Keynote speakers

Three keynote speakers

Keynote speaker 1 :  Prof. Juan-Jose Salazar-Gonzalez (Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain)

Title:  Travelling Salesman Problems with Time Consistency

Abstract:

A typical requirement in Scheduling is the need of synchronizing several machines to jointly perform each task. Similarly, in Logistic, there may be the need of synchronizing several vehicles to jointly serve a customer. In most articles, this requirement is modelled with continuous variables and big-M values in formulations with poor linear programming relaxations.

In this talk, we will show an alternative Combinatorial Optimization approach based on computing paths (special network flows). We describe the approach on some variants of the well-known Travelling Salesman Problem. In both variants, there is a time period (say, a week) and customers asking for a visit on some specific days of the week.

The aim in both variants is to design a route for each day such that, when a customer requires service in two days, the service time is "similar" in both days. We will discuss several mathematical formulations for the variants and analyse computational results comparing computer implementations. While the approach based on computing paths leads to models with a large number of variables, appropriated Bender' Decomposition techniques make the approach be the winner in our experiments.

The talk will present other problem variants where the new approach (or others) could lead to interesting and useful results in Combinatorial Optimization. The content of the talk is partially based on the article https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2023.08.021, EJOR (2024) Volume 313, Issue 2, Pages 465-477.

Keynote speaker 2 :  Prof. Suresh Sethi (University of Texas, Dallas, USA)

Title:   to be announced

Abstract:  to be announced

Keynote speaker 3 :  Prof. Luis Gouveia (Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)

Title:  to be announced

Abstract:  to be announced