Efficiency in modern industrial operations requires that resources be deployed in an optimal manner. This has resulted in extensive work in operations research on resource allocation with a focus on optimal or near-optimal planning. Facility location applications are concerned with the placement of one or more facilities/routes in a way that optimizes a specified objective such as minimizing transportation cost, providing equitable service to customers, capturing the largest market share etc. These problems give rise to challenging combinatorial problems. The research on locating logistics spans many fields such as operations research/management science, geography, computer science, mathematics etc.
Our project activities have grown along two seemingly different directions. Our research activities in the past years have been greatly influenced by the problems of the industrial sponsors. In the past several years, we worked with three industrial partners. One of them is Dynamex Inc. which is in the courier business. We have invested considerable time and resources to design a prototype to generate routes for the same-day pick-up-and-delivery of packages in Greater Vancouver area. We have also been involved in designing a prototype to schedule patient transfer routes in Greater Vancouver area for the BC ambulance. This was jointly done with FDM Software. Recently, we started collaborating with Mobile Knowledge, a company based in Ottawa. Mobile Knowledge offers advanced GPS, wireless, and mobile data communications technology to customers in a wide variety of markets for enhanced fleet management applications. The research on some other interesting location problems is also progressing exceedingly well. As we will see later we have made significant progress in some well known open problems in facility location optimization.