Rich Vehicle Routing

DESCRIPTION

In the last 60 years, a vast amount of academic research has been devoted to solve vehicle routing problems (VRPs). Despite this effort the gap between academic and practical problem solving is still significant. In recent years, the VRP community has accepted the challenge of trying to design solution methods that are better fit to tackle problems in practical settings. One of the main research streams in this vein is the study of the so called rich VRPs. Although there is no formal definition of the term, the members of the community broadly refer to a rich VRP as a problem that simultaneously considers features from several VRP variants. The main objective of this doctoral dissertation is to contribute to that effort by designing and testing optimization algorithms for rich vehicle routing problems. Possible application contexts include, for instance, home care routing and electric vehicle routing problems. The project also aims to provide the community and the industry with an open-source library implementing the proposed methods.

CONTEXT

The dissertation is part of ongoing collaboration between the Computer Science Research Lab (LI) of the University of Tours (France) and the Interuniversity Research Centre on Entreprise, Networks, Logistics, and Transportation (CIRRELT) in Montréal (Canada). The successful student will prepare his or her dissertation under a joint degree agreement and spend 30 months in Montreal and 18 months in Tours. The dissertation will be supervised by Pr. Louis-Martin Rousseau at CIRRELT and Dr. Jorge E. Mendoza and Dr. Yannick Kergosien at LI-Tours. The scholarship is around 20kCAD/year during the Canadian leg and around 18k€/year during the French leg. The start date is Aug./Sep. 2016 in Tours.

DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS

The ideal applicant possesses strong computer programming skills (preferably in Java), software architecture, and parallel programming; has advance knowledge of operations research models and methods (specially hybrid and parallel metaheuristics); and is able to communicate comfortably in English. Such applicants must hold a Masters degree in operations research, computer science, management science, industrial engineering, or applied mathematics. Knowledge of French is only necessary for making life more pleasant in France and Quebec but not professionally required.

CONTACT

Interested applicants should contact Dr. Jorge E. Mendoza (jorge.mendoza@univ-tours.fr) attaching to the email: an up-to-date CV, a letter of motivation, transcripts for the last two academic years, and the name and contact information of 2 professional references. Please use the tag “[CIRRELT-LI] application” as subject on the email. The deadline for applications is May 31, 2016.