Real-time Optimisation of Mobile Facilities in Public Service Delivery
- When:
- Friday 15 July 2016
- Time:
- 11:00am - 12:00pm
- Where:
- Conference Room, Urban Big Data Centre, 7 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow UK G12 8RZ GET DIRECTIONS
The Urban Big Data Centre, as part of the SASNet Programme, is pleased to host a seminar with Dr. Soheil Davari, Lecturer in Supply Chain Management at Hertfordshire Business School on Real-time Optimisation of Mobile Facilities in Public Service Delivery.
The seminar will be relevant for anyone interested in business analytics, public service delivery and smart cities.
Abstract
Public services are those provided by public bodies (such as governments) in various sectors such as healthcare, security, and telecommunications. While most of these services are provided by fixed facilities, mobile facilities are used whenever the cost of establishing a fixed facility is prohibitive, or when the demand is sporadic. Mobile facilities are preferred in a variety of applications such as telecommunication services, police patrol cars, HIV walk-in clin- ics, humanitarian relief, and health screening programmes. Although these facilities bring about considerable benefits, their optimisation is a really challenging problem owing to the semantic complexity of the problem and the rapid evolution of the parameters.
In this talk, the speaker will present the problem of routing-scheduling of mobile facilities considering the idea of activity space and using a set of heterogeneous and capacitated vehicles, so that the total cost is minimised, and the service rate is maximised in an equitable way to people. Each vehicle can be positioned at any of a set of discrete vertices on a graph and stays there for a certain time to serve the demand in the neighbourhood before moving to another vertex. The information in the problem evolves over time through ubiquitous com- munication devices such as smart-phones. The decisions in such a context should be made and updated quickly, which necessitates developing efficient heuristics and also a responsive decision support system capable of gathering the information on-line, making decisions, and communication with all the key players in the system.
Short Bio
Soheil is a lecturer in operations & supply chain management at Hertfordshire Business School. He has a PhD in Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences from Amirkabir University of Technology, Iran. Prior to joining the Hertfordshire Business School, he was a research fellow at Cardiff University, United Kingdom; a mathematical modeller at NHS Wales; a postdoctoral fellow and a visiting lecturer at Sabanci University, Turkey; and a consultant in different sectors of industry for more than eight years. His current research areas are combinatorial optimisation, business analytics, public service delivery, and smart cities.