INFORMS Nashville – 2016
228
4 - Design And Modeling Of A Crowdsource-enabled System For
Urban Parcel Delivery
Bo Zou, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL,
United States,
bzou@uic.edu, Nabin Kafle, Jane Lin
We consider cyclists and pedestrians close to customers as crowdsources to relay
parcels with a truck carrier and undertake last-leg parcel delivery. The
crowdsources express their interests in doing so by submitting bids to the truck
carrier. The truck carrier then selects bids and coordinate crowdsources’ last-leg
delivery with its truck operations. A Tabu Search based algorithm is proposed to
solve the truck carrier problem. Results show that truck VMT and total cost can
be considerably reduced compared to pure-truck delivery.
MD61
Cumberland 3- Omni
Advances in Blocking and Trip Planning
Sponsored: Railway Applications
Sponsored Session
Chair: Shrikant Jarugumilli, BNSF Railway, Fort Worth, TX,
United States,
shrikant.jarugumilli@bnsf.com1 - Arc Costing Approaches For Railroad Algorithmic Blocking
Erick D Wikum, TCS,
erick.wikum@tcs.comAlgorithmic blocking provides a way to generate travel routes for freight rail car
movements by computing shortest paths in a network of blocks. Traditionally, the
cost of a block (arc) has been a function of two components—the distance
between the block’s origin and destination yards in the railroad’s physical track
network and the relative cost of classifying a rail car at the block’s origin yard. We
explore alternative cost structures which take into account time as well as
incremental operating cost. We compare and contrast the various approaches and
draw analogies to airline passenger itineraries to arrive at a promising approach.
2 - Next Generation Blocking And Trip Planning Systems
Carl D Van Dyke, TransNetOpt,
carl@cvdzone.comAlgorithmic blocking has now been in production for close to 20 years, and is
slowly spreading to more railroads. The basic trip planning logic used by railways
is even older, having been in wide use for about 35 years. As railroads think
about the future, the obvious question is how blocking and trip planning should
evolve to meet current and future needs, due to both changes in technology and
changes in the fundamental business mix. Are the current technologies still
relevant given the rise of intermodal and unit trains? How should these
technologies be adapted to support these lines of business? What changes should
be considered in how traditional carload traffic is blocked and trip planned?
3 - Modernizing Blocking And Trip Planning
Pooja Dewan, BNSF Railway,
pooja.dewan@bnsf.comIn this talk, we present the various challenges and opportunities that need to be
considered and carefully evaluated as railroads modernize various information
MD62
Cumberland 4- Omni
Aviation Applications Section: Keynote Presentation
Sponsored: Aviation Applications
Sponsored Session
Chair: Senay Solak, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Isenberg 318,
121 Presidents Drive, Amherst, MA, 01003, United States,
solak2@isenberg.umass.edu1 - Operations Research at FedEx: Looking Back, Looking Forward
William Payson, Staff Vice President, FedEx Corporation, 1000
Ridgeway Loop, Memphis, TN, 38120, United States,
william.payson@fedex.comThis keynote talk will describe a history and overview of the use of operations
research at FedEx, and how this usage is expected to evolve in the future. While
overall logistics applications will be discussed, special emphasis will be given on
FedEx air cargo operations.
MD63
Cumberland 5- Omni
UAS Traffic Management and Low-altitude Airspace
Operations
Sponsored: Aviation Applications
Sponsored Session
Chair: Peng Wei, Iowa State University, 2312 Howe Hall,
537 Bissell Road, Ames, IA, 50011, United States,
pwei@iastate.edu1 - Deliver Or Not?: Revenue Management For Future Delivery
Service Operations Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Heng Chen, Assistant Professor, University of Nebraska–Lincoln,
Lincoln, NE, 68588, United States,
heng@unl.edu, Senay Solak
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are expected to fulfill commercial delivery
services for retailers and courier companies in the near future. We study certain
capacity and revenue management decisions that these companies will face in
UAV based delivery operations, and use currently available data to develop
models for guiding such decisions.
2 - On Routing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles For Surveillance And
Reconnaissance Activities
Cai Gao, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, 14260, United States,
caigao@buffalo.edu, Jose Luis Walteros
We tackle a variation of the close-enough traveling salesman problem in which
the salesman is accounted of visiting a node if he traverses a predefined distance
through a circular area surrounding the node. This variation arises in the context
of unmanned aerial vehicle routing, where a vehicle must cross an area collecting
information form a set of targets, while minimizing the detection risks. We
consider two approaches for modeling the tradeoff between the amount of
collected information and the observed risk and test them by solving a collection
of instances adapted from the literature.
3 - Mission Planning For Unmanned Aerial Vehicles And
Human Operators
Chase Murray, University at Buffalo, Dept of Industrial & Systems
Engineering, 309 Bell Hall, Amherst, NY, 14260-2050,
United States,
cmurray3@buffalo.eduAdvances in autonomy promise to enable human operators to manage multiple
UAVs simultaneously. This talk presents a new algorithm to optimally allocate
complex tasks to operators and machines. This algorithm mitigates the impacts of
increased operator multitasking, and considers the degree to which each operator
“trusts” the automated system. Operator stress caused by multitasking overload or
lack of trust can compromise task performance and increase the likelihood of a
mishap or mission failure.
4 - Routing Problems For Unmanned Surface Vehicles With Limited
Battery Life
Joshua Margolis, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, 29634,
United States,
jtmargo@clemson.edu,Lawrence V Snyder
Given a set of locations that must be inspected and a set of waypoints, we design
and implement a model to construct the optimal set of routes for at most K
unmanned surface vehicles that minimizes the fleet’s total distance, subject to
distance, battery life, and site number constraints, while ensuring that a set of
sites are covered during the tours. The model also determines the velocity of each
vehicle along each arc of the tour, where the velocity is dependent upon the
importance of the sites that are covered along that arc. Lastly, we modify, design,
and implement heuristics to construct feasible solutions.
MD64
Cumberland 6- Omni
Multicriteria Applications in the Public Section
Sponsored: Multiple Criteria Decision Making
Sponsored Session
Chair: Richard Forrester, Associate Professor, Dickinson College, P.O.
Box 1773, Carlisle, PA, 17013, United States,
forrestr@dickinson.edu1 - The Protest Casino; A Procurement Policy Simulation
Steven D Roemerman, Lone Star Analysis, 4555 Excel Pkwy,
Ste 500, Addison, TX, 75001-5691, United States,
sroemerman@lone-star.com, Randal Allen
Protests are a controversial component of public procurement. Governments and
agencies use a range of approaches to contested awards of funds from the public
treasury. This paper examines policy questions facing the House Armed Services
Committee of the U. S. Congress. A policy simulation examined economic
rationality of three agents; government setting protest rules, and two CEOs, one
who always protests and one never does. The model helped inform lawmakers
who drafted the National Defense Authorization Act. The approach to modeling
and supporting research is presented, along with results and progress toward
improved protest policy. A survey of prior work is provided.
MD61