Related papers: Optimization for Secure and Humane Border Operatio…
Bayesian optimization has emerged as a highly effective tool for the safe online optimization of systems, due to its high sample efficiency and noise robustness. To further enhance its efficiency, reduced physical models of the system can…
In addition to their benefits, optimization systems can have negative economic, moral, social, and political effects on populations as well as their environments. Frameworks like fairness have been proposed to aid service providers in…
State-of-the-art emergency navigation approaches are designed to evacuate civilians during a disaster based on real-time decisions using a pre-defined algorithm and live sensory data. Hence, casualties caused by the poor decisions and…
This paper presents a solution for the problem of optimal planning for a robot in a collaborative human-robot team, where the human supervisor is intermittently available to assist the robot in completing tasks more quickly. Specifically,…
AI is being increasingly used to aid response efforts to humanitarian emergencies at multiple levels of decision-making. Such AI systems are generally understood to be stand-alone tools for decision support, with ethical assessments,…
A coordinated economic dispatch method for multi-area power systems is proposed. Choosing boundary phase angles as coupling variables, the proposed method exploits the structure of critical regions in local problems defined by active and…
Transitions between two lanes often have a significant impact on various forms of road traffic. To address this problem, we have developed a two-lane asymmetric simple exclusion process model and two hypothetical traffic control strategies,…
Many companies now use crowdsourcing to leverage external (as well as internal) crowds to perform specialized work, and so methods of improving efficiency are critical. Tasks in crowdsourcing systems with specialized work have multiple…
We present an optimization-based method to plan the motion of an autonomous robot under the uncertainties associated with dynamic obstacles, such as humans. Our method bounds the marginal risk of collisions at each point in time by…
The rise of machine learning has shifted targeted resource allocation in policy and humanitarian settings toward algorithmic targeting based on predicted risk scores. This approach is typically cheaper and faster than traditional screening…
This paper addresses the integration of additional information sources into a Bayesian optimization framework while ensuring that safety constraints are satisfied. The interdependencies between these information sources are modeled using an…
This tutorial contrasts probabilistic modeling and robust optimization to determine decisions in humanitarian logistics, specifically supply chains subject to adversarial (natural and human) disruptions. Natural disruptions induce dispatch…
Efficient workload assignment to the workforce is critical in last-mile package delivery systems. In this context, traditional methods of assigning package deliveries to workers based on geographical proximity can be inefficient and surely…
In today's dynamic and interconnected world, resource constraints pose significant challenges across various domains, ranging from networks, logistics and manufacturing to project management and optimization, etc. Resource-constrained…
Crowdsourcing is the primary means to generate training data at scale, and when combined with sophisticated machine learning algorithms, crowdsourcing is an enabler for a variety of emergent automated applications impacting all spheres of…
Climate change and political unrest in certain regions of the world are imposing extreme hardship on many communities and are forcing millions of vulnerable populations to abandon their homelands and seek refuge in safer lands. As…
This paper presents a widely applicable approach to solving (multi-marginal, martingale) optimal transport and related problems via neural networks. The core idea is to penalize the optimization problem in its dual formulation and reduce it…
Distributed online optimization and game have been increasingly researched in the last decade, mostly motivated by its wide applications in sensor networks, robotics (e.g., distributed target tracking and formation control), smart grids,…
Optimal transport is a framework that facilitates the most efficient allocation of a limited amount of resources. However, the most efficient allocation scheme does not necessarily preserve the most fairness. In this paper, we establish a…
The recent surge in the network modeling of complex systems has set the stage for a new era in the study of fundamental and applied aspects of optimization in collective behavior. This Focus Issue presents an extended view of the state of…