2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting Program

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INFORMS Nashville – 2016
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reflect a range of possible defender interceptor inventories. The ADP policy
provides high-quality decisions for a substantial proportion of the state space,
achieving a 7.7 percent mean optimality gap in the baseline scenario.
3 - Containing The Mess Of Optional Meals Via Approximate
Dynamic Programming
Sandra Jackson, Instructor, United States Military Academy,
West Point, NY, United States, ,
Keith DeGregory, Matthew Fletcher
On any given day, the United States Military Academy Mess Hall provides three
meals to the Corps of Cadets, approximately 4,400 people. These meals are
simultaneously served meaning the entire Corps arrives, eats, and departs at the
same time. In recent years, the Academy has allowed cadets to option out of
formally mandatory meals thus moving what was a consistent demand to a
stochastic one. As a result, the Academy Mess Hall experiences a stochastic
demand similar to dining facilities in the active Army. Variable demand opens the
door to food waste and the question of how to make sequential resourcing
decisions under uncertainty, a problem for which approximate dynamic
programming is suited to solve.
4 - Heterogeneous Surface-to-air Defense Battery Location:
A Game Theoretic Approach
Brian Lunday, Air Force Institute of
Technology,
Nicholas Boardman, Matthew Jd Robbins
We examine a game theoretic model for the location of air defense batteries
having different interceptor capabilities, and we find high quality solutions using
the game tree search technique Double Oracle, within which we embed either of
two alternative heuristics to solve an important subproblem for the attacker. We
test and compare these solution methods to solve a designed set of 52 instances
having parametric variations. Enhancing the solution methods with alternative
initialization strategies, our superlative methodology attains the optimal solution
for 75% of the instances tested and solutions within 2.12% of optimal, on
average, for the remaining 25% of the instances.
MA70
Acoustic- Omni
Transportation, Maritime I
Contributed Session
Chair: Hossein M Soroush, Kuwait University, Department of Statistics
& Operations Research, PO Box
5969, Safat, 13060, Kuwait,
1 - Understanding Vehicle Movement Patterns With Artificial
Neural Networks
Burak Cankaya, Lamar University, 13960 Hillcroft St. Apt
724, Houston, TX, 77085, United States,
Geographical Identification System (GIS) is utilized by most of the vehicles and
cellphones in recent years. This research proposes an alternative type of
methodology to understand vehicle movement patterns with historic geospatial
data. This research investigates the vehicle movement patterns with artificial
neural networks and compares the results with other machine learning
methodologies including decision trees and random forest algorithm. The
methodology will be applied on a case study, which is strategic Gulf of Mexico
Ports’ vessel traffic data. The result of the study will explain the question “Can we
understand vessel movement patterns and optimize the vessel traffic?
2 - A Discrete Simulation Of A New Container Terminal – The Case Of
Hamad Port Of Qatar
Ghaith Rabadi, Professor, Old Dominion University, Engineering
Management Systems Engineering, Engineering Systems Building,
Room 2102, Norfolk, VA, 23529, United States,
Mariam Kotachi, Moahmed K Msakni, Mohammad Al-Salem,
Ali Diabat
A discrete even simulation is developed for a future container terminal of
Hamad’s new port of Qatar. The simulation models vessel arrivals, ship to shore
crane operation, container movement from vessels to yard via yard trucks and the
operations in the opposite direction from the yard to the vessels. Furthermore,
external trucks dropping off and picking up containers from the yard are also
modeled. Berth allocation and crane assignment methods are embedded in the
simulation. Preliminary analysis and scenarios are presented.
3 - Modeling The Service Network In Container Terminals
Considering Process Integration And Decomposition
Qingcheng Zeng, Professor, Dalian Maritime University,
School of Transportation
Management, Dalian, 116026, China,
Process integration/decomposition and process variation are pair of critical
decision variables in service network design. In this paper, the variation of each
service process of container terminals is analyzed. A cyclic queue network model
is developed. Principles of integration or decomposition, methods of stabilizing
the processes are proposed.
4 - A Vessel Scheduling Transportation-inventory Problem With
Stochastic Demands
Hossein M Soroush, Kuwait University, Department of Statistics &
Operations Research, P.O. Box
5969, Safat, 13060, Kuwait,
Salem Al-Yakoob
We study a vessel scheduling transportation-inventory problem to transport a
product from a source to a destination where demands are stochastic and
penalties are imposed on the shortages/excesses in storage levels. The goal is to
schedule a set of heterogeneous fleet to meet the demands with acceptable level
of reliabilities while minimizing the expected total cost.
MA71
Electric- Omni
Supply Chain, Shipping I
Contributed Session
Chair: Tao Lu, Erasmus
University, Rotterdam, Netherlands,
1 - Shipping Peak Demand For Online Sellers
Ju Myung (J.M.) Song, Rutgers Business School, PhD Program,
Washington Park, Room 430C, Newark, NJ, 07102,
United States, , Yao Zhao
Online retailing is changing the landscape of retail industry in countries as
Amazon’s market cap has recently doubled that of Wal-Mart in the US. Different
from brick and mortar, online sellers rely on 3rd party logistics for the delivery of
the goods but the hugely spiked demand during holiday seasons (Christmas in the
US, Singles’ day in China) poses a substantial challenge for the 3PLs to deliver on
time. To better manage demand, 3PLs such as UPS, require the sellers to make
reservation and to pay a surcharge for extra work. In this paper, we discuss how
these shipping arrangements may affect the online sellers’ inventory decisions,
how to coordinate the channel for the sellers and shippers to win-win.
2 - Explosive Storage Location Assignment Problem For Amazon
Class Internet Fulfillment Warehouses
Sanchoy Das, New Jersey Institute of Technology, University
Heights, Newark, NJ, 07102, United States, ,
Jingran Zhang
We establish a storage assignment heuristic for Internet Fulfillment Warehouses.
xSLAP is based on an explosive policy, whereby the same item is stored
simultaneously in small lots in a large number of locations. Compared with
classical storage policies used in traditional warehouses, an explosive policy
leverages demand correlated storage assignment by commingling SKUs in the
same bin, bins in close proximity, or bins in the same zone. The xSLAP heuristic
optimizes the downstream picking processes by finding the optimal assignment of
items in order to meet quick customer orders fulfillment.
3 - Analysis Of Hub Ports In Southeast Asia And Northeast Asia
Richard W Monroe, Longwood University,
7413 Nicklaus Cir, Farmville, VA, 23909,
United States,
Major seaports in Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia have experienced significant
growth in the last two decades. Several ports are known as “hub” ports due to the
dominant volume of transshipments. This paper will present descriptive statistics
for the major ports in Asia among the Top 50 Container Ports in the world. A
secondary analysis will focus on a smaller sample of the top hub ports to compare
the growth of container volume for those ports with higher transshipment
volumes. The differences between hub ports and other ports will also be
discussed.
4 - Approximate Dynamic Programming For An Empty Container
Repositioning Problem In A Cyclic Route
Shaorui Zhou, Assistant Professor, Sun Yat-sen
University, Guangzhou, China, , Fan Wang
In this work, we study an empty container repositioning problem in a cyclic route
with uncertain demands. We formulate it as a stochastic dynamic programming
problem. We study two special cases: in case 1, the route covers only 2 ports and
we propose a optimal t ld policy due to the separability of the value function; In
case 2, the route covers 3 ports, and the optimal policy can be characterized by
state-dependent threshold points. For general case, in order to overcome curse of
dimensionality, we propose an approximate dynamic programming algorithm. We
compare the performance with heuristics. Numerical results demonstrate the
efficiency of the algorithm.
MA71