On the morning of April 8th, Professor Francisco Saldanha da Gama from the Management School of the University of Sheffield was invited to the School of Management of Shandong University to give an academic lecture. Professor Zhao Peixin from the Department of Information Systems and Supply Chain Management presided over the lecture. Teachers and students of the School actively participated in the lecture.
In the lecture, Professor Francisco Saldanha da Gama introduced his latest research achievement, “The latency location-routing problem with stochastic travel times” in detail from three aspects: problem definition, model establishment and solution method. Based on the classic Latency Location-Routing Problem (LRP), the achievement innovatively introduces the uncertainty of travel time and the risk preference of decision makers. The two factors are described with latency conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) index and can be adjusted according to the real situation. From the perspective of a multi-layer network, a two-stage random mixed integer programming model is established. In terms of the solution method, a multi-start variable neighborhood search algorithm (MS-VNS) is used, and the superiority of the method is verified by numerical experiments. After the lecture, Professor Francisco Saldanha da Gama had an in-depth exchange with teachers and students on the future application of robust optimization and the future development of location-routing problems.
Professor Francisco Saldanha da Gama is the director of the Department of Supply Chain Management and director of the Operations Management and Decision Science Research Centre of the University of Sheffield, UK. He is an editor of Computers & Operations Research, and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Journal of the Operational Research Society, Operations Research Perspectives, International Journal of General of Systems and Algorithms. His research interests include supply chain management, logistics, decision making under uncertainty, facility siting, and project dispatching and management.