ISYE 6336 SCE II: Freight Transportation, Spring 2023

Description

This course focuses on an in-depth study of freight transportation systems and engineering approaches for the design, planning, and control of such systems. Selected freight systems will be covered in depth, and we will introduce important decision problems, optimization models, and solution approaches for these systems. A focus will be on building models and solution approaches for decision problems of realistic scale, and students will implement ideas for example problems that are directly applicable to practically-sized instances.

Calendar

Below find the schedule of topics that are covered in ISYE 6336 and the course meeting details. The mode will indicate whether the class will be held in-person or whether it will be held remotely by MS Teams meeting. The color will indicate the type of class meeting: a green box indicates lecture material, a blue box will be a discussion session covering content that should be reviewed in advance, a yellow box is for exam dates, and a red box will alert students to other important dates.

Date	Mode	Topic	Notes
Jan 9	In-person	Introduction	Introduction to freight transportation systems. Slides available on course Canvas. Please also review these slides covering the fundamentals of freight transport logistics.
Jan 11	In-person	Introduction to freight transportation and ocean container transportation	Freight transportation introduction continued. Slides available on course Canvas.
Jan 16	No class	Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday	We will not hold class today. For those who may not know, Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta in the Auburn Avenue area just east of downtown and he did much of his important work based here. The US maintains a National Historic Park in the area, and it is worth a visit before you leave Atlanta.
Jan 18	In-person	Ocean container transportation and seaport terminals	Introduction to ocean container transportation, including the freight transfer role of container terminals. Slides available on course Canvas.
Jan  23	In-person	Seaport berth scheduling problems	Berthing vessels at seaports and the connection to machine scheduling problems. Single berth scheduling models.
Jan  25	In-person	Seaport berth scheduling problems	MIP formulations for single-berth discrete berth scheduling problems.
Jan  30	In-person	Python implementation of BAP formulations	Continuation of discussion of berth scheduling MIP formulations. Python code for MIP formulations.
Feb  1	In-person	Linear berth scheduling problems	Berthing multiple vessels simultaneously on linear berthing sections. MIP formulations and python code demonstrations.
Feb 6	No class	ISYE 6340 Tour conflict	We will not hold class today, and we will make up the time later in the semester.
Feb  8	In-person	Intermodal container management	Introduction to container management in intermodal ocean container cargo systems. Cyclical schedules and fleet sizing
Feb  13	In-person	Mobile resource management	Analysis using cumulative curves. Dispatching frequency and headways and capacity.
Feb  15	In-person	Mobile resource management	Empty container repositioning for ocean container cargo systems. Empty imbalance determination given origin-destination demands. Simple strategies for repositioning on cyclical schedules.
Feb  20	In-person	Mobile resource management	Minimum cost network flow optimization models. Application to resource repositioning problems.
Feb 22	No class	ISYE 6340 Tour conflict	We will not hold class today, and we will make up the time later in the semester.
Feb  27	In-person	Mobile resource management	Using minimum cost network flow models to solve planning problems in empty container repositioning. Building model instances from data input.
Feb  27 12:30 special session	In-person	Mobile resource management	Python implementation of repositioning models. Discussion of results.
Mar  1	In-person	Freight flow management	Extending network flow models to manage freight flows. Introduction to multi-commodity flows.
Mar  6	In-person	Freight flow management	Multi-commodity network flow linear programming. Extension to integer programming.
Mar  8	In-person	Freight flow management	Introduction to consolidation and service network design problems.
Mar  10 Special 4 pm Review Session	In-person	Midterm review session	A review of topics for the midterm examination.
Mar  13	In-person	Midterm Examination	Complete the midterm examination according to the instructions provided on the course Canvas site.
Mar 15	No class	ISYE 6340 Tour conflict	We will not hold class today, and we will make up the time later in the semester.
Mar 20,22	No class		We will not hold class during the Georgia Tech Spring Break week.
Mar  27	In-person	Freight flow management	Controlling freight flow paths in multi-commodity flow formulations. Binary arc variable formulation.
Mar  29	In-person	Service network design	Controlling freight flow paths in multi-commodity flow formulations. Path variable formulations. From freight flow to network design.
Apr  3	In-person	Service network design	Service network design models for freight consolidation planning.
Apr  3 12:30 special session	In-person	Service network design	Python implementation of service network design examples. Discussion of results.
Apr  5	In-person	Last-mile logistics	Local transportation and last-mile logistics. Routing and scheduling problems.
Apr  5 12:30 special session	In-person	Last-mile logistics	Optimization models for single-vehicle routing problems. Implementation and solution.
Apr  10	In-person	Last-mile logistics	Heuristics for single vehicle routing. Insertion heuristics and local improvement heuristics.
Apr  12	In-person	Last-mile logistics	Routing heuristics implementation in python. Comparison of heuristic solutions with optimal solutions.
Apr  17	In-person	Last-mile logistics	Multiple vehicle routing problems. Optimization formulation for capacitated vehicle routing.
Apr  19	In-person	Last-mile logistics	Heuristics for multiple vehicle routing problems.
Apr  24	In-person	Last-mile logistics	Dynamic assignment of tasks to couriers in rapid last-mile systems, such as Grubhub or Amazon Flex.