Lecturer

• O.Univ.Prof.Dr. Richard Hartl

Dates & Places

• Tuesday 16:45-18:15 a.m. (Seminar-Room 1, Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1)
• Starting on October 7 , 2014

Study Programs

• Mag. internationale Betriebswirtschaft (KFK Production Management,  KFK SupplyChain Management, KFK Transportation Logistics)
• Mag. Betriebswirtschaft (KFK Production Management,  KFK Supply Chain Management, KFK Transportation Logistics)
• partly also KFK Operations Research
• QEM - Quantitative Economics Master

Course Content

• This course (Seminar) will focus on "Stochastic Vehicle Routing" 
• The basic model is the "travelling salesman problem" (TSP) where one vehicle has to service a predefined set of customers in a way that the total rout length (or duration) is minimized.
• If more than one vehicle/tour is used due to capacity or tour length restrictions this leads to the  "vehicle routing problem" (VRP).
• Bräysy and Gendreau (2005ab) below give an introdoction on the "vehicle routing problem".
• In "Stochastic Vehicle Routing" not all data of the TSP/VRP are given. This can either be the customers itself,  the demands of the customers, or the travel times between the customers.
• Gendreau, Laporte, and Séguin (1996) give a short survey on "Stochastic Vehicle Routing".
• In  stochastic problems some kind of "failures" can occur , which require certain recourse actions. In stochastic TSP, e.g. a single vehicle visits all customers until it visits a customer and finds out that the remaining vehicle load is not sufficient to service this customer (failure). in this case a recourse action is needed. In the simplest recourse action it is a trip to the depot for reloading and then visiting this customer again. The aim is to find an optimal "a priori route2 (not knowing the realizations of the random variables) so that the expected total costs (planned routing costs plus ecpected costs of the recourse actions) is minimized. An appropriate solution method in this case is "stochastic programming".
• Higle (2005) gives a tutorial on "stochastic programming".

Requirements

• Regular presence and participation in discussion
• Literature study
• Presentation using slides (Power Point or PDF)
• Term paper (Seminararbeit)

Prerequisites

• This course (Seminar) is intended as the final course in a KFK. Thus, it should only be taken after some other courses in the corresponding area have been successfully completed.
• The topic is related to "Transportation Logistics", but it is not necessary, that the corresponding KFK course has been taken before. 
• Minimum requirement for admission is
•  the course „Operations Management“ (very old "Studienplan") or 
• "Transportation Logistics (TL)", "Production Analysis", or "Supply Chain Management" (current "Studienplan")

Basic Literature 

• Olli Bräysy, Michel Gendreau: Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows, Part I: Route Construction and Local Search Algorithms, Transportation Science Vol. 39, No. 1, February 2005b, pp. 104–118. >> PDF (usual password)
• Olli Bräysy, Michel Gendreau: Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows, Part II: Metaheuristics, Transportation Science Vol. 39, No. 1, February 2005a, pp. 119–139. >> PDF  (usual password)
• M. Gendreau, G. Laporte, R. Séguin. 1996. Stochastic vehicle routing. European
  Journal of Operational Research 8, 3-12. >> PDF (usual password)
• J.L. Higle: Stochastic programming: optimization when uncertainty matters. In: INFORMS tutorials in operations research, 2005. >> PDF (usual password)

Schedule "Würfelteil"

• The first part of the course is a so called "Würfelseminar", i.e. certain topics are to be prepared by all participants. Every 10 minutes, say, a different person will be asked (at random -> Würfel) to present the next pages of the underlying literature. The purpose is
      (i) to obtain some common knowledge base by all participants, and 
      (ii) to facilitate discussion.
• Literature for the "Würfelseminar": see "basic literature" above
• Tentative schedule: 
• October 7 , 2014: introduction into the topic and organizational issues
• October 21, 2014: basic literature: Bräysy and Gendreau (2005ab)
• October 28, 2014: basic literature: Bräysy and Gendreau (2005ab)
• November 4, 2014: basic literature: Bräysy and Gendreau (2005ab),  Gendreau et a. (1996).
• November 11,2014: basic literature: Gendreau et a. (1996), Higle (2005)
• November 18,2014: basic literature: Higle (2005)

Schedule "Spezialteil"

Term paper (Seminararbeit)

• A first version of the term paper should be available at the presentation. The final version can be handed in by  the end of the semester.
• Term papers should not be just an excerpt of the basic paper provided. Additional literature must be found and used to deal with the "topic", not just with the paper.
• For guidelines concerning the term paper see:
  http://prolog.univie.ac.at/teaching/downloads/WissArbeiten.pdf
• For information concerning plagiarism and good scientific conduct see: http://prolog.univie.ac.at/teaching/downloads/Rechtliche%20Grundlagen_Infoblatt_070207.pdf
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