ISE Seminar - Optimizing task assignment and routing with a heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicle for emergency healthcare services
Industrial and Systems Engineering Department
Presents a Seminar
Title: Optimizing task assignment and routing with a heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicle for emergency healthcare services
Location: Building 24, Room: 250
Date & Time: 4-02-2025 at 2:00 PM
Speaker: Prof. Emrah Demir, Cardiff University UK
Summary: This talk will focus on the optimization of task assignment and pickup and delivery operations using a heterogeneous fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We specifically address the distribution of emergency medical supplies, including medications, vaccines, and essential medical aid, as well as the collection of biological blood samples for testing and analysis. Unique challenges, such as supply shortages, time windows, and geographical considerations, are explicitly considered. The problem is first formulated as a MIP model aimed at maximizing the total profit derived from the execution of a set of emergency healthcare pickup and delivery tasks. An enhanced Q-learning-based adaptive large neighbourhood search (QALNS) is proposed for large-scale benchmark instances. QALNS exhibits a superior performance on benchmark instances. It also improves the quality of the solutions on average by 5.49% and 6.86% compared to the Gurobi solver and a state-of-the-art adaptive large neighbourhood search algorithm, respectively.
Speaker Bio: Emrah Demir is a Professor of Operational Research in the Logistics and Operations Management Section of the Cardiff Business School. Before that, Emrah worked as Assistant Professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. He holds BEng and MSc degrees in Industrial Engineering from Baskent University (Turkey), and a PhD in Management Science from University of Southampton. He has mainly worked in the application of mathematical optimisation to real-life freight transportation problems. He has published more than 50 journal articles and six book chapters and has currently over 6,400 citations (h-index 32) to his publications on Google Scholar. Emrah has also been involved in and obtained several external grants from different funding bodies. Emrah has the following editorial roles: Area Editor of Journal of Heuristics, Associate Editor of IMA Journal of Management Mathematics, Associate Editor of Frontiers in Future Transportation - Freight Transport and Logistics, and Associate Editor of OR Spectrum Journal.