ISYE 6336 SCE II: Freight Transportation, Spring 2024

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 8	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 10	In-person	Introduction to freight transportation and ocean container transportation	Freight transportation introduction continued. Slides available on course Canvas.
Jan 15	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 17	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 22 (special time: 12:30 pm)	In-person	Seaport berth scheduling problems	Berthing vessels at seaports and the connection to machine scheduling problems. Single berth scheduling models.
Jan  24	In-person	Seaport berth scheduling problems	Objective functions, constraints for single berth scheduling problems. Easy and difficult problem variants.
Jan  29	In-person	Seaport berth scheduling problems	MIP formulations for discrete berth scheduling problems.
Jan  31	In-person	Seaport berth scheduling problems	Linear berth scheduling problems. MIP formulation extensions for linear berth scheduling.
Feb  5	In-person	Seaport berth scheduling problems	Linear berth scheduling problems. Solving MIP models with Python and PuLP.
Feb  7	In-person	Intermodal container management	Introduction to container management in intermodal ocean container cargo systems. Cyclical schedules and fleet sizing
Feb  12	In-person	Mobile resource management	Analysis using cumulative curves. Dispatching frequency and headways and capacity.
Feb  14	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  19	In-person	Mobile resource management	Minimum cost network flow optimization models. Application to resource repositioning problems.
Feb  21	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  26	In-person	Mobile resource management	Python implementation of repositioning models. Discussion of results.
Feb  28	In-person	Freight flow management	Extending network flow models to manage freight flows. Introduction to multi-commodity flows.
Mar  4	In-person	Freight flow management	Extending network flow models to manage freight flows. Introduction to multi-commodity flows.
Mar  6	In-person	Service network design	Introduction to consolidation and service network design problems.
Mar  11	In-person	Midterm Examination	Complete the midterm examination according to the instructions provided on the course Canvas site.
Mar  11 special time 12:30 - 1:45 pm	In-person	Service network design	Models for jointly installing freight transportation capacity to a network and assigning freight flows.
Mar 18, 20	No class		We will not hold class during the Georgia Tech Spring Break week.
Mar  25	In-person	Service network design and last-mile	Path-flow formulations for multi-commodity flow and design. Introduction to last-mile planning.
Mar 27	No class		We will not hold class due to a conflict with ISYE 6340.
Apr  1	In-person	Last-mile logistics	Service network design models with unique paths and tree structures. Multi-stop single vehicle routing.
Apr  3	In-person	Last-mile logistics	Local transportation and last-mile logistics. Implementing and solving a network design formulation for single-vehicle routing.
Apr  3 12:30 special session	In-person	Last-mile logistics	Heuristics for single vehicle routing. Insertion heuristics and local improvement heuristics.
Apr  8	In-person	Last-mile logistics	Routing heuristics implementation in python. Comparison of heuristic solutions with optimal solutions.
Apr  10	In-person	Last-mile logistics	Midterm review. Single-vehicle routing heuristics.
Apr  10 12:30 special session	In-person	Last-mile logistics	Lower bounds for single-vehicle routing. Comparing routing heuristic solutions.
Apr 15	No class		We will not hold class due to a conflict with ISYE 6340.
Apr  17	In-person	Last-mile logistics	Multiple vehicle routing. When are multiple vehicles needed? Bin-packing and fleet size lower bounds.
Apr  22	In-person	Last-mile logistics	Heuristics for multiple vehicle routing problems.
Apr  22; 12:30 pm special session	In-person	Course wrap-up	Final comments and discussion about course topics.