Partners
Molde University College (MUC) is giving both a Master and a PhD program in logistics, and is one of the leading educators in Norway in this area. MUC is now known as a Specialized University in Logistics. The main research focus is on quantitative logistics. MUC accepts around 50 MSc students every year, with a large foreign contingent. The students have a background in informatics, economics, and transport. There are around 20 PhD students on the PhD program in logistics. Most of the research on quantitative logistics, mostly optimization based, is organized in the Optimization Group. Arne Løkketangen was the leader of the group from it was formed until he passed away in June 2013, Johan Oppen is currently the leader. The group currently has 2 professors, 5 associate professors, 5 PhDs and a number of MSc students. The group is placed in the department of economics, informatics and social sciences. Most of the research by the group is related to transport optimization, using both exact methods and metaheuristics. Some 60 articles have been published by the group the last 5 years, with a majority relevant to DOMinant II. The project members in Molde have actively participated in science communication for high school students, by lectures, demonstrations and organizing competitions in solving simple vehicle routing problems.
Website: http://kursinfo.himolde.no/forskningsgrupper/optimering
The group of operations research at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) is the largest optimization group to be found at Norwegian universities. The group has specialized in discrete and stochastic optimization. Optimization within transport, logistics, and supply chain management are focal points of the group. The Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management (IØT) is giving both a Master and a PhD program in these areas, and some 15 master students within transport and logistics optimization are educated each year. At the moment 10 PhD students are specializing in this area. The group of operations research has recently been very active in VRP research. Numerous technical and applied papers on VRP-related problems have been published in recent years, particularly in the area of ship routing. These activities have been noticed abroad, leading to several invitations to give tutorials and plenary talks on the VRP at international conferences and PhD schools, as well as invitations to write chapters in renowned handbooks and journals.
Website: http://www.ntnu.edu/iot
The SINTEF Group is a Norwegian multi-disciplinary contract research organization with around 2.200 employees. The Department of Applied Mathematics at SINTEF (SAM) has some 40 research scientists. More than 50 % are doctorates. The Group of Optimization started its work in 1987 and currently has a staff consisting of 12 highly qualified research scientists.
During the past 15 years, the main focus of the Group has been transport optimization, see http://www.sintef.no/Transportation-planning. Currently, the activities cover most transportation modalities, and both goods and passenger transportation. It is particularly known internationally for its work on rich variants of the VRP, and has co-edited special issues on rich models in discrete optimization and rich VRP models. It has co-authored a chapter containing a categorized bibliography on metaheuristics for the VRP. Together with its DOMinant-partners, SINTEF has published survey papers on inventory routing and fleet composition, also covering industrial aspects. Another key area is large-scale applications where combined node and arc routing formulations are particularly relevant (in particular, variants of the Mixed Capacitated General Routing Problem), such as newspaper delivery, postal delivery, and garbage collection. The Group has co-authored a chapter on software tools in the second edition of the VRP book edited by Toth and Vigo. Similarly, a book chapter on newspaper delivery has been accepted for a new book on arc routing problems edited by Corberan and Laporte. The Group is also known internationally for its work on GPU computing and heterogeneous computing in discrete optimization. A tutorial and a survey paper on GPU computing in discrete optimization with focus on routing problems were published in 2013.
The group organized The International Workshop on Vehicle Routing in Practice in 2008. The workshop gathered both highly reputed senior researchers from abroad and Norwegian senior and junior researchers on vehicle routing. The DOMinant II partners organized TRISTAN VII - The Seventh Triennial Symposium on Transportation Analysis in 2010. In 2014, the partners plus the Norwegian School of Economics organize VeRoLog 2014 - The third meeting of the EURO Working Group on Vehicle Routing and Logistics Optimization.
The group performs extensive computational experiments on several variants of the VRP, both real-life cases and standard benchmarks from the literature. It has produced several of the currently best known results on standard test instances for VRP variants known as CVRP, DVRP, VRPTW, FSMVRPTW, PDPTW, and MCGRP. At the TOP web site SINTEF maintains the best known solutions for standard benchmarks for the VRPTW, the PDPTW and the MCGRP.
In addition to the long-term collaboration with NTNU and MUC, the group has a collaboration agreement with the CIRRELT research group in Canada. The Group has a large scientific and industrial network, and collaborates with several research institutions and users in industry and the public sector at any time.
The development of models and algorithms at SINTEF has produced a generic solver for rich VRPs called Spider. A spin-off company, Spider Solutions AS, was established in 1999 for commercialization. It is now the largest vendor of DSSs for vehicle routing in Norway. Spider is also exploited through Norkart AS, Geomatikk AS, and Distribution Innovation AS. Similarly, the group has developed a generic solver for maritime IRP called Invent that has demonstrated large savings for the LNG operations of GDF Suez and Statoil.
Websites:
http://www.sintef.no/math
http://www.sintef.no/transportation-planning