Travel and Transportation

The travel and transportation sector faces problems ranging from personnel scheduling and resource planning to revenue management and operations planning and recovery. Advances in computational power, communication capabilities, as well as global competition, make it imperative for companies in this sector to exploit modern advances in optimization. The need for improved efficiency is driven by increasing costs of people, fuel, and capital investment. At the same time, the industry is experiencing substantial growth and increasing demand.

In this workshop, models are studied that combine different planning functions, include uncertainty, and address global and systems issues. We will discuss these models as well as their theoretical foundations and the required computational methods. We explore ways to exploit information technologies, with the goal of greater efficiency in all aspects of the operation.

This workshop is intended for academic researchers interested in developing the models, methods and theory which can deal with these challenging problems as well as the practitioners who require these advances to deal with their strategic, tactical and operational issues.

One goal of the workshop is to create a cross sector forum bringing together people from different parts of this industry and the academic community. A second goal is to identify new areas of research for the academic community. The topics covered are intended to identify new threads that cut across many models and applications, for example, robust planning, risk management and the incorporation of real time information.