This talk is based on a research study partially supported by an Alibaba Cainiao research grant. We consider the problem of designing a sparse subgraph that supports a large matching after some nodes are randomly deleted. It is motivated by how to balance the trade-off between transportation costs and network complexity in the context of middle-mile delivery operations. We study three families of sparse graph designs (namely, Clusters, Rings, and Erdos-Renyi graphs) and show both theoretically and numerically that their performance is close to the optimal one achieved by a complete graph. We test our theoretical results using real data and conclude that adding a little flexibility to the routing network can significantly reduce transportation costs. This is joint work with Yifan Feng (National University of Singapore), René Caldentey (Chicago Booth), Yuan Zhong (Chicago Booth), Bing Wang (Alibaba Cainiao), and Haoyuan Hu (Alibaba Cainiao).

Dr. Linwei Xin is an assistant professor of Operations Management at Booth School of Business, University of Chicago. His primary research is on inventory and supply chain management: designing models and algorithms for organizations to effectively "match supply to demand" in various contexts with uncertainty. His research on stochastic inventory theory by using asymptotic analysis has been recognized with several INFORMS paper competition awards, including the Applied Probability Society Best Publication Award (2019), First Place in the George E. Nicholson Student Paper Competition (2015), Second Place in the Junior Faculty Interest Group Paper Competition (2015), and a finalist in the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Student Paper Competition (2014). His work with JD.com on dispatching algorithms for robots in intelligent warehouses was recognized as a finalist for the INFORMS 2021 Franz Edelman Award, with an estimate of billions of dollars in savings. His other honors include winning a National Science Foundation grant as a principal investigator. His research has been published in journals such as Operations Research, Management Science, Mathematics of Operations Research, and INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics. He currently teaches MBA and PhD courses at the University of Chicago.

Increased storm frequency and intensity, increased total precipitation, sea level rise and very high tides are among some of the concerns associated with climate change. With these impacts, more frequent temporary or permanent inundation of transportation system elements can be expected. This has important consequences for economies, needed response capacities and capabilities, and motorist safety. This talk describes a multi-temporal, stochastic optimization-based solution technique for long-term transportation investment planning in protective measures for safeguarding the performance of our roadway networks. The importance of explicitly considering the stochastic nature of future climate impact predictions and predictive accuracy to investment planning and enhanced system resilience is investigated. In events where pre-event investments do not suffice and significant inundation occurs, connectivity of the transportation network may be impacted, affecting the transportation system’s performance, and precluding needed access for restoring transportation services and services of other critical lifelines. This talk introduces a stochastic modeling approach that explicitly consider endogenous uncertainty for the problem of jointly prioritizing post-disaster roadway inspection and restoration actions.

Dr. Elise Miller-Hooks holds the Bill and Eleanor Hazel Endowed Chair in Infrastructure Engineering at George Mason University, is an advisor to the World Bank Group, and the founding Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier’s Sustainability Analytics and Modeling journal. Prior to this, Dr. Miller-Hooks served as a program director at the U.S. National Science Foundation and on the faculties of the University of Maryland, Pennsylvania State University and Duke University. Dr. Miller-Hooks received her Ph.D. (1997) and M.S. (1994) degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas – Austin and B.S. in Civil Engineering from Lafayette College (1992). She has expertise in: disruption planning and response; multi-hazard civil infrastructure resilience quantification and protection; stochastic and dynamic network algorithms; transportation systems engineering; intermodal passenger and freight transport; real-time routing and fleet management, including paratransit, delivery, ridesharing and bikeways; and collaborative and multi-objective decision-making.

Measuring the degree of competition in markets is important for setting competition and regulatory policy as well as developing management strategies. Commonly used structural indices, such as the HHI, overlook the way in which firms compete and, hence, set their prices in markets. We propose a new horizontal differentiation measure, which encapsulates firms’ portfolio of products as well as the degree of overlap and substitution between competing services. Applied to aviation markets, we term this measure Schedule Differentiation Metric, or SDM, and we demonstrate the significant importance of SDM in explaining price levels and structure.

This work is a collaboration with David Gillen, Tuba Delibasi, and Vijay Kumar.

Dr. Benny Mantin is a full professor and the Director of the Luxembourg Centre of Logistics and Supply Chain Management (LCL), at the University of Luxembourg, which is a member of the MIT’s SCALE network. His research covers diverse aspects of supply chain management, dynamic pricing, and revenue management, as well as transportation economics. More recently he has been working on sustainability in supply chains and harnessing technology to drive digital operations. His work was published in leading journals such as Productions and Operations Management, Marketing Science, EJOR as well as Transportation Research Parts A, B and E. His research has been recognized and supported by several grants. Prof. Mantin is a board member of the Journal of Air Transport Management, and he is on the advisory board of the European Aviation Conference. He joined the University of Luxembourg in 2017 following a tenure of 9 years at the University of Waterloo.

Dr. Laetitia Dablanc will present a soon-to-be published book chapter on the impact of COVID-19 on urban logistics. Dr. Dablanc and her team have conducted three surveys in Paris, France, during the pandemic in 2020 on logistics service providers, logistics real estate developers as well as other stakeholders such as municipalities. These surveys show how urban freight activities have been challenged and transformed because of the pandemic. In addition to the survey results, Dr. Dablanc will also present an extensive literature review and data collection efforts on COVID-19 impacts on urban consumers’ shopping habits.

Dr. Laetitia Dablanc is a Professor at the University Gustave Eiffel in Paris where she heads the Logistics City Chair. Dr. Dablanc was previously Professor at the French Institute of Science and Technology for Transport, Development and Networks (IFSTTAR, University of Paris-Est). She leads the Young Initiative of the World Conference of Transport Research Society. She is a member of MetroFreight, an international network of research on urban freight sponsored by the Volvo Research and Education Foundations (VREF). Her areas of research are freight transportation, freight and the environment, urban freight and logistics, freight policies, and spatial issues related to logistics. Dr. Dablanc received a Ph.D. in transportation planning from Ecole des Ponts-ParisTech in Paris, France, and a Master’s degree in city and regional planning from Cornell University, USA. She was initially trained in policy analysis and economics at Sciences Po, Paris. Dr. Dablanc has authored or co-authored numerous publications on freight transportation. She participates regularly in scientific, institutional and business meetings around the world, as well as in the media.

Mega infrastructure projects, such as High-Speed Rail (HSR), have experienced rapid development in many countries in the world. But how could planners and decision-makers better understand the regional impact of the gigantic system to make rational decision-making for future investment and development remains a challenge. In this presentation, I will discuss the regional impacts of HSR using China as an example. The assessment covers a range of issues, such as land use, real estate, tourism, modal competition, regional economy, and the environment. The objective is to provide lessons learned for transportation planners and decision-makers in India with a holistic perspective to understand the benefits of HSR investment on regional development.

Dr. Zhenhua Chen is an assistant professor in City and Regional Planning at the Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture at the Ohio State University. He was also a visiting fellow of the Asian Development Bank. His research interest includes infrastructure planning and policy, risk, and resilience assessment of transportation infrastructure. He has published five books, over 60 academic publications, including some published in leading journals, such as Transportation Research Part A, Part D, Transport Reviews, Journal of Transport Geography, Accident Analysis and Prevention, Environment Research Letters, Risk Analysis, Land Use Policy, Annals of Regional Science, Papers in Regional Science, Computer Environment and Urban Systems, and Economic Systems Research. He has received several awards, such as the Best Dissertation Award of the Regional Science Association International and William Miernyk Research Excellence Medal. His research was funded by various agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Ford Motor Company, the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, and the Ohio Department of Transportation. Before joining OSU, Zhenhua worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the National Center of Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. in Public Policy from George Mason University.

Fast-growing needs for urban mobility are worsening congestion, energy use, and greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, the sector is being rapidly transformed by on-demand businesses and new vehicle technologies. Long-term sustainable mobility growth requires developing novel technology, business and policy solutions. This talk focuses on two such specific solutions. First, despite their various benefits, ride-hailing platforms like Uber, Ola and Didi have also been associated with increased road congestion and declining public transit ridership. In the first half of this talk we focus on the following question: Can public transit and ride-hailing co-exist and thrive in a way that enhances the urban transportation ecosystem as a whole? We develop a new mathematical model and a novel computational framework optimizing transit schedules, while explicitly accounting for their impacts on road congestion and passenger mode choice. We demonstrate that, through better alignment of transit services with passengers’ preferences and ride-hailing services, transit agencies can lower costs for passengers, operators and the system as a whole—a rare win-win-win outcome.

Second, electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) vehicles enable a new form of transportation known as Urban Aerial Mobility (UAM). This second half of the talk focuses on optimizing the number, location and capacity of vertiports in a metropolitan area. We capture interdependencies between strategic vertiport deployment, tactical UAM operations and customer adoption. We develop an original exact algorithm based on adaptive discretization and provide a provable solution quality guarantee. Results indicate that the optimal UAM networks vary widely across metropolitan areas, as a function of geographic, urban and commuting patterns. Vertiport networks grow in a nested fashion, starting with a few “obvious” vertiports and adding vertiports as penetration increases. We uncover two potential use cases for UAM technologies: airport shuttle and long-distance commutes.

Dr. Vikrant Vaze is Stata Family Career Development Associate Professor and the Program Area Lead of Mechanical, Operations and Systems Engineering at Dartmouth College. He is also a Research Affiliate in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has an MS in Transportation, another MS in Operations Research and a PhD in Transportation Systems, all from MIT. He has a BTech in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. He works on solving large-scale transportation problems involving consumer choice modeling, schedule planning, and disruption management using optimization, game theory, and machine learning. He is the recipient of the US National Science Foundation’s Career Award, MIT Presidential Fellowship, President of India Medal, Best PhD Dissertation Award from the Council of University Transportation Centers, and several best paper awards.

With the rapid development and popularization of mobile and communication technologies, dynamic ride-sharing platforms, as pioneers in a sharing economy context, provide on-demand shared mobility services and are disruptively changing the transportation industry. First, we study the coordination of platform demand and supply using prices and wages. We use a queueing model with endogenous supply and demand and present steady-state performance in equilibrium to determine the optimal price and wage that maximize the platform’s profit or social welfare. Second, we discuss the matching problem, in which the platforms match passengers and drivers in real-time considering multiple objectives such as platform revenue, pick-up distance, and service quality. We develop an efficient online matching policy and demonstrate its good performance through numerical experiments and implementation using real data.

Prof. Hai Wang is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at Singapore Management University and a visiting faculty at the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He received B.S. from Tsinghua University and Ph.D. in operations research from MIT. His research focuses on methodologies of analytics and optimization, data-driven decision-making models, machine learning algorithms, and their applications in smart cities and urban systems. He has published in leading journals such as Transportation Science, American Economic Review P&P, M&SOM, and Transportation Research Part B. He serves as the guest editor for the Special Issue on Innovative Shared Transportation in Transportation Research Part B and Special Issue on Innovation in Transportation-Enabled Urban Services in Service Science, as a reviewer for over 40 academic journals. Dr. Wang was selected as Chan&Yun Rising Star Fellow in transportation and mobility, was nominated for the Goodwin Medal, MIT’s top teaching award for graduate students, and won the Excellent Teaching award for junior faculty at SMU. During his Ph.D. studies at MIT, he also served as the co-President of the MIT Chinese Students & Scholars Association and as Chair of the MIT-China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum.

The international transport of maritime containers employs multiple transport means, such as deep-sea vessels and trucks, or alternatively river barges and train sets. The planning and execution of combined transport operations is challenging, since resources are to be orchestrated efficiently while delivery of service must be reliable.

To address these challenges, the port of Rotterdam and its hinterland have become a living laboratory, where practitioners are performing pilot studies and academics develop new methods to put innovative logistics concepts to the test.

In the presentation, I will discuss how Synchromodal transport solutions offer mobility of freight instead of specific transport capacity. Containers that need to be transported are matched with transport options in a dynamic way. Practitioners have demonstrated the feasibility of the concept, while academics have elaborated on various decision models in support of e.g. network design, capacity planning, and routing. The living lab now progressively involves new modes of transport, such as semi-automated trucks that dynamically form platoons where consolidation is viable.

Advanced planning concepts, where multiple modes of transport are involved, tend to be more data intensive. However, the transportation industry is progressively recognizing the value of data as a strategic asset, not to be shared without compensation. Therefore, a proper understanding of what data is needed to enhance quality of planning is key. In some cases, a marginal improvement of data quality may already help create better prognostics and planning.

Prof. Rob Zuidwijk is professor of Global Supply Chains and Ports at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM). The chair focuses on three topics: coordination for sustainable global supply chains, synchromodal transport networks (a flexible and integral deployment of different modes of transport on a network to better meet customer demand and sustainability objectives), and inter-organisational systems in logistics.

His work has been published in journals like California Management Review, Transportation Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Communications of the ACM, and Production and Operations Management. He has participated and coordinated funded research projects in the area of international logistics and container transport.

He teaches freight transport systems, intermodal transportation, international logistics and global supply chain management, and inter-organizational systems in logistics to BSc, MSc, and PhD students, and he is also involved in post-experience courses.

Professor Rob Zuidwijk makes a significant contribution to Smartport, a strong research community in port-related research for which RSM and EUR are one of the main stakeholders. He is also Captain of Science of the Topsector Logistics in the Netherlands.

Professor Zuidwijk received his PhD in Mathematics from Erasmus University and has held a one-year visiting position at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The workshop on "Electric Vehicle: A Primer for Beginners" shall familiarize participants in academia, and from industry with the key concepts and aspects of the EV industry. Also, the workshop shall pose some of the key challenges and opportunities both on the research and commercial fronts in the EV domain.

This is a two-session workshop (each session of 2 hours), and it is advised to attend both the sessions.
Session 1 : June 15, 2021 at 5 - 7 PM IST followed by QA
Session 2 : June 22, 2021 at 5 - 7 PM IST followed by QA

Contents:

• Key components of an electric vehicle (EV) and types of EVs
• Overview of related concepts including Li-Ion battery and Battery Management System
• Different types of EV charging (slow, fast, AC/DC)
• EV outlook (current state and projections in Indian and international market)
• Role of domain stakeholders in EV operations (drivers, fleet operators, charge point operators, mobility service providers, energy suppliers, OEMs)
• Electricity distribution network concepts to understand the role of utilities in EV
• EV Financing in India (current state, challenges, opportunities, and examples)
• EV Policy in India (FAME II, Electricity Rates, Subsidies)
• Research/commercial challenges and opportunities in India EV landscape including urban planning, end-user behavior, policy making, and infrastructure planning

Dr. Arvind Kumar has 20 years of experience in the mobility domain. As a VP-R&D at Optym, an MNC in transportation space, he has helped several companies worldwide in improving the efficiency of their operations using advanced mathematical modeling tools. For over a year, he has been closely involved in the EV domain. He has guided the team at a Bangalore/Toronto-based EV startup, Elocity, in developing solutions in EV space to help chargepoint operators, cities and electric utilities grow with the EV adoption. He also holds a B.Tech in Chemical Engineering from IIT Madras, and a PhD in Industrial Engineering from University of Florida. More about him at Dr. Arvind Kumar.

Mr. Vignesh Nandakumar has 20 years of corporate experience in the roles of lead executive and investor in large firms. Recently, as a Partner with LGT Lightstone Aspada, a global impact fund, he led the environmental sustainability focused investments, into electric vehicles, renewable energy and the shared and circular economy. He has also served as an active Board member of Amp Energy, Vogo Automotive and Lithium Urban Technologies as well as the co-CEO of Lithium Urban Technologies. He has a track record of developing and executing on renewable energy investments of over $750M across India, South Africa and SE Asia with SunEdison and headed the sub-Saharan Africa business. He holds a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras, and an MBA from ISB Hyderabad. More about him at Mr. Vignesh Nandakumar

• Supply Chain Resilience: A result of Supply Chain Strategy
• The foundations of Supply Chain Strategy
  • The Supply Chain Arcs of Integration, Control and Influence.
• The Temple of Supply Chain Resilience.
  • ESG - Environment, Social Governance.
• An Executive Board debate.
• Resilience Lessons as we move towards a new better.

Professor Richard Wilding OBE

BSc, PhD, CEng, Eur Ing, FIET, FCILT, FCIPS, NTF, PFHEA.

As Chair in Supply Chain Strategy at the Centre for Logistics, Procurement and Supply Chain Management, Cranfield School of Management U.K. Richard works with European and International companies on logistics and supply chain projects in all sectors including pharmaceutical, retail, automotive, high technology, food drink and professional services to name a few. He was appointed a National Teaching Fellow in 2019 and is recognised by the BBC and DHL as one of “the world’s foremost supply chain experts”. He is a champion for encouraging evidence-based decision making within logistics industry and is an advocate for ensuring knowledge can create action and impact within the organisations he works with.