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Monday 21st March 2011 at 2pm

Room 1035, Building 2, School of Management, University of Southampton, Highfield Campus

(See http://www.soton.ac.uk/about/whereissoton/highfield.html for directions.)

Title: The Dial-a-Ride Problem and Its Variants

by Gilbert Laporte

Canada Research Chair in Distribution Management

HEC Montreal

Abstract: In the dial-a-ride problem (DARP), the aim is to determine a set of least cost vehicle routes to serve a number of pickup and delivery requests, subject to side constraints. The most common constraints are capacity constraints, time windows, and maximum ride time constraints. The latter constraints specify that no passenger should remain aboard the vehicle more than a preset time. This presentation surveys some of the work done by our research team over the past eight years. This includes the development of exact and heuristic algorithms, solution strategies for the dynamic DARP in which some of the requests are revealed in real time, a version of the stochastic DARP in which the arrival time of passengers at their origin is uncertain, and a multi-criteria algorithm for a version of the DARP in which the aim is to jointly minimize solution cost and maximize quality of service. This work was carried out with Gerardo Berbeglia, Jean-François Cordeau, Géraldine Heilporn, Julie Paquette, Marta M.B. Pascoal and Stefan Ropke.

Short biography of the speaker: Gilbert Laporte obtained his Ph.D. in Operations Research at the London School of Economics in 1975. He is Professor of Operations Research at HEC Montréal, Canada Research Chair in Distribution Management, adjunct Professor at Molde University College, the University of Bilkent, the University of Alberta and Université Laval, and visiting professor at the University of Southampton. He is also a member of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT) and founding member of the Groupe d'études et de recherche en analyse des décisions (GERAD). He has authored or coauthored 15 books, as well as more than 360 scientific articles in combinatorial optimization, mostly in the areas of vehicle routing, location and timetabling. He has received many scientific awards including the Pergamon Prize (United Kingdom) in 1987, the 1994 Merit Award of the Canadian Operational Research Society, the CORS Practice Prize on three occasions. In 1999, he obtained the ACFAS Jacques-Rousseau Prize for Interdisciplinarity, and the President's Medal (Operational Research Society, United Kingdom). In 2001, he was awarded the Pedagogy Prize by HEC Montréal. He has been a member of the Royal Society of Canada since 1998, and Fellow of INFORMS since 2005. In 2007 he received the Innis-Gérin medal from the Royal Society of Canada. In 2009 he was awarded the Gérard-Parizeau Prize, he was inducted as the 42nd Honorary Member of the INFORMS International Omega Rho Society, and he received the Robert M. Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science from the Transportation Science and Logistics Society of INFORMS. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the LANCS Initiative, a collaboration between four U.K. Universities: LAncaster, Nottingham, Cardiff and Southampton.

All welcome.

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Please contact Dr Tolga Bektas ([log in to unmask]) for more information on this seminar.