Title: Accelerated Bender's Decomposition Algorithm and Hybrid Heuristics for Multi-Period Planning of Maternal Healthcare Facilities in India
Speaker: Dr. Ajinkya Tanksale, Newcastle University Business School
Venue: Online
MS Teams Link: Click here
Date, Time: Tuesday, 12 November 2024, 12:00 noon -- 1:00 p.m.
Abstract: This work addresses the challenge of improving availability and accessibility of maternal healthcare in India by presenting a multi-period planning problem of hierarchical and successively inclusive healthcare facilities. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming model to minimize the overall cost, including the cost of establishing and upgrading the facilities, the cost of allocating/referring the mothers-to-be to the respective facilities and the penalty cost of demotivating the overburdening of the facilities in each time period. To solve the model effectively and efficiently, a Bender's Decomposition Algorithm (BDA) with several acceleration strategies such as valid inequalities, disaggregated Benders cuts, rolling horizon heuristic and parallelism is developed. A Bender's type heuristic is also tested by solving the master problem heuristically. Additionally, a Fix-and-Optimize (F&O) heuristic hybridized with Simulated Annealing (SA) enhanced by various search space reduction techniques is developed to obtain good quality solutions in a reasonable time for large instances. It is evident from the results of the computational experiments that the accelerated BDA and Bender type heuristic outperforms GUROBI. The hybrid F&O and SA is observed to be the most computationally efficient approach. A representative scenario in the Indian setting presents further evidence of the model's applicability.
Biography: Dr. Ajinkya N. Tanksale is currently working as Lecturer of Operations & Supply Chain management in Newcastle University Business School, which is a premier Russel group university in the UK. Dr. Tanksale carries multinational work experience. He has worked as Assistant Professor Operations/Engineering Management at David D. Reh School of Business, Clarkson University, USA. Prior to joining Clarkson University, Dr. Tanksale worked as Assistant Professor at Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University) Varanasi, India during 2018-2022. He holds a Ph.D. in Industrial and System Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India. He is a recipient of TUBITAK postdoctoral research fellowship at Sabanci University, Turkey. He is keenly interested in solving a variety of complex real-life problems in the domain of Operations and Supply Chain Management primarily using Operations Research techniques. Some of the application areas that he has explored are Logistics and Supply chain management, Food Supply Chains, Humanitarian operations, home healthcare management and Emergency Response Network Design. Dr. Tanksale has published his research in several reputed Journals such as European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of Operational Research Society, International Journal of Production Economics, Expert Systems with Applications, Computers & Industrial Engineering, Socio-economic Planning Sciences, Safety Science, INFOR, RAIRO and British Food Journal. He has presented his research at several reputed international conferences. Dr. Tanksale has supervised several Ph.D. and postgraduate students. He is the life member of ORSI and SOM in India and annual member of international professional bodies. He is an associate editor of OPSEARCH - journal of OR society of India, editorial board member of International Journal of Industrial Engineering: Theory, Applications and Practice, and served as reviewer to many prestigious journals in OR/MS domain.