Economies of scale in recoverable robust maintenance location routing for rolling stock

\u3cp\u3eWe consider the problem of locating maintenance facilities in a railway setting. Different facility sizes can be chosen for each candidate location and for each size there is an associated annual facility costs that can capture economies of scale in facility size. Because of the strategic nature of facility location, the opened facilities should be able to handle the current maintenance demand, but also the demand for any of the scenarios that can occur in the future. These scenarios capture changes such as changes to the line plan and the introduction of new rolling stock types. We allow recovery in the form of opening additional facilities, closing facilities, and increasing the facility size for each scenario. We provide a two-stage robust programming formulation. In the first-stage, we decide where to open what size of facility. In the second-stage, we solve a NP-hard maintenance location routing problem. We reformulate the problem as a mixed integer program that can be used to make an efficient column-and-constraint generation algorithm. To show that our algorithm works on practical sized instances, and to gain managerial insights, we perform a case study with instances from the Netherlands Railways. A counter intuitive insight is that economies of scale only play a limited role and that it is more important to reduce the transportation cost by building many small facilities, rather than a few large ones to profit from economies of scale.\u3c/p\u3

Using 3D-printing in disaster response:the two-stage stochastic 3D-printing knapsack problem

In this paper, we will shed light on when to pack and use 3D-printers in disaster response operations. For that, we introduce a new type of problem, which we call the two-stage stochastic 3D-printing knapsack problem. We provide a two-stage stochastic programming formulation for this problem, for which both the first and the second stage are NP-hard integer linear programs. We reformulate this formulation to an equivalent integer linear program, which can be efficiently solved by standard solvers. Our numerical results illustrate that for most situations using a 3D-printer is beneficial. Only in extreme circumstances, where the quality of printed items is extremely low, the size of the 3D-printer is extremely large compared to the knapsack size, when there is no time to print the items, or when demand for items is low, packing no 3D-printers is the best option. In this paper, we will shed light on when to pack and use 3D-printers in disaster response operations. For that, we introduce a new type of problem, which we call the two-stage stochastic 3D-printing knapsack problem. We provide a two-stage stochastic programming formulation for this problem, for which both the first and the second stage are NP-hard integer linear programs. We reformulate this formulation to an equivalent integer linear program, which can be efficiently solved by standard solvers. Our numerical results illustrate that for most situations using a 3D-printer is beneficial. Only in extreme circumstances, where the quality of printed items is extremely low, the size of the 3D-printer is extremely large compared to the knapsack size, when there is no time to print the items, or when demand for items is low, packing no 3D-printers is the best option

Maintenance location routing for rolling stock under line and fleet planning uncertainty

Rolling stock needs regular maintenance in a maintenance facility. Rolling stock from different fleets are routed to maintenance facilities by interchanging the destinations of trains at common stations and by using empty drives. We consider the problem of locating maintenance facilities in a railway network under uncertain or changing line planning, fleet planning, and other uncertain factors. These uncertainties and changes are modeled by a discrete set of scenarios. We show that this new problem is NP-hard and provide a two-stage stochastic programming and a two-stage robust optimization formulation. The second-stage decision is a maintenance routing problem with similarity to a minimum cost-flow problem. We prove that the facility location decisions remain unchanged under a simplified routing problem, and this gives rise to an efficient mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulation. This result also allows us to find an efficient decomposition algorithm for the robust formulation based on scenario addition (SA). Computational work shows that our improved MIP formulation can efficiently solve instances of industrial size. SA improves the computational time for the robust formulation even further and can handle larger instances due to more efficient memory usage. Finally, we apply our algorithms on practical instances of the Netherlands Railways and give managerial insights

Column generation strategies and decomposition approaches for the two-stage stochastic multiple knapsack problem

\u3cp\u3eMany problems can be formulated by variants of knapsack problems. However, such models are deterministic, while many real-life problems include some kind of uncertainty. Therefore, it is worthwhile to develop and test knapsack models that can deal with disturbances. In this paper, we consider a two-stage stochastic multiple knapsack problem. Here, we have a multiple knapsack problem together with a set of possible disturbances. For each disturbance, or scenario, we know its probability of occurrence and the resulting reduction in the sizes of the knapsacks. For each knapsack we decide in the first stage which items we take with us, and when a disturbance occurs we are allowed to remove items from the corresponding knapsack. Our goal is to find a solution where the expected revenue is maximized. We use branch-and-price to solve this problem. We present and compare two solution approaches: the separate recovery decomposition (SRD) and the combined recovery decomposition (CRD). We prove that the LP-relaxation of the CRD is stronger than the LP-relaxation of the SRD. Furthermore, we investigate numerous column generation strategies and methods to create additional columns outside the pricing problem. These strategies reduce the solution time significantly. To the best of our knowledge, there is no other paper that investigates such strategies so thoroughly.\u3c/p\u3

Decomposition approaches for recoverable robust optimization problems

Real-life planning problems are often complicated by the occurrence of disturbances, which imply that the original plan cannot be followed anymore and some recovery action must be taken to cope with the disturbance. In such a situation it is worthwhile to arm yourself against possible disturbances by including recourse actions in your planning strategy. Well-known approaches to create plans that take possible, common disturbances into account are robust optimization and stochastic programming. More recently, another approach has been developed that combines the best of these two: recoverable robustness. In this paper, we solve recoverable robust optimization problems by the technique of branch-and-price. We consider two types of decomposition approaches: separate recovery and combined recovery. We will show that with respect to the value of the LP-relaxation combined recovery dominates separate recovery. We investigate our approach for two example problems: the size robust knapsack problem, in which the knapsack size may get reduced, and the demand robust shortest path problem, in which the sink is uncertain and the cost of edges may increase. For each problem, we present elaborate computational experiments. We think that our approach is very promising and can be generalized to many other problems