INFORMS 2021 Program Book

INFORMS Anaheim 2021

WE07

4 - Performance Factors Influencing the Service Reliability and Service Interruption in Train Operations under PTC Yalda Khashe, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, United State Railroads operate in high-risk and rapidly changing environments while avoiding catastrophic events. Positive Train Control (PTC) is a range of fully integrated technologies that overlay existing safety systems to prevent train-to-train collision and improve worker safety. This research identifies factors that affect the reliability and serviceability of train operations under PTC. The results show that although technical factors affected the PTC operation, issues that arise from inadequate interaction of the subsystems or lack of alignment between organizational and human factors, and the technical system have a significantly higher contribution to PTC failures and major delays. WD35 CC Room 210A In Person: Transportation-Freight II Contributed Session Chair: Camill Harter, Erasmus University-Rotterdam, Rotterdam, 3062PA, Netherlands 1 - Determinants of Air Cargo Pricing Arim Park, North Carolina A& T. State University, Greensboro, NC, United States, Min Kyung Lee, Ji-Hung (Ryan) Choi, Ju Myung Song This paper is to examine critical factors that influence air cargo pricing. We estimated fixed effect regressions and explored the surcharge cases with analytical modeling approaches using a major company’s operational level dataset that provides an air cargo service in South Korea between 2008 and 2013. 2 - Evaluation and Comparison of Three Alternative Collaboration and Profit Sharing Methods for Less Than Truckload Carriers Bhavya Padmanabhan, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, United States, Nathan Huynh, William G. Ferrell, Vishal Badyal This study addresses three methods for less than truckload carrier collaboration under centralized planning, but the carriers are allowed to retain some of their jobs and share the rest. Method 1 and Method 3 are two step approaches and Method 2 is a one step approach. Two step refers finding the job allocation first and then sharing the profit whereas one step refers finding both simultaneously. Mathematical models for job allocation and profit sharing are proposed for all the three methods. The experiment results indicate that the total profit from Method 1 is 5.29% higher than that of Method 2 and 11.25% higher than that of Method 3. The total profit from Method 2 is 6.60% higher than that of Method 3. 3 - Selection of Auto-carrier Loading Policy in Automobile Distribution Yanshuo Sun, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, Tallahassee, FL, United States, Sajeeb Kirtonia When finished vehicles are shipped from automobile manufacturers to dealerships, auto-carriers are employed, which are specially designed to allow the compact storage of multiple automobiles. This special design means automobiles can only be loaded and unloaded through a single exit of an auto-carrier, which complicates the automobile loading and unloading operations. As there is no consensus in the auto-carrier routing literature regarding whether to enforce a Last In First Out (LIFO) policy or allow reloading en-route, this study explores how to optimize the selection of loading policy based on a trade-off between solution complexity and quality. 4 - An Efficiency-vulnerability Trade-off for Information Layer Integration in Multimodal Transport Networks Camill Harter, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands, Otto Koppius, Rob A. Zuidwijk Synchromodality tackles inefficiency in hinterland transport through a dynamic system allowing for flexible routes and use of transport modes. This requires extensive integration of digital infrastructure, resulting in an interdependent complex system with digital and physical layer. Such systems have shown high vulnerability to cascadic failure. Applying a multi-layer network approach to a network of all intermodal services in Europe, we analyze a trade-off between efficiency and vulnerability that comes with synchromodality. We show that the system benefits from synchromodal transport under light attack, but it collapses quickly under heavy and targeted attack to the information layer.

Wednesday, 4:30PM-6:00PM

WE06 CC Room 303A In Person: Agriculture Applications Contributed Session Chair: Erick Jones, II, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, United States 1 - Water Quality Impacts of Optimal Crop Insurance Policy Selection Gorkem Emirhuseyinoglu, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, United States, Sarah M. Ryan Crop yield and prices are the major uncertainties affecting farm revenue. Farm yield is a function of nitrogen (N) and random weather elements. However, farmland runoff of N negatively impacts biodiversity via water quality. Insurance programs target yield and/or price uncertainty to mitigate farming risks. From a farmer’s viewpoint, we generate weather scenarios and build stochastic programs for insurance and N application decisions to maximize risk-adjusted farm profits. We investigate how insurance programs affect N fertilizer application and the consequent surface water quality impacts. 2 - Food Flows Between US Counties Through Time Deniz Berfin Karakoc, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, United States, Junren Wang, Megan Konar Food supply chains are essential for distributing goods from production to consumption points. Recent research has developed novel methods to estimate food flows with high spatial resolution. Yet, we do not currently understand how fine-grained food supply chains vary in time. In this study, we develop a time- series analysis of food flows between the counties in the United States. We use the Food Flow Model to estimate food flows across all food commodity groups (approximately 70 million links) for the years 2007, 2012, and 2017. We then determine the core nodes and links in the US food supply chain, which may prove useful for future research, policy, and decision-making. 3 - Stochastic Optimization Modeling of an Agriculture, Water and Energy System under Future Water Uncertainty Erick Jones, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, United States Climate change has caused prolonged droughts which strains water resource availability. However, there are unconventional sources of water that could become profitable for agricultural uses when water or crop prices increase. Therefore, we develop a stochastic multi-systems optimization scheme based on decomposition that takes creates a distribution for likely water and energy resource futures and optimize all the systems under uncertainty simultaneously so that the farm can make the best decisions today. WE07 CC Room 303B In Person: Lavanya’s Session General Session Chair: Lavanya Marla, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, 61801-2925, United States 1 - An Optimization Model for Vaccine Distribution via UAVS or Drone Abhijeet Kumar, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, United States, M. A. Shariful Amin, Rishabh Rana, Victor Prybutok The pandemic that began in December 2019 in China is now taking a toll on developing countries like India. Due to a lack of proper outreach of vaccines, India is suffering from low coverage rates. India needs to vaccinate its people quickly otherwise the virus would continue to mutate and spread not only locally but also globally. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can help in outreach and help in the last-mile distribution of the vaccine. The objective of this research is to formulate an optimization model for the delivery of vaccine packages via UAVs to a remote location.

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