Scalable Timing-Aware Network Design via Lagrangian Decomposition

This paper addresses instances of the temporal fixed-charge multi-commodity flow (tfMCF) problem that arise in a very large scale dynamic transportation application. We model the tfMCF as a discrete-time Resource Task Network (RTN) with cyclic schedule, and formulate it as a mixed-integer program. These problems are notoriously hard to solve due to their time-expanded nature, … Read more

Energy-efficient Automated Vertical Farms

Autonomous vertical farms (VFs) are becoming increasingly more popular, because they allow to grow food minimising water consumption and the use of pesticides, while greatly increasing the yield per square metre, compared with traditional agriculture. To meet sustainability goals, however, VFs must operate at maximum efficiency; it would be otherwise impossible to compete with the … Read more

Dynamic optimization for airline maintenance operations

The occurrence of unexpected aircraft maintenance tasks can produce expensive changes in an airline’s operation. When it comes to critical tasks, it might even cancel programmed flights. Despite of it, the challenge of scheduling aircraft maintenance operations under uncertainty has received limited attention in the scientific literature. We study a dynamic airline maintenance scheduling problem, … Read more