Howe School Seminar

Design of Periodic Delivery Systems with Consistent Service Constraints

Panagiotis Repoussis, Ph.D.

ATHENS UNIVERSITY of ECONOMICS & BUSINESS, Greece

ABSTRACT
The design and implementation of periodic delivery systems has become a crucial concern for modern companies that seek to provide high quality —yet low cost— services to their customers. Evidently, optimizing repetitive delivery operations over multiple days can add up to significant cost savings through the maximum utilization of equipment and personnel. Periodic deliveries occur in a wide range of real life applications including parcel deliveries and courier services, home care and nursing services, vending machine replenishment, cleaning services, building maintenance, and others. This talk will focus on a challenging multi-period vehicle routing problem with consistent service constraints that has recently attracted a lot of attention from the academic and industrial community. A novel mathematical programming formulation will be presented that facilitates a desirable decomposition of the problem into smaller manageable sub-problems, as well as advances on the algorithmic front that include a collaborative scheme between meta-heuristic algorithms and an exact branch-and-cut framework. The proposed methods exhibit strong computational performance as evidenced by their ability to obtain new best solutions for a number of benchmark problems that have previously appeared in literature.

BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Repoussis holds a PhD in Operations Research & Management Science, ATHENS UNIVERSITY of ECONOMICS & BUSINESS, Greece where he is currently a Lecturer in Supply Chain Management. He also has an MSc in Process Systems Engineering, IMPERIAL COLLEGE of Science, Technology and Medicine, UK.

His research interests include mathematical models and optimization methods in the fields of production scheduling, transportation optimization, network design, and distribution logistics.