【Time】13:30-16:55, May 10th, 2017, Wednesday

【Venue】Room B310, No.6 Teaching Building

【Host】Dr. Hai Jiang

【Talk #1】Airports as Queueing Systems: Capacity, Delays and Demand Management

【Abstract】Many of the busiest and most important airports in the world have become very congested, resulting in serious air traffic delays, which are costly to airlines and their passengers.  In order to better understand how to reduce or manage these delays, it is very useful to study these congested airports as queueing systems, where the demand rates are the number of scheduled flights per hour and service rates are determined by the capacity of the airport’s runways.  In this talk, we will see how to develop such queueing models and discuss the sensitivity of air traffic delays to changes in various characteristics of demand and of runway capacity.  We will also describe the demand management procedure which is followed at the busiest airports to limit the number of flights that can be scheduled during peak hours.

【Speaker】Prof. Amedeo R. Odoni, MIT

【Bio Note】Amedeo Odoni is the T. Wilson Chair Professor Emeritus of Aeronautics and Astronautics and of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, where he served for 46 years on the faculty. His research has focused on Operations Research and its applications to transportation and to urban services. He has been the Co-Director of the National Center of Excellence in Aviation Operations Research (1996-2010) and of MIT’s Operations Research Center (1986-91) and has more than 100 professional publications and 9 books to his credit, including the well-known textbooks Urban Operations Research (with R. C. Larson) and Airport Systems (with R. de Neufville). He is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of INFORMS, and the recipient of many awards for his teaching and research. He has also served as consultant to many of the busiest airports in the world on projects related to airport planning and design and to air traffic management.

【Talk #2】 Cases of Operations Research in On-Demand Transportation Systems

【Abstract】Transportation was one of the earliest application areas of operations research, and important transportation problems contributed to fundamental knowledge in operations research. In the age of big data under booming sharing economy, various on-demand transportation systems arise and become critical for everyday transportation service. The operational and managerial challenges of these on-demand transportation services are one of the most important and vibrant areas of operations research. In this talk, we introduce four research cases regarding on-demand transportation systems, including (1) performance approximation of a last mile transportation system; (2) routing and scheduling operation of a flexible bus system; (3) pricing and wage commission for Uber-like on-demand service platform; and (4) an information inference methodology applied in transportation demand modeling.

【Speaker】Assistant Prof. Hai Wang, Singapore Management University

【Bio Note】Hai Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Area of Intelligent Systems & Decision Analytics at Singapore Management University. He held Bachelor degree from Tsinghua University, Dual Master degrees in Operations Research and Transportation from MIT, and Doctoral degree from MIT’s Operations Research Center. His research has focused on Operations Research and its application to transportation and urban services. Particularly, he is interested in on-demand transportation service systems. He also explores research in big data inference and healthcare analytics. He has papers published and/or reviewed in “Transportation Science”, “American Economic Review Papers & Proceedings”, “Manufacturing & Service Operations Management”, and “Transportation Research Part B”. He also served as the co-President of MIT Chinese Students & Scholars Association and co-President of MIT-China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum.

All interested are welcome!