Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Transportation scipline and motivate its continuous development.***Our long-term objectives are to 1) Advance knowledge in OR and TL and disseminate the results broadly; 2) Transform results into innovative methods and decision-support tools for transfer to users; 3) train HQP; 4) Contribute to meet the TL challenge to simultaneously achieve the highest levels of efficiency, profitability, competitiveness, 2) City Logistics proposing new organizational and business models for the management of urban TL to decrease congestion, emissions and fossil fuel consumption within a sustainable urban development context; 3) New collaborative interurban TL mechanisms to fully use available capacity, add value to stakeholders, 4) Autonomous-vehicle fleet operations in urban (flexible transit and City Logistics) and interurban (truck platooning) environments; 5) Large-scale multi-layer multi-period Network Design with structural constraints and uncertainty; 6) Multi-attribute time-dependent Vehicle Routing and Location-Routing problems with several decision layers and synchronization. ***The research program aims for significant contributions to scientific knowledge and, through technological transfer, increase the efficiency and productivity of Canadian TL systems. Results will be widely and openly disseminated through presentations, technical reports and papers in refereed journals. We address major OR problems and expect our results not only to modify the state of the art and the way problems are addressed, but also to open new research perspectives in network design, routing, methods for stochastic programs, meta-heuristics, and parallel computation. We study core issues in TL and are setting standards in planning City Logistic systems. We expect to accompany authorities in addressing these challenges for Canadian cities, and our results to contribute to enhance the efficiency of TL systems in economic, service quality, impact on society and new technology terms and, thus contribute to the harmonious and sustainable development of our cities and country.**