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    Department of Decisions, Operations and Technology &

    Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management

                       The Chinese University of Hong Kong

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Date: Thursday, June 6, 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm

Venue: ERB 513, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: A New Approach for Vehicle Routing with Stochastic Demand: Combining Route Assignment with Process Flexibility

Speaker: Prof. Hanzhang Qin, Department of Industrial Systems Engineering & Management, National University of Singapore

Abstract:

We propose a new approach for the vehicle routing problem with stochastic customer demands revealed before vehicles are dispatched. We combine ideas from vehicle routing and manufacturing process flexibility to propose overlapped routing strategies with customer sharing. We characterize the asymptotic performance of the overlapped routing strategies under probabilistic analysis while also providing an upper-bound on the asymptotic performance that depends only on the mean and standard deviation of the customer demand distribution. Moreover, we show the optimality gap of our approach decays exponentially as the size of overlapped routes increases. We demonstrate that our overlapped routing strategies perform close to the theoretical lower-bound derived from the reoptimization strategy, and significantly outperform the routing strategy without overlapped routes. The effectiveness of the proposed overlapped routing strategies in non-asymptotic regimes is further verified through numerical analysis. At the end of the talk, we also outline some recent progress on several extensions of the model.

Biography:

Hanzhang Qin is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Industrial Systems Engineering and Management at NUS. He is also an affiliated faculty member at the NUS Institute for Operations Research and Analytics and NUS AI Institute. He earned his PhD in Computational Science and Engineering under supervision of Professor David Simchi-Levi, and his research interests span stochastic control, applied probability and statistical learning, with applications in supply chain analytics and transportation systems. Prior to attending MIT, Hanzhang received two bachelor degrees in Industrial Engineering and Mathematics from Tsinghua University.

Everyone is welcome to attend the talk!

SEEM-5202 Website: http://seminar.se.cuhk.edu.hk

Email: seem5202@se.cuhk.edu.hk