Transport and Mobility Laboratory, EPFL
January 23, 2009, 16:00, Room GC C3 30 (click here for the map)
Transportation systems include complex and structured operations that must be planned in advance in order to exploit the available resources, provide a reliable and competitive service and forecast system's performances. Decisions regarding transport operations are based on data which is frequently due to uncertainty. Moreover, unpredicted events may disrupt the current state of the system and force managers to take reactive decisions to recover to an operational state. Proactive decisions, i.e. decisions which take into account the uncertainty of the data, tend to robust solutions which are able to absorb data deviation and small disruptions. In this talk we address two complex transportation systems, namely air and maritime transportation, we identify some operation planning issues and illustrate a robust planning approach for both cases. For the airline case we focus on a robust recoverable approach for aircraft routing, i.e. a proactive strategy which accounts for the presence of a disruption recovery strategy. In the maritime case we focus on an integrated decision problem arising in container terminals and present a planning approach which accounts for congestion in terminal operations induced by the solution. Both problems are based on real world data.
Matteo Salani is an assistant professor at Transport and Mobility Laboratory at EPFL. He received his PhD in computer science in 2006 from University of Milano with a thesis on Branch and Price algorithms for Vehicle Routing Problems. His main research interests are optimization algorithms for complex combinatorial problems arising in transportation. He contributed to the field of Column Generation with publications on real world routing problems, advanced dynamic programming algorithms and resource constrained shortest paths. He is actually interested in robust optimization, intermodal transportation and some involving cases of routing problems.