Transport and logistics forms a growing sector in Asia. These areas provide many interesting problems.
Logistics
Studies of pricing and operations planning models for container, trucking and other fleet based transport operations are some areas of recent interest. This has led to work in the modeling of decision problems in the usage of shared resources, subject to service level constraints. A parallel area of work is the design of contracts in the logistics domain. Some work has been initiated in the area of air cargo operations.
Faculty: Ashutosh Mahajan, Avinash Bhardwaj, Jayendran Venkateswaran, Narayan Rangaraj
Transportation
Operational planning of transport operations, mode specific studies (Road, rail, air, sea), capacity planning, operations scheduling and routing, fleet and crew planning offer several rich problems for analysis. Ongoing work includes railway operations planning based on detailed simulations of train movements on the rail network. Many what-if analyses are possible, such as the impact of new schedules of trains, spacing of signal blocks, loop configuration at stations and level crossing control. Timetabling and rake allocation applications for suburban and long distance train services is another practical problem of considerable interest.
In the aviation sector, variants of crew planning and their scheduling (include rostering) and a variety of network flow based models for aircraft routing and deployment have been recent areas of research.
Faculty: Jayendran Venkateswaran, Narayan Rangaraj