Related papers: Integer Programming for Multi-Robot Planning: A Co…
Robots performing tasks in warehouses provide the first example of wide-spread adoption of autonomous vehicles in transportation and logistics. The efficiency of these operations, which can vary widely in practice, are a key factor in the…
The bin packing problem exists widely in real logistic scenarios (e.g., packing pipeline, express delivery), with its goal to improve the packing efficiency and reduce the transportation cost. In this NP-hard combinatorial optimization…
In light of the need for design and analysis of intermodal transportation systems, we propose an algorithmic framework to determine the system optimum of an intermodal transportation system. To this end, we model an intermodal…
During natural or anthropogenic disasters, humanitarian organizations face a series of time-sensitive tasks. One of the tasks involves picking up critical resources (e.g., first aid kits, blankets, water) from warehouses and delivering them…
Planning for multi-robot teams in complex environments is a challenging problem, especially when these teams must coordinate to accomplish a common objective. In general, optimal solutions to these planning problems are computationally…
The rise of battery-powered vehicles has led to many new technical and methodological hurdles. Among these, the efficient planning of an electric fleet to fulfill passenger transportation requests still represents a major challenge. This is…
The team formation and routing problem is a challenging optimization problem with several real-world applications in fields such as airport, healthcare, and maintenance operations. To solve this problem, exact solution methods based on…
We study the problem of instance segmentation in biological images with crowded and compact cells. We formulate this task as an integer program where variables correspond to cells and constraints enforce that cells do not overlap. To solve…
For robots to successfully execute tasks assigned to them, they must be capable of planning the right sequence of actions. These actions must be both optimal with respect to a specified objective and satisfy whatever constraints exist in…
We study the problem of selecting a fleet of robots to service spatially distributed tasks with diverse requirements within time-windows. The problem of allocating tasks to a fleet of potentially heterogeneous robots and finding an optimal…
We consider the problem of completing a set of $n$ tasks with a human-robot team using minimum effort. In many domains, teaching a robot to be fully autonomous can be counterproductive if there are finitely many tasks to be done. Rather,…
Robotic systems are routinely used in the logistics industry to enhance operational efficiency, but the design of robot workspaces remains a complex and manual task, which limits the system's flexibility to changing demands. This paper aims…
Column generation is an iterative method used to solve a variety of optimization problems. It decomposes the problem into two parts: a master problem, and one or more pricing problems (PP). The total computing time taken by the method is…
We consider a fashion discounter that supplies any of its many branches with an integral multiple of lots whose size assortment structure stems from a set of many applicable lot-types. We design a column generation algorithm for the optimal…
In this work, we address a task allocation problem for human multi-robot settings. Given a set of tasks to perform, we formulate a general Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem aiming at minimizing the overall execution time while…
Electric utility companies perform numerous technical interventions every day. Since it is generally not possible to complete all planned interventions within a single day, companies face two objectives: maximizing the total duration of…
In order to ensure efficient flow of goods in an automated warehouse and to guarantee its continuous distribution to/from picking stations in an effective way, decisions about which goods will be delivered to which particular picking…
We study the computational complexity of optimally solving multi-robot path planning problems on planar graphs. For four common time- and distance-based objectives, we show that the associated path optimization problems for multiple robots…
The task allocation problem in multi-robot systems (MRTA) is an NP-hard problem whose viable solutions are usually found by heuristic algorithms. Considering the increasing need of improvement on logistics, the use of robots for increasing…
The problem of optimizing a sequence of tasks for a robot, also known as multi-point manufacturing, is a well-studied problem. Many of these solutions use a variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and seek to find the minimum…