Title: A New Approach for Vehicle Routing with Stochastic Demand: Combining Route Assignment with Process Flexibility

Abstract: In this talk, we introduce a new approach for the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands for the case in which customer demands are revealed before vehicles are dispatched. Our approach combines ideas from vehicle routing and manufacturing process flexibility to propose overlapped routing strategies with customer sharing. We characterize the asymptotic performance of the overlapped routing strategies under probabilistic analysis. Using the characterization, we demonstrate that our overlapped routing strategies perform close to the theoretical lower-bound derived from the reoptimization strategy, and significantly outperforms the routing strategy without overlapped routes. Furthermore, we verify effectiveness of the proposed overlapped routing strategies in non-asymptotic regimes through numerical analysis. This is joint work with Kirby Ledvina, Hanzhang Qin, and David Simchi-Levi.

Bio: Yehua Wei is an Associate Professor in Decision Sciences at Duke University. His research interest includes optimizing decisions under uncertainty, designing sparse resource pooling systems, and strategic customers in queueing networks. His research has won a number of awards, including second place in the 2011 George Nicholson Paper Competition, winner of the 2014 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice, winner of the 2019 Service Management SIG Prize, and finalist of the 2019 M&SOM Practice-Based Paper Competition.