CAREER: Two-Stage Competition on Spatio-Temporal Location and Pricing

职业：时空位置和定价的两阶段竞争

• 批准号: 1750587
• 负责人: Vikrant Vaze
• 金额: $ 50万
• 依托单位: Dartmouth College
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-04-01 至 2024-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1750587&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Two; Stage; Competition; Spatio

This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) project exploits the opportunities brought by the emerging technologies and combines knowledge from operations research (OR), economics and computer science to advance science in resource allocation and promote national prosperity and welfare. The project will establish the mathematical foundations for resource allocation, coupled with computational algorithms and empirical validation methods, for prescriptive and predictive analysis in determining facility locations and associated pricing. Prescriptive analysis helps competing entities in optimizing their scheduling and facility location decisions. Predictive analysis helps central authorities (e.g., government and regulators) in optimizing system efficiency and equity through infrastructure investments, incentives creation, and regulations. Under this project's integrated vision for research and education, the research program directly informs the educational program. The educational program includes the development and dissemination of an active learning module for high-school mathematics focused on underrepresented minority students; an undergraduate research internship program for underprepared prospective engineering students; and undergraduate and graduate course development in OR and game theory. These educational activities contribute toward strengthening and diversifying the pipeline of researchers and practitioners skilled in OR and analytics, in turn fostering the long-term growth of the very disciplines which the research program builds upon. Educational and outreach activities also focus on highlighting the economic, social and political complexities associated with planning and operations of civil infrastructure systems.Scheduling and facility location problems (together called as spatio-temporal location problems) share similar underlying mathematical structures that allow researchers to analyze them jointly. However, under dynamic pricing, spatio-temporal location decisions become interdependent with pricing decisions which are made at a later stage through complex interactions between competing service providers and their customers. This necessitates the use of two-stage game theoretic models. This project develops a comprehensive framework that relies on combining and mutually reinforcing mathematical, computational and empirical insights. The key innovations are the tight interplay between mathematical, computational and empirical ideas, a holistic approach that enables the optimal tradeoff between modeling precision and solution tractability, and a comprehensive testbed comprising large-scale real-world networks from aviation, railways, transit, hotels and gasoline distribution. The project not only makes deep contributions to the theoretical and applied research in competitive transportation scheduling, but also triggers further exploration enabling similar future contributions to the competitive facility location theory and applications. Additionally, this general approach could be usefully employed in other, otherwise intractable, applications of multi-stage game theory.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

这一学院早期职业发展计划(CALEAR)项目利用新兴技术带来的机遇，结合运筹学(OR)、经济学和计算机科学的知识，推动科学资源配置，促进国家繁荣和福祉。该项目将建立资源分配的数学基础，结合计算算法和经验验证方法，在确定设施位置和相关定价时进行规范性和预测性分析。规范性分析有助于竞争实体优化其日程安排和设施选址决策。预测性分析通过基础设施投资、激励措施创建和监管，帮助中央当局(如政府和监管机构)优化系统效率和公平。在本项目研究和教育的综合愿景下，研究计划直接为教育计划提供信息。该教育计划包括开发和传播针对未被充分代表的少数族裔学生的高中数学主动学习模块；为准备不足的未来工程学学生提供的本科生研究实习计划；以及运筹学和博弈论的本科生和研究生课程开发。这些教育活动有助于加强和多样化精通运筹学和分析的研究人员和从业人员的渠道，进而促进研究计划所依据的学科的长期发展。教育和外联活动还侧重于突出与民用基础设施系统的规划和运营相关的经济、社会和政治复杂性。调度和设施选址问题(统称为时空选址问题)具有相似的基本数学结构，使研究人员能够联合分析它们。然而，在动态定价下，时空位置决策与后期通过竞争服务提供商与其客户之间的复杂交互而做出的定价决策相互依存。这就需要使用两阶段博弈论模型。这个项目开发了一个全面的框架，依赖于结合和相辅相成的数学、计算和经验见解。关键的创新是数学、计算和经验想法之间的紧密相互作用，能够在建模精度和解决方案可处理性之间进行最佳权衡的整体方法，以及包括来自航空、铁路、交通、酒店和汽油分销的大型现实世界网络的综合试验台。该项目不仅对竞争性运输调度的理论和应用研究做出了深刻的贡献，而且引发了进一步的探索，使未来对竞争性设施选址的理论和应用做出了类似的贡献。此外，这种一般的方法可以有效地应用于其他原本难以处理的多阶段博弈论的应用中。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。