Dario Vezzali

Progetto di ricerca
Integrated optimization and decision support systems for attended home delivery and service problems

This research project addresses the class of attended home delivery and service problems, which have been widely studied through different lenses in the last two decades. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has definitely boosted the appeal of attended home delivery, with a significant increase in terms of global demand and a still lasting effect on people’s habits. From an operational point of view, they require the customer to be at home when the goods are delivered or the service is executed. Typically, the service provider and the customer agree on a particular time window for the delivery or the execution of service. The aim of this work is mainly focused on the study of specific attended home delivery and service real-world applications in gas and water distribution, and in the context of global service providers. In particular, the solution of real-world optimization problems through integrated decision support systems, which rely on exact and heuristic mathematical formulations plus additional modules, is investigated. This requires an accurate problem definition, in order to clearly state the objective function and the constraints, it is followed by the implementation on commercial solvers (in an exact or heuristic fashion) and it ends with several computational experiments, aimed at producing valuable solutions. This process implies a preliminary real-data collection and preparation, which has to be performed carefully, in order to compute all the relevant information that a decision maker might evaluate. The proposed methodology integrates each time, depending on the particular application, classic techniques of operational research with machine learning, to predict missing information for future periods, multi-criteria decision analysis, to define and weight the multiple factors that occur in a complex decision, and engineering economics, to evaluate a project on a financial perspective.

Pubblicazioni

• Baschieri D., Iori M., Magni C.A., Marchioni A., Vezzali D. (2021) Smart-Meter Installation Scheduling in the Context of Water Distribution. 31st European Conference on Operational Research, Athens, Greece, July 11-14 [Abstract in Atti di Convegno]

• Bruck B.P., Vezzali D., Iori M., Magni C.A., Pretolani D. (2021) A Decision Support System to Evaluate Suppliers in the Context of Global Service Providers. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2021) (Vol. 1, pp. 461-470) [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]

• Bruck B.P., Castegini F., Cordeau J.F., Iori M., Poncemi T., Vezzali, D. (2020) A Decision Support System for Attended Home Services. INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics 50(2):99-152 [Articolo su rivista]

• Bruck B.P., Iori M., Pretolani D., Vezzali D. (2019) A Decision Support System to Evaluate Suppliers in the Context of Global Service Providers. 30th European Conference on Operational Research, Dublin, Ireland, June 23-26 [Abstract in Atti di Convegno]

• Atefi R., Iori M., Salari M., Vezzali D. (2022) Solution of a Practical Vehicle Routing Problem for Monitoring Water Distribution Networks. [Sottomesso a rivista]