Séminaire conjoint CRT-DIRO-Chaire de recherche du Canada en distributique

TITRE : BARTOC : A Booking Algorithm for Routing and Timing of Customers

CONFÉRENCIER : Oli B.G. Madsen

DATE et ENDROIT : 15 octobre, 14h, Pavillon André-Aisenstadt, Campus de l'Université de Montréal, 2920, chemin de la Tour

RESPONSABLE : Bernard Gendron 343-7479

RÉSUMÉ : In many kinds of service companies, a customer may contact the company by telephone or internet and ask for service and an appointment for service. The service may be a repair in a private home or in a company, new installations, inspections for control, or delivery of commodities. A service consists of a visit to the customer plus the spending of some given time at the scene. When a customer call comes in, the service company must immediately specify a time window within which a service crew will arrive at the customer and start service. At the calling time, the company does not know about future customer calls. The company may however know about the probability distribution of the future customer demands. Of course, the customers are interested in time windows which are as narrow as possible, while the service company is interested in wide time windows. wide time window allows the company some flexibility, for example to change the sequence of the customer visits. On the other hand, a narrow time window offers the customer a better service. A good solution will be a compromise between the two objectives. The problem discussed in this paper is for a fixed service level to determine a near optimal strategy of route design and time window setting such that the total distance travelled is minimised over the time horizon given.

Oli B.G. Madsen is professor and director at CTT, Center for Traffic and Transport, at The Technical University of Denmark (DTU). He got a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, a Ph.D. in Operations Research, and a Dr. Techn. (a senior doctorate degree) in Transport Optimization from DTU. He has been visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at University of Auckland. Oli B.G. Madsen's research interests are logistics, transport optimisation (in particular vehicle routing), and large-scale mathematical programming.