SmartPort Community Lunch meeting February 16th 2016

Speaker: Ioannis Fragkos, RSM

Time: 12.00-13.30

Location: T03-42 Mandeville building

"Optimizing transshipment operations for the Noble group"

The Noble Group is a global supply chain manager of agricultural and energy products and metals, minerals and ores. It is headquartered in Hong Kong, and operates in over 140 locations. This talk describes a modelling framework developed for Noble's coal transhipment operations, which include the transportation of coal from several mines to jetties, where it is loaded onto river barges, which then transport the coal to ports where it is transferred onto ocean vessels using floating cranes. Noble incurs penalties for delays and late deliveries, costing millions of dollars each month. Additional infrastructure can be hired on a spot basis to minimise the impact of delays, but it comes at a high cost. Our model is designed to minimise the cost of these transhipment operations, including penalties and cost of spot-market resources. The complexity and scale of the model, however, puts it beyond the capabilities of state-of-the-art solvers. Therefore, we develop a column generation procedure that provides strong lower bounds, and a fast local search algorithm that delivers high quality solutions. The modeling framework has been fully implemented in 2013, resulting in a significant decrease in Noble's overall shipping costs. Extensions to related problems will be discussed.

Short bio:

Ioannis is Assistant Professor in the Department of Technology and Operations Management, within the Rotterdam School of Management (RSM). Before joining RSM, Ioannis was an instructor at University College London, London Business School and London School of Economics, and a research scientist with the Department of Logistics and Operations Management at HEC Montreal. Ioannis has contributed to courses taught at undergraduate, postgraduate, MBA, EMBA and PhD level, and have collaborated with a variety of institutions. In RSM he teaches Operations Research Methods (MSc in Supply Chain Management), Management Science (MSc in Management) and Business Analytics (RSM Cologne EMBA).

Ioannis’s research focuses on decision analytics, decision support systems and the development of large-scale optimization models. His research has appeared in leading international academic journals, and has been applied in a variety of companies in the high-tech, maritime, transportation and education industries. Ioannis has collaborated with organizations such as the UK Department for Transport, Network Rail, the Noble Group, and London Business School. He is a regular speaker at international conferences in the area of decision analytics, operations management and management science, and a member of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS).