Network design optimization with applications in logistics and telecommunications

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The proposed research concerns the development of sophisticated solution methods for large scale network design problems with application to recent problems in logistics and telecommunications. Network design problems spawned a substantial amount of research and continue to attract much attention because of their theoretical and practical significance.  Network design lies at the intersection of several disciplines; namely, operations research/management science, graph theory, engineering and computer science. Most network design problems are hard optimization problems and are large in size. In addition,  recent advances in technology and business strategies lead to an array of  challenging issues that made most classical models obsolete. There is an urgent need to build network design models that capture the complexity of recent applications  and to develop specialized optimization tools in order to  provide efficient and meaningful solutions.   For example, recent  applications of network design include: collaborative transportation systems design, hybrid telecommunications network design, service systems design, global supply chain network design, etc.Network design problems are usually modeled as large mixed-integer programming problems and are characterized by a graph-theoretical component that defines the network structure and a design component that captures  restrictions pertinent to the specific application. Exploiting this component characteristic through decomposition and relaxation is the key to developing efficient algorithms.  The ultimate goal of my research program is to develop a decision support tool for network design problems that is built on top of specialized algorithms and  that can identify problem structure and apply the appropriate solution approach.