkload of medical staff. To this end,we have developed a method to determine optimal allocations of intra-hospital transports to hospital transport employees. When optimizing … Read more
In this paper we present a Bayesian optimization framework that iteratively “learns” good schedules for healthcare professionals of outpatient healthcare in a hospital, that minimize the overall number of patients in queue — we understand that a patient in schedule is one in queue. The hospital has several medical specialties and each is modeled as … Read more
We propose a new stochastic mixed-integer linear programming model for a home service fleet sizing and appointment scheduling problem (HFASP) with random service and travel times. Specifically, given a set of providers and a set of geographically distributed customers within a service region, our model solves the following decision problems simultaneously: (i) a fleet sizing … Read more
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
Recently, there has been a paradigm shift by certain energy and chemical companies towards modular manufacturing, whereby transportable modular production units can be relocated between production facilities to meet the spatial and temporal changes in the availabilities, demands, and prices of the underlying commodities. We refer to the optimal distribution, production, and storage of commodities, … Read more
Airport coordination is a demand control mechanism that maximizes the use of existing infrastructure at congested airports. Aircraft operators submit a list of regular flights that they wish to operate over a five to seven-month period and a designated coordinator is responsible for allocating the available airport slots, which represent the permission to operate a … Read more
This paper introduces the multiphase course timetabling problem and presents mathematical formulations and effective solution algorithms to solve it in a real case study. Consider a pool of lessons and a number of students who are required to take a subset of these lessons to graduate. Each lesson consists of a predetermined and consecutive sequence … Read more