New PhD: Rich routing problems
On Tuesday 30 January 2018 Seyed Mostafa Mirhedayatian will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend his thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
Prescribed topic for the trial lecture:
Maritime Inventory Routing: Status and Challenges
Trial lecture:
10:15 in Jebsen Centre, NHH
Title of the thesis:
Contribution to rich vehicle routing problems
Summary:
This thesis addresses rich routing problems within a logistics context. The first and major part of the thesis introduces a new location-routing problem, and discusses both modelling and solution approaches.
The second part addresses the use of vehicle routing problems in evaluating different supporting policies for electric vehicles.
Chapter 2 introduces and defines a new problem that incorporates synchronization as well as delivery and pickup activities in a two-echelon location-routing problem (2E-LRP). The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP). The main contribution is to model the synchronization of transshipments at intermediate facilities. The modelling of synchronization can be used in similar logistics problems (e.g., multi-echelon routing problems).
Chapter 3 proposes a decomposition-based heuristic that decomposes the problem into three phases: 1) choosing the facility configuration, 2) assigning the customers to the chosen facilities and 3) solving the routing sub-problem.
Chapter 4 provides numerical results for different sets of instances. The results show that the performance of the heuristic depends on instance characteristics (e.g., customer location distribution). The sets of instances could be adapted for use in similar problems (e.g., two-echelon routing problems).
Chapter 5 proposes three data-driven schemes in order to remove unlikely routes from set of feasible solutions. The results revealed that the solutions with the schemes were of better or same quality as the solutions found without the schemes and the searching time improved considerably.
Chapter 6 extends the new 2E-LRP to incorporate vehicles capacity, multiple trips for vehicles, and location decisions on terminals.
Chapter 7 is part of a paper in co-authorship with Shiyu Yan, published in Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment. This chapter proposes a framework that combines an optimization model (i.e., a vehicle routing problem) with economic analysis in order to evaluate the effect of different freight policies for supporting electric vehicles on vehicle purchase and routing decisions, externalities, and welfare.
Defense:
12:15 in Jebsen Centre, NHH
Members of the evaluation committee:
Associate Professor Sigrid Lise Nonås (leader of the committee), Department of Business and Management Science, NHH
Associate Professor Walid Klibi, KEDGE Business School, Bordeaux, France
Associate Professor Arild Hoff, Molde University College
Supervisors:
Professor Stein W. Wallace (main supervisor), Department of Business and Management Science, NHH
Associate Professor Mario Guajardo, Department of Business and Management Science, NHH
Professor Teodor Gabriel Crainic, University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada
The trial lecture and thesis defence will be open to the public. Copies of the thesis will be available from presse@nhh.no.