Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Yıldız B.(Yürütücü), Bayram V.
TÜBİTAK Projesi, 2022 - 2025
"The lack of an infrastructure to facilitate the fast and economical distribution of social aids is one of the main obstacles to enhancing the scope and the quality of the social aid efforts, which constitute one of the main pillars of solidarity and unity in our societies. Especially in large cities, the difficulties related to last-mile delivery operations (high economic and environmental cost) results in spending a significant part of the aid resources for delivery expenditures or blocking a substantial in-kind donation potential. In this project, we aim to address this critical issue and propose to develop a novel social aid distribution (SAD) network that takes advantage of the emerging smart transportation applications. For the first time in the literature, we propose to use existing public transit (PT) systems to constitute a backbone network to transfer in-kind donations in an urban area and place collection/transshipment centers (CTC) in the selected PT stations to facilitate transportation of goods between origins/destination points of the donations and the public transit system by the volunteer couriers. The project will introduce the SAD network design and management problem to the literature and develop exact algorithms to solve them. In the design problem, we will focus on the strategic level location and capacity decisions to decide where to place CTCs and determine which PT lines to include in the system. In the network-management problem, we will determine the optimal package routing decisions to maximize the social value while respecting the transportation capacity limits. We plan to develop novel Benders Decomposition and branch-and-price algorithms to solve the mixed-integer programs we will use to model these complex problems. We will conduct extensive numerical experiments with realistic problem instances to test the computational performance of the suggested solution methods and derive critical managerial insights for the design and management of the SAD networks. The envisioned SAD networks provide tremendous opportunities to enhance social solidarity, combat poverty, and prevent waste, especially in large cities. It can provide a critical infrastructure to facilitate new approaches to improve the social benefits through aids and eliminating economic and environmental losses due to waste. As an important advantage SAD networks does not impose significant economic and sustainability burdens while delivering such crucial capabilities. We believe, demonstrating the considerable potential of the SAD to unlock a significant in-kind donation potential through the project studies will create a strong motivation both for the public and the decision-makers to realize such a system. We also foresee that the novel solution methods we will develop for the challenging optimization problems we will study in the project will attract significant attention from academicians and practitioners working on similar network design and management problems. Many cities around the world would be interested in SAD networks, hence designing and producing the needed equipment for this new system can create a substantial market. Our country's institutions and companies can take leading roles in these activities to generate significant economic benefits and new jobs. Considering all these far-reaching social, economic, and scientific impacts, we expect that the outcomes of the project studies would attract considerable attention on a global scale, get published in the leading scientific journals and conferences, and trigger new national and international projects."