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                Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management
                             The Chinese University of Hong Kong

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Date: Friday, 4:30pm - 5:30pm, 18 September, 2015

Title: Routing Optimization under Uncertainty

Speaker: Jin QI, Assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Logistics Management, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Abstract:

We consider a class of routing optimization problems under uncertainty in which all decisions are made before the uncertainty is realized. The objective is to obtain optimal routing solutions that would, as much as possible, adhere to a set of specified requirements after the uncertainty is realized.  These  problems include finding an optimal routing solution to meet the soft time window requirements at a subset of nodes when the travel time is uncertain, and sending multiple capacitated vehicles to different nodes to meet the customers' uncertain demands. We introduce a precise mathematical framework for defining and solving such routing problems. In particular, we propose a new decision criterion, called the Requirements Violation (RV) Index, which quantifies the risk associated with the violation of requirements taking into account both the frequency of violations and their magnitudes whenever they occur. The criterion can handle instances when probability distributions are known, and ambiguity, when distributions are partially characterized through descriptive statistics such as moments information. We develop practically efficient algorithms involving Benders decomposition to find the exact optimal routing solution in which the RV Index criterion is minimized, and give numerical results from several computational studies that show the attractive performance of the solutions.

Biography:

Jin QI is an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Logistics Management, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She graduated from NUS Business School at National University of Singapore in 2014, and holds a Master's degree in Management Science and a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Tsinghua University. Jin QI is broadly interested in the analytics of services systems, with the goals of eliciting operational insights and providing solutions for supporting decision-making in practice. Her research interests include robust optimization, healthcare operations and transportation.

Everyone is welcome to attend the talk!

Venue: Room 513,

       William M.W. Mong Engineering Building (ERB),

       (Engineering Building Complex Phase 2)

       The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The talk will be hosted by:

Prof. Gao Xuefeng,

Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management,

The Chinese University of Hong Kong,

E-mail: xfgao@se.cuhk.edu.hk

Homepage: http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/people/xfgao.html