Graduation Year

2014

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Industrial & Management Systems Engineering

Major Professor

Bo Zeng, Ph.D.

Co-Major Professor

Yu Zhang, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Tapas Das, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Kingsley Reeves, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Shengyong Wang, Ph.D.

Keywords

Facility Location Problem, Hub-and-spoke Network, Reliability, Robust Optimization, Unit Commitment

Abstract

The reliability issue of the infrastructure systems has become one of the major concerns of the system operators. This dissertation is a collection of four published and working papers that address the specific reliable design and operations problems from three different application settings: transportation/telecommunications network, distribution network, and power plant. In these four projects, key random factors like site disruption and uncertain demand are explicitly considered and proper research tools including stochastic programming, robust optimization, and variants of robust optimization are applied to formulate the problems based on which the important and challenging modelling elements (nonlinear congestion, disruption caused demand variation, etc.) can be introduced and studied. Besides, for each of the optimization models, we also develop advanced solution algorithms that can solve large-scale instances within a short amount of time and devise comprehensive numerical experiments to derive insights. The modelling techniques and solution methods can be easily extended to study reliability issues in other applications.

Share

COinS