Karen R. Smilowitz - US grants

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) research proposes to provide funding to develop operating strategies for goods movement. In particular, the research explores the impact of introducing operational choice into vehicle routing and scheduling. The research considers a diverse set of applications in routing for goods movement in both industry and non-profit agencies, including intermodal drayage operations and interlibrary loan delivery, with the common theme of developing and evaluating innovative strategies. These applications involve similar core optimization problems involving vehicle routing and scheduling with operational choice and illustrate the inherent tradeoffs from introducing increased choice. Allowing more flexibility in transportation systems can lead to increased logistics efficiency; yet, introducing flexibility in modeling and solution phases is challenging, as the scope and complexity of the optimization problems expand. This project will design and analyze algorithms to solve the resulting optimization problems. Longer-term plans include the study of broader issues related to the value of choice in terms of efficiency gains, as well as the complexities of introducing choice into difficult problems. The educational components of this CAREER program include hands-on student learning, interactive coursework, and programs that foster diversity in engineering. This proposal includes initiatives to promote student involvement in transportation research for women and minorities.

If successful, this research will improve the efficiency of distribution systems for goods movement in a variety of applications. In addition, the results of this career program can be extended well beyond transportation. The main output of this research will be a set of methodological tools that can be used by others for different applications.

While America has the strongest national economy with a GDP of 12.4 trillion dollars in 2005, thirty-six million Americans suffered from hunger in that same year. Twenty-five million of these Americans rely on America's Second Harvest (ASH) and their network of pantries, shelters and soup kitchens for food. The largest suppliers to these agencies are regional and local food banks, which serve as distribution centers to collect, store and distribute food. Much of this food comes from surplus food. According to the Department of Agriculture, 100 billion pounds of food are wasted each year in the United States. The goal of ASH and related agencies is to match surplus food with those in need. This matching is a large-scale distribution and inventory management operation, performed daily by thousands of non-profit agencies across the country. Much research has been conducted in academia and the private sector on supply chain problems in commercial settings where the goal is to maximize profit or minimize cost. Little work has been conducted in non-profit applications where the objectives are often more difficult to quantify since issues such as equity and sustainability must be considered. Our work will design efficient control and management principles for non-profit supply chains that are involved in food distribution, based on our on-going work with the Greater Chicago Food Depository, a member of the ASH network of food banks.

The alternative objectives of non-profit distribution operations lead to new variations of traditional problems in operations research and operation management. We consider dynamic inventory allocation problems and vehicle routing problems with non-traditional objective functions that are aimed at equity and sustainability rather than profit. Our main objective is to develop a series of analytical and simulation models to generate decision rules and insights for effective management of non-profit inventory/distribution networks. We believe that this project will strengthen the relationships between non-profit organizations and academia, and stimulate the interest of the operations research and operation management community toward studying operations of non-profit agencies.

In 2005, 6.5 million children in the United States suffered from asthma, a chronic respiratory disease characterized by periods of difficulty in breathing. Childhood asthma places severe burden on communities through emergency room visits and hospitalization due to lack of access to routine and continuous health care. Non-profit organizations, such as the Mobile C.A.R.E. Foundation (MCF), provide mobile care for childhood asthma through periodic visits to schools in metropolitan areas across the United States. Mobile care entails a complex array of operational decisions, including patient scheduling and capacity allocation, which are critical to ensuring that community health objectives are met effectively. This research investigates the link between operational decisions in a mobile environment and their impact on the community health outcomes. Three critical aspects of the research setting, chronic care, mobile delivery and non-profit environment, necessitate the creation of a new family of operations research models for planning, scheduling and resource allocation in health care operations compared to those developed for conventional settings such as primary care clinics and hospital outpatient departments.

This research will have significant impact at many levels. Operations research techniques can greatly improve the ability of MCF to provide essential health services to children from underserved communities in the Chicago region in a sustainable manner. Such operational improvement is especially critical during an economic downturn. The insights will be used to create a set of operational best practices to be disseminated to other organizations that operate mobile clinics for chronic conditions beyond asthma. The new operations models will contribute to the growing field of health care operations, and stimulate research in settings as varied as mobile health care for diabetes and for homeless and elderly, and mobile HIV clinics in Africa. The research will actively engage graduate and undergraduate students in analytical research and field work.

The goals of this research project are to (1) assess how new data streams available during a crisis can improve logistical decisions, and (2) facilitate data stream integration into humanitarian logistics operations, such as search-and-rescue (SAR) and relief distribution efforts. Since the devastating January 2010 Haitian earthquake, there has been an increasing use and a deeper understanding of the role of new technologies in disaster relief, as well as the challenges of integrating these technologies into response activities. The deliverables of this project will be a comprehensive data source taxonomy focused on humanitarian logistics and a formal description of the necessary processes to prepare real-time datasets for use in humanitarian emergencies. Furthermore, this work will identify needed advances in dynamic routing models to accommodate these new data streams and the complex set of decisions in the field. Field-based activities will bring together undergraduate/graduate students, faculty and practitioners.

Ultimately, this project will provide a framework for researchers in the field to further this line of work. The project also identifies a new class of routing models that combine orienteering and path planning problems needed to address the challenges of these unique problem settings. Integration of emerging data streams into humanitarian logistics, such as SAR operations, has potential to save lives and minimize suffering of people affected by natural disaster and other crises. The likelihood of success in model creation and implementation in practice will increase with a series of ongoing conversations between practitioners, inter-disciplinary research teams, humanitarian organizations and the broader crisis mapping community. This research will also impact undergraduate and graduate students by exposing them to new applications of their operations research knowledge.

This INSPIRE award is partially funded by the Science of Organization Program in the Division of Social and Economic Sciences in the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, and the Math and Science Partnership Program and the Discovery Research K-12 program in the Division of Research on Learning in the Education and Human Resources Directorate.

Our country faces a decline in student engagement, particularly in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines and among underrepresented minority groups. Most often this problem is discussed in the context of an achievement gap, where racial and socioeconomic groups perform unequally on academic assessments. To understand what creates the achievement gap, researchers must understand the STEM "opportunity gap" that exists between students from different backgrounds, where these same students achieve differently because of varying exposure to out-of-school enrichment and learning experiences. The STEM opportunity gap arises from the inequity of out-of-school learning experiences for children. Therefore, efforts to engage minorities and women in STEM in primary schools will only succeed if we consider the complex organizational environment in which primary schools operate. The focus of this study is on what interorganizational relationships are necessary for schools to maintain to ensure equitable, efficient, and effective opportunities for students to engage in STEM. External relationships require schools to commit time and resources, and schools must decide which relationships to develop and maintain. Understanding what kinds of relationships particular school types invest in and what level of effort to commit to maintaining those relationships is important for improving student engagement opportunities in STEM.

Specifically, the study explores the following issues in 9 schools across 3 neighborhoods in Chicago, IL:
(1) How student engagement in STEM is enabled and constrained by the school's relations with its external community.
(2) The similarities and differences in partnerships, particularly STEM-related partnerships, across different types of schools in three different urban neighborhoods by mapping networks, and assessing the costs and benefits of creating, maintaining, and dissolving network ties.
(3) How to model school and network decisions, relations, and resources using an operations research framework. The model prescribes network configurations that address strategic, tactical, and operational concerns, to ensure the school will equitably, efficiently, and effectively utilize partners to improve student engagement in STEM.

The objective of this Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) award is to improve medical preparedness, public safety and security at mass gathering events through the use of optimization methodologies. The nation engages in over 500 mass gathering events, such as marathons, each year. Such events are subject to medical emergencies for the participants, and other security related events. This GOALI project brings together engineering and medical faculty at Northwestern University and the organizers of the Bank of America Chicago Marathon to study approaches for the mitigation of hazards and risks through course design. In the case of a marathon, course design decisions are related to the route to be followed and the locations of aid stations, medical tents and volunteers on the course. Multi-objective models and solution approaches will be developed for course design, coupled with data analytics and field observations to identify a safe and medically accessible course. The research plan is based on active integration across the areas of modeling, algorithms, data analysis and decision maker engagement.

If successful, the results of this research will lead to advances in medical preparedness and response for a variety of mass gathering events. This project provides a test bed to advance the science and practice of mass event planning and preparedness, through repeated field observations at the Chicago Marathon, conducted by faculty, students, and practitioners. Given connections across city of Chicago and within the marathon community, the research team will host seminars to disseminate best practices from this research to other mass events in the Chicago region and worldwide. This GOALI project represents a unique application of operations research that will expose students to a new type of planning problems. The operations research modeling will lead to new developments in multi-objective arc routing models, by introducing new classes of arc routing problems and creating solution methods for these problems. Further, this work will lead to new approaches to multi-objective optimization based on the iterative generation of promising solutions with input from decision makers.

This PFI: AIR Technology Translation project focuses on translating operations research models and data analytics to improve situational awareness and decision making for mass gathering events. Such mass gathering events are growing in popularity, and thus require significant resources to ensure safety and success. To date, event management tools have not grown to meet this need. This project is designed to address these gaps in event management tools. The research proposed in this project significantly expands the development of a Data Visualization System focused on medical preparedness for mass gathering events, originally conceived for marathons. This system was created for event organizers and relevant stakeholders to effectively manage and oversee all participants, monitor the dynamic location of participants, and manage health and safety resources throughout the event, both under normal operating conditions and in the event that emergency issues arise. The system provides a dynamic representation of the flow of people and resources: at the core is a novel simulation tool that predicts and displays runner density on the course over time. The data visualization system is the first comprehensive dashboard for endurance event management. The project will result in a significant ramp-up of the current prototype of the data visualization system to expand functionality and make the system more turn-key. The project will also result in the development of a business plan for commercialization, working with Northwestern University's Innovations and New Ventures Office (INVO). While this system was initially developed for marathons, its applicability can go beyond endurance events.

This project addresses several important technology gaps as it translates from research discovery toward commercial application. The innovation of the data visualization system comes from the integration of data visualization, participant and resource flow simulation, event data, and event management services. As such, the next steps towards commercialization will require advances in data analytics related to event data and operations research decision tools that leverage the data analysis. System capabilities will be expanded in new directions to allow us to scale up the technology for broader applicability. The project focuses in three areas: (1) upgrading the simulation model to capture additional flows of resources and participants; (2) merging new streams of event data to more fully capture the nuances of mass gathering events, and (3) developing new event management services that improve decision making for mass gathering events. In addition, personnel involved in this project, undergraduate and graduate students, will receive innovation and entrepreneurship experiences through INVO. In particular, INVO offers a series of internship and fellowship programs for these students.

The project engages experts in event management and emergency response to guide commercialization aspects, specifically focusing on needed system functionalities in this technology translation effort from research discovery toward commercial reality.

Public school districts in the United States are under great pressure to improve operations and reduce costs of support services in order to better support classroom education. Expanding on a partnership with a densely populated suburban school district, this project provides a comprehensive approach to improving student transportation needs. The project will support optimization-based approaches to district-wide school bus routing that address staggered bell schedules, mixed fleet capacity, community bus stops, and after school transportation needs. More broadly, this research project will support better planning and decision-making for urban public transit in locations with grid-like road networks. The educational component includes the involvement of K-12 teachers in developing modules to help students understand the value of operational methods to provide decision-making support for complex, practical problems, such as transportation planning.

This work introduces an innovative approach to the joint problem of vehicle stop selection and vehicle route generation, leveraging the underlying grid-like structure of the road network to obtain robust, implementable solutions. Methodological advances revolve around analyzing the Covering Path Problem with non-uniform distances between stops. While the Covering Path and Hamiltonian Path Problems are in general NP-hard, even on general grid graphs, this project will investigate trade-offs between stop-minimizing designs and length-minimizing designs. Starting with analysis of the single vehicle, single destination covering path problem on a complete grid, the problem setting is generalized to consider the multiple vehicle, multiple destination problem. Complexities in the school bus routing context, including robustness to demand, staggered school starting schedules, and mixed capacity fleet availability are also addressed. This research will lead to advances in route optimization modeling and solution approaches and contribute to a growing literature on routing problems with special network structure.

This grant supports the 22nd International Symposium on Transportation and Traffic Theory (ISTTT) to be held July 24-26, 2017, in Evanston, Illinois. The symposium will showcase 35 original papers drawn from a pool of over 300 submissions from around the world. A special workshop session will be held to explore additional ways of placing the symposium findings into professional practice. This award will cover fellowships to foster participation from a selected set of advanced graduate students from underrepresented groups.

Since its inception, the ISTTT has been the premier gathering of transport theorists. The coming Evanston Symposium promises to build on that tradition: the papers accepted for the event represent breakthrough research from around the world. These papers have the potential to challenge current thinking about transport science, and perhaps even to transform the field. And the papers address a variety of pressing topics in transportation: they include ideas for promoting greener, more sustainable travel modes, and for transporting people and goods in emergency situations. Given the role that transportation plays in the world and in the lives of her people, the ideas unveiled in the coming symposium are expected to be of significance. An outcome of this workshop includes a report that summarizes the main intellectual achievements of the conference. The report will describe the key challenges raised, new problems identified, and main innovations proposed by the contributors of the conference.

This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) grant will document and investigate the deployment and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines as a large-scale complex extreme logistics event. Given the unique unprecedented scale, magnitude and urgency of this operation, and its fast-moving nature, it is imperative to document its development and deployment, and extract lessons for the planning, design and operation of future extreme logistical operations. Controlling the virus through vaccination will normalize economic and social life in the US and around the world, reopening vital local, regional, and international economies. Given the huge toll of lost lives, productivity and economic output, along with poor educational and mental health outcomes, it is imperative to take stock of the vaccine deployment process, extracting lessons for future extreme logistical operations including future pandemics, health threats, and responses to major natural and man-made disasters.

This study will document in real-time the state of the COVID-19 vaccine supply chain, including vaccination rates over time, provide interim guidance for the latter portions of the continuing deployment process, and extract lessons learned and principles for the robust design and resilient operation of future extreme logistics deployments, including other health-related crises and disaster response situations. The study findings will help address questions about (1) the capacity of the US logistics system and overall biopharma supply chain to deliver vaccine at the desired scale and in the desired urgent time frame, (2) the time frames required to reach target vaccination levels, (3) the main vulnerabilities in the vaccine supply chain and distribution process, (4) resilience of the overall supply chain viz. disruptions due to various sources, (5) equity of the logistical processes in terms of reaching traditionally underserved populations, and (6) the value of real-time information in enhancing the robustness and resilience of extreme logistics processes and building public trust in these processes. This work will be further informed by an advisory board of experts and stakeholders engaged in the distribution process. The scientific significance arises from the unprecedented scale, urgency and complexity of the logistics processes, featuring (a) decisions made by multiple interacting agents from considerably different domains, (b) many sources of stochasticity and disruption potential, (c) strongly interacting network elements with potential for cascading failure, and (d) hierarchical processes featuring strong centralized control at upper levels with highly decentralized loose coupling at lower levels.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.