[CCoE Notice] Industrial engineering seminar

[Tekin, Eylem]

INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING SEMINAR

Date: November 16, 2012
Time: 10am-11am
Place: D 102

Relay Network Design and Analysis for Truckload Transportation

Halit Uster
Associate Professor, Industrial and Systems Engineering
Texas A&M University

Abstract

The truckload industry in the US faces a serious and chronic problem of high driver turnover rate -- typically more than 100% --with staggering associated costs. Among the major causes of this problem are unpredictably extended, low quality-of-life away-from-home times for drivers. In this study, we consider the strategic design of a relay network which may potentially help to alleviate this problem by providing an efficient underlying network that facilitates an assignment of drivers to home-bases and generation of more predictable schedules with continuity and higher get-home rates. In doing so, we explicitly consider driver tour lengths, load imbalance at relay points, and the percentage circuity constraints.

We develop an efficient Benders decomposition based algorithm that is significantly enhanced via strengthened Benders cuts, cut disaggregation schemes, heuristics for improved upper bounds, and surrogate constraints. Our approach provides the ability to solve large size instances within reasonable solution times and very small optimality gaps as we illustrate with an extensive computational study. Furthermore, in our experiments, we also examine the effects of changes in the problem parameters on the performance of solution algorithm. Finally, we provide analysis of various performance measures obtained via a relay network and alternative multi-zone and point-to-point dispatching methods.
(Joint work with Panitan (Ken) Kewcharoenwong)

Biography

Halit Üster is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University.  His research interests are in the areas of logistics, design of networked systems, and applied optimization. His publications appeared in Computers and Operations Research, European Journal of Operational Research, IIE Transactions, Interfaces, Naval Research Logistics, Networks, and Transportation Science among others. He was a visiting professor at the IEMS Department of Northwestern University during 2009-2010 where he was named Eshbach Society Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science.

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