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Recent Advances on Linking Demand Management and Transport Optimisation

Recent advances on linking demand management and transport optimisation

Demand management is the theory and practice of influencing demand by various means (such as pricing) so as to optimize some measure (such as profitability). Transport optimisation – for the purpose of this class – is concerned with improving efficiency of transport operations (such as minimizing route length or emissions).

Traditionally, these two domains were considered separately, but over recent years many researchers (and companies) have looked into ways of how influencing demand dynamically could help improve operational transport efficiency. Application examples from my own research include last mile grocery delivery, last mile meal delivery, home healthcare, waste oil collection, and air traffic control.

From a modelling point of view, we typically face a form of dynamic control problem with a difficult boundary condition representing a vehicle routing problem or something similar. As such, this class will introduce you to dynamic programming, approximate dynamic programming and how to apply this to problems with an NP-hard boundary condition. Given the wide scope of the topic and the limited time available, I will focus on the general concept and getting the main ideas across using illustrative examples, rather than a very detailed and in-depth discussion.