Speaker: Professor Ann Campbell (Henry B. Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa)
Hosted by: University of Liverpool Management School's Operations and Supply Chain Management Group
Open to: OSCM Group staff and students, with no sign up needed
Date: Monday 20 May 2024
Time: 11am
In person: Management School - Seminar Room 1
Abstract
The use of underground freight transportation (UFT) is gaining attention because of its ability to quickly move freight to locations in urban areas while reducing road traffic and the need for delivery drivers.
Since packages are transported through thetunnels by electric motors, the use of tunnels is also environmentally friendly. Unlike other UFT projects, we examine the use of tunnels to transport individual orders, motivated by the last mile delivery of goods from e-commerce providers.
We introduce a new network design problem based on this delivery model and transform the problem into a fixed charge multicommodity flow problem with additional constraints.
We show that this problem is NP-hard and provide an exact solution method for solving large-scale instances. Our solution approach exploits the combinatorial sub-structures of the problem in a cutting planes fashion, significantly reducing the time to find optimal solutions on most instances compared to a MIP.
We provide computational results for real urban environments to build a set of insights into the structure of such networks and evaluate the benefits of such systems.
We show that a budget of 45 miles of tunnel can remove 32% of packages off the roads in New York City.
We estimate the fixed and operational costs for implementing UFT systems and break them down into a per package cost.
Our estimates indicate over a 40% savings from using a UFT over traditional delivery models. This indicates that UFT systems for last mile delivery are a promising area for future research.
Speaker
Ann Melissa Campbell is the Clement T. and Sylvia H. Hanson Family Chair in Manufacturing Productivity in the Department of Business Analytics at the Henry B. Tippie College of Business.
Her research focuses on freight transportation, especially on problems related to new and emerging business models, as well as the logistics of disaster preparation and relief.
She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and servs an an Area Editor for Transportation Science.
As department chair, she led the department's efforts to win the 2021 INFORMS UPS George D. Smith Prize for excellence in analytics education. Since 2022. she has chaird the annual FutureBAProf workshop focussed on improving diversity in business analytics academic positions.
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