Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ANR

ANR project AGIRE “Aide à la Gestion Intelligente des Ressources dans les Entrepôts - Decision system for smart management of resources in warehouses” in collaboration with Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne (Gardanne), IFSTTAR (Champs-sur-Marne), HappyChic (Tourcoing). This project addresses human resources management in warehouses which supply either sale points (B2B) or final consumers (B2C). Nowadays, such warehouses are under pressure. This is mainly due to the no inventory policy at the sale points and to the constant growth of e-commerce sales in France and Europe. In terms of logistics, this translates into an increasing number of parcels to prepare and to ship to satisfy an order, which is known typically a few hours before. Moreover, the total number of products to be packed varies very significantly from day-to-day by a factor of at least 3 (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happychic).

The novelty of the project is twofold: (1) The human factor is explicitly be taken into account. It is integrated in the mathematical models and algorithms that are developed for the project. The aim is to improve the quality of employees' work ensuring the efficiency of the logistic system; (2) Problems at different decision levels are integrated and tackled jointly. At the tactical level, the main problematics are workload smoothing and the management of the storage zone. At operational level, the major issues concern the rearrangement of the picking zone, the picking tours, and the dynamic reorganization of activities to manage uncertainties.

ANR project PI-Commodality “Co-modal freight transportation chains: an approach based on physical internet” in collaboration with CGS-ARMINES (Paris), LAAS (Toulouse), DHL (2016 - 2019). The PI-co-modality project aims to design new sustainable logistic services between preset origins and destinations. It is based on innovative approaches both in terms of: (1) Logistics and transportation services: by considering the PI-internet approach, specifically: mesh logistics and transportation networks based on available capacities, by designing consistent integrated co-modal chains; (2) Methodology: by addressing the underlying problems according to two approaches: centralized and decentralized, by proposing news realistic models relevant for practitioner taking into account the consistency, by developing state-of-the-art decision making algorithms.

F.R.S.-FNRS (Belgium)

Bilevel optimization is a branch of mathematical optimization that deals with problems whose constraints embed an auxiliary optimization problem. The F.R.S.-FNRS research project “bilevel optimization” (2018-2019) will study such bilevel problems with bilinear objectives and simple second level problems. Each follower chooses one strategy in a given fixed set of limited size. Two classes of such problems will be studied: Pricing Problems and Stackelberg Security Games.

In pricing problems, prices for products must be determined to maximize the revenue of a leader given specific behaviors of customers (followers). More precisely, we will consider the single minded pricing problem and the rank pricing problem.

In Stackelberg games, mixed strategies to cover targets,must be determined in order to maximize the defender expected payoff given that attackers (followers) attack targets that maximize their own payoffs.