Seminar "Capacity and Service Planning in Freight Transportation

Tittle: Capacity and Service Planning in Freight Transportation

Date: Tuesday 11/29/22 from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., Amphitheatre A70 S, First Floor, Abel de Pujol 1

Speaker: Teodor Gabriel Crainic, Professor of Operations Research, Logistics and Transportation at UQAM and CIRRELT

Abstract: Shippers, carriers, and intermediaries make up the freight transportation ecosystem. Their interactions yield a dense network of requests and offers of service to move or store loads, and of the resulting multimodal vehicle and terminal flows enabling the freight journeys from origins to destinations. We focus on the consolidation-based component of the field and a set of important planning issues most stakeholders face to efficiently and profitably secure or provide the required capacity and services for their regular operations over a short-medium time horizon. We discuss a number of modelling approaches, combining packing, design, and routing, which address a broad range of these issues, presenting a bit of review, some new developments and work in progress, as well as a number of research challenges and perspectives.

Short BIO: Teodor Gabriel Crainic is Full Professor of Operations Research, Transportation, and Logistics, and holds the Chair on Intelligent Logistics and Transportation Systems Planning in the School of Management, Université du Québec à Montréal. He is also Adjunct Professor, Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, Université de Montréal, and senior scientist at CIRRELT, the Interuniversity Research Center for Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation, where he is Director of the Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory.

Professor Crainic is a member of the Royal Society of Canada - The Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada. He co-founded, in 1991, the TRISTAN - TRienial Symposium on Transportation Analysis and, in 2000, the Odysseus - International Workshop on Freight Transportation and Logistics series of international meetings. He contributes to several editorial boards. He was President of the Transportation Science and Logistics Society of INFORMS, Director of the Centre for Research on Transportation (currently CIRRELT), and received the 2006 Merit Award of the Canadian Operational Research Society.

The research interests of Professor Crainic are in network, integer, and combinatorial optimization, meta-heuristics, and parallel computing applied to the planning and management of complex systems, particularly in transportation and logistics. Major contributions target the design, scheduling, and management of consolidation-based carrier services, including uncertainty, resource, and revenue management considerations, as well as routing and scheduling of vehicles, Intelligent Transportation Systems, City Logistics, new business and organizational transportation and logistics models and systems, planning of urban and inter-urban multimodal multi-stakeholder freight transportation systems at all geographic scales, etc.

Professor Crainic published over 290 scientific papers and chapters, and has a h-index of 78 (Google Scholar). He co-edited the Network Design with Applications in Transportation and Logistics book published by Springer in 2021, as well as numerous special issues of major scientific journals. He supervised over 160 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.