Efficiency in modern industrial operations requires that resources be deployed in an optimal manner. This has resulted in extensive work in operations research on resource allocation with a focus on optimal or near-optimal planning. Facility location applications are concerned with the placement of one or more facilities/routes in a way that optimizes a specified objective, such as minimizing transportation cost, providing equitable service to customers, capturing the largest market share, etc. These problems give rise to challenging combinatorial problems. The research on locating logistics spans many fields such as operations research/management science, geography, computer science, mathematics, etc.
Our project activities have grown in two seemingly different directions as our research activities in the past years have been greatly influenced by the problems of our industrial sponsors. We have also made great progress in various fundamental problems in discrete optimization which include vehicle routing problems, network facility center locations, network flows etc. In the past two years, we have worked with two industrial partners: Mobile Knowledge and BC Ferries. Mobile Knowledge offers advanced GPS, wireless, and mobile data communications technology to customers in a wide variety of markets for enhanced fleet management applications. We are continuing to invest considerable time and resources to generate efficient routes for scheduling services in city networks, keeping an eye on the road conditions round the clock for realistic travel times. For BC Ferries, we studied the effectiveness of their current schedules to the gulf islands, given the passenger demands.