Gizem Özbaygın, a faculty member at the Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences (FENS), Sabancı University was found eligible for the TÜBİTAK 3501 fund.
Gizem Özbaygın’s project supported under the TÜBİTAK 3501 fund, a career development program, is entitled “Approaches to finding cost-effective and visually attractive solutions for multi-period vehicle routing and scheduling problems.”
According to the project, the goal when discussing problems in the vehicle routing and scheduling literature is to find routes that have the lowest total cost. However, if a route plan consists of routes scattered over large areas and intersecting with each other, it is not always preferred in practice due to a number of operational difficulties or restrictions, even it offers the lowest possible cost. Instead, low-cost, but at the same time “visually attractive” routes can be more easily implemented by planners and adopted by drivers.
In this project, mathematical formulations and effective solution methods will be developed and tested based on optimization for finding visually attractive and low-cost routes with a balanced workload to solve multi-period vehicle routing and scheduling problems. No such comprehensive study that contains all mentioned elements together is not available in the literature. It is expected that the proposed modeling and solution approaches will also guide various rich ARP types that are encountered in practice and have similar elements.
The aim of the project is to evaluate the benefits it can provide in practice by developing and testing effective solution methods for a class of problems that actually exist, but do not have a systematic solution. The success of the developed methods will also be tested on the actual problem data.