Fall 2009 - H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems ...

ON THE MOVE
Transportation Logistics at ISyE
Large-scale, complex transportation systems pose
significant challenges in terms of design and control. Many
of these challenges, however, are well suited to analytical
techniques of operations research and industrial engineering
that form the core expertise of the faculty in the Stewart
School. Operations research has a long history of successful
application to transportation planning problems of a tactical
nature. Such problems (including network design, service
scheduling, fleet sizing and positioning, and resource and
crew scheduling) have traditionally been modeled as largescale
deterministic optimization problems. More recently,
researchers have addressed planning problems with models
that explicitly consider inherent uncertainty in such systems.
In response to continual improvements in computing power
and information technology, the focus today has expanded
to include problems of operational control where models can
support decisions in real time.
Faculty and student researchers within the Stewart School
have been active participants in the application of operations
research to problems of transportation system design and
control, and they continue that tradition to date. The group
of industry sponsors and collaborators who have worked
recently with faculty and student research teams includes
industry leaders such as UPS, Schneider National, Norfolk
Southern, Delta Airlines, ExxonMobil, Yellow-Roadway, and
the Georgia Ports Authority.
Research and industry-sponsored educational activities
in the area of transportation systems take a variety of
forms at the Stewart School. Researchers are supported
by federal grants from the National Science Foundation
(NSF), the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), and
the Department of Homeland Security, as well as funds from
the State of Georgia through the Center of Innovation for
Logistics and from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Industry
Studies Program. Large industry-funded collaborations
are typically managed by contracts through Georgia Tech’s
Office of Sponsored Programs. Other industry collaborations
are formalized as Leaders in Logistics projects through the
Georgia Tech Supply Chain & Logistics Institute (SCL).
Finally, transportation problems are frequently the focus of
undergraduate Senior Design projects.
NSF funded a $1.1 million, three-year project titled
“Collaborative Logistics,” supporting the work of ISyE faculty
members John Bartholdi, Ozlem Ergun, Pinar Keskinocak,
Anton Kleywegt, George Nemhauser, Martin Savelsbergh,
and their PhD students. The study, which concluded in
2007, covered a wide-range of topics, including inventory
pooling in supply chains, collaborative procurement of
truckload transportation services, dynamic pricing with
buyers’ learning, and carrier alliances and resource sharing.
Another recent NSF award, to study “Risk Mitigation for
Strategic Ports,” provided $3.6 million in funding to support
a large interdisciplinary research team led by Georgia Tech
to investigate how to protect critical seaport infrastructure
from major operational disruptions. Investigator Alan Erera
is developing berth and quay crane scheduling optimization
methods for this project to understand how to best
recover operating capacity when some port components
are damaged.
FHWA has supported ISyE research through a $1.4 million,
multi-year grant to fund the “Transportation Research
Center for Freight, Trade, Security, and Economic Strength.”
Co-directed by School Chair Chelsea C. White III and Erera,
the center supported a diverse set of transportation-related
research activities. On one project, the co-directors, along
with faculty member Hayriye Ayhan, developed technology
to improve route-finding for commercial vehicles given
highway congestion, and efforts are underway to deploy
this technology for rail container drayage trucks in the
Kansas City area as part of the Cross-Town Improvement
Project. Another project, led by faculty members Christos
Alexopoulos and Dave Goldsman, focuses on developing
Martin Savelsbergh, Schneider National Professor at the Stewart School of ISyE and director of industry research at the Supply Chain & Logistics
Institute (SCL), and Alan Erera, associate professor at the Stewart School of ISyE and co-director of SCL’s Center for Global Transportation.
6 • Industrial and Systems Engineering