Seminar - Optimization Models for Transportation and Logistics

On 13 November 2024, TRAIL PhD researcher Adrien Nicolet will defend his PhD thesis ‘Choice-Driven Methods for Decision-Making in Intermodal Transport’ at Delft University of Technology. The defence is public, and you are invited to join. 

Moreover, on the occasion of this public defence, TRAIL and TU Delft have set up a seminar on ‘Optimization Models for Transportation and Logistics’.

Registration
Participation is free, registration is required: click here.

Location
TU Delft | Faculty of Mechanical Engineering 

Programme seminar 
Chair: Bilge Atasoy

13:00-13:45: Collaboration: a challenge in transportation and logistics by Prof. Maria Elena Bruni
Collaboration is believed to be an innovative approach to tackle the increasing challenges of companies, struggling to achieve long-term sustainability. So far, it remains unclear how the process of collaboration should be structured and operated and the explicit impact on the participating partners. Establishing a business model that considers different stakeholders' interests and balances the economic and operational dimensions, is still a challenge. In this seminar, we will introduce a novel problem that broadly covers such setting, where the delivery to customers is managed through satellite depots and the interplay and the hierarchical relation between the problem agents are modeled in a bi-level framework. Two mathematical models and an exact solution approach, properly customized for our problem, will be presented, and extensive computational experiments on benchmark instances and a real case study discussed. Finally, we will discuss how collaboration should be structured, governed, and incentivized to create value for participants. We will explore issues that must be addressed to make collaboration viable on a large scale, arguing that a broader definition and understanding of collaboration is urgently needed, prompting calls for more research on the topic.

13:45-14:30: Activity-based models: an optimization approach by Prof. Michel Bierlaire
Modern transportation systems require advanced travel demand models to accurately capture and predict travel behavior. Activity-based models offer a comprehensive approach by forecasting all daily activities and the resulting travel patterns. However, traditional choice models struggle to handle the large number of alternatives involved in such complex scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a novel modeling approach that leverages combinatorial optimization techniques, effectively managing the complexity and improving predictive performance.

More information on the lecturers below.

Public defence Adrien Nicolet
At 17:30 h the public defence starts in the Senaatszaal of the Aula. 
At 17:00 h Adrien will give a brief presentation about his research in the same room.

Lecturers
Maria Elena Bruni is an Associate Professor in Operations Research at the University of Calabria and collaborating member of the CIRRELT, Montreal. She received her Ph.D. in Operations Research at the University of Calabria and her M.S. in Public Economy from the University of Sapienza (Rome). Her research activity focuses on designing solution methods for combinatorial problems under uncertainty and risk, with applications mainly in scheduling, routing and healthcare. She co-authors more than 90 papers accepted in refereed journals and author of three Springer book chapters. She received the best paper prize of the IMA Journal of Management mathematics journal in 2016 and best poster awards for the ICORES conferences in 2018, 2019 and 2022. She is the associate editor of Networks, and member of the Scientific Boards of SOS Log (http://www.sos-logistica.org/en), the main Italian association of Sustainable Logistics and of the Freight Leader Council (https://www.freightleaders.org/), a free non-profit association of companies active in every phase of the supply chain, and in particular in Logistics.

Michel Bierlaire earned his PhD in Mathematical Sciences from the University of Namur, Belgium. From 1995 to 1998, he worked as a research associate and project manager for the Intelligent Transportation Systems Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA. In 1998, he joined the Operations Research group ROSO within the Institute of Mathematics at EPFL as junior faculty, a role he held until 2006. In that year, he was appointed Associate Professor in the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering at EPFL, where he also became the director of the Transport and Mobility Laboratory. In 2012, he was promoted to full professor at EPFL. He is the founder of hEART: the European Association for Research in Transportation. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics, from 2011 to 2019. He is an Associate Editor of Operations Research since 2012.