Professor George Nemhauser, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, will
give a seminar entitled "Scheduling On-Demand Air Transportation" at
Lancaster University Management School at 2pm on Friday 18th September
2009.
This event, which is being run under the LANCS Initiative, is open to anyone
who would like to attend. If you would like to attend, please e-mail Rosemary
Hindley ([log in to unmask]).
Abstract: A non-scheduled airline provides regional “on demand” air
transportation on small jet planes. A request for travel specifies an origin,
destination, earliest departure time, and latest arrival time. Based on requests
already accepted for that day, the accept/reject problem is to determine
whether the new request can be accommodated. At the beginning of the day
an optimal schedule that minimizes flying time is created for all of the
accepted requests for that day.
This service is especially useful for areas that are not well served by large
airports. By using small airports, they eliminate the hassles associated with
long drives to the airport, packed parking lots, security lines, etc. For many
travelers, this service will yield huge time-savings in comparison to the
alternatives of a scheduled airline or driving.
In this talk, I will discuss the optimization models and algorithms that we have
developed for scheduling DayJet’s service. These include a multi-commodity
flow model with side constraints for solving small instances, which is imbedded
into a local search algorithm with an asynchronous parallel implementation for
solving real-life instances.
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