Optimization methods in Healthcare, Transportation and Telecommunications applications

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This research program pursues two main objectives, which are the application of optimization methods to the three very important socio-economical fields that are health care systems, transportation, and telecommunication, as well as the continuing development of novel methodological concepts combining both heuristic search and exact solution techniques. ***First with respect to applications, this work will build and expand on the research carried out within the previous grants. More precisely, it will focus on the following themes: ***1) Solving deployment/redeployment problems for emergency vehicle fleets; 2) Study of different variants of location, routing and scheduling problems related to real-life health services applications (home care, medical test sample collection, etc.); 3) Developing efficient and portable solution methods for solving health care system personnel scheduling problems; 4) Study of different variants of operating room planning problems; 5) Modeling and implementation of exact and approximate approaches for solving transportation network design problems with non-convex cost structures; 6) Design/dimensioning of cost-effective survivable network structures in the context of transmission as well as service layer telecommunication networks.***On the methodological development side, we will continue to study different research avenues that appear to hold good potential for enhancing the effectiveness of metaheuristics as well as exact algorithms. Among these we will continue our work on the development of hybrid methods incorporating various heuristic search concepts and classical optimization approaches. In addition, we will also draw from the areas of simulation, robust optimization and stochastic programming in order to further enhance solution approaches. These developments will be carried out and validated on the applications described above as well as on other applications.***