10,810 research outputs found
Route Planning in Transportation Networks
We survey recent advances in algorithms for route planning in transportation
networks. For road networks, we show that one can compute driving directions in
milliseconds or less even at continental scale. A variety of techniques provide
different trade-offs between preprocessing effort, space requirements, and
query time. Some algorithms can answer queries in a fraction of a microsecond,
while others can deal efficiently with real-time traffic. Journey planning on
public transportation systems, although conceptually similar, is a
significantly harder problem due to its inherent time-dependent and
multicriteria nature. Although exact algorithms are fast enough for interactive
queries on metropolitan transit systems, dealing with continent-sized instances
requires simplifications or heavy preprocessing. The multimodal route planning
problem, which seeks journeys combining schedule-based transportation (buses,
trains) with unrestricted modes (walking, driving), is even harder, relying on
approximate solutions even for metropolitan inputs.Comment: This is an updated version of the technical report MSR-TR-2014-4,
previously published by Microsoft Research. This work was mostly done while
the authors Daniel Delling, Andrew Goldberg, and Renato F. Werneck were at
Microsoft Research Silicon Valle
Energy management in communication networks: a journey through modelling and optimization glasses
The widespread proliferation of Internet and wireless applications has
produced a significant increase of ICT energy footprint. As a response, in the
last five years, significant efforts have been undertaken to include
energy-awareness into network management. Several green networking frameworks
have been proposed by carefully managing the network routing and the power
state of network devices.
Even though approaches proposed differ based on network technologies and
sleep modes of nodes and interfaces, they all aim at tailoring the active
network resources to the varying traffic needs in order to minimize energy
consumption. From a modeling point of view, this has several commonalities with
classical network design and routing problems, even if with different
objectives and in a dynamic context.
With most researchers focused on addressing the complex and crucial
technological aspects of green networking schemes, there has been so far little
attention on understanding the modeling similarities and differences of
proposed solutions. This paper fills the gap surveying the literature with
optimization modeling glasses, following a tutorial approach that guides
through the different components of the models with a unified symbolism. A
detailed classification of the previous work based on the modeling issues
included is also proposed
Ambulance Emergency Response Optimization in Developing Countries
The lack of emergency medical transportation is viewed as the main barrier to
the access of emergency medical care in low and middle-income countries
(LMICs). In this paper, we present a robust optimization approach to optimize
both the location and routing of emergency response vehicles, accounting for
uncertainty in travel times and spatial demand characteristic of LMICs. We
traveled to Dhaka, Bangladesh, the sixth largest and third most densely
populated city in the world, to conduct field research resulting in the
collection of two unique datasets that inform our approach. This data is
leveraged to develop machine learning methodologies to estimate demand for
emergency medical services in a LMIC setting and to predict the travel time
between any two locations in the road network for different times of day and
days of the week. We combine our robust optimization and machine learning
frameworks with real data to provide an in-depth investigation into three
policy-related questions. First, we demonstrate that outpost locations
optimized for weekday rush hour lead to good performance for all times of day
and days of the week. Second, we find that significant improvements in
emergency response times can be achieved by re-locating a small number of
outposts and that the performance of the current system could be replicated
using only 30% of the resources. Lastly, we show that a fleet of small
motorcycle-based ambulances has the potential to significantly outperform
traditional ambulance vans. In particular, they are able to capture three times
more demand while reducing the median response time by 42% due to increased
routing flexibility offered by nimble vehicles on a larger road network. Our
results provide practical insights for emergency response optimization that can
be leveraged by hospital-based and private ambulance providers in Dhaka and
other urban centers in LMICs
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