Waiting and rebalancing strategies in an urban waterborne transport environment

This thesis explores waiting and rebalancing strategies in urban waterborne transport, intending to improve the efficiency and operational performance of water transportation systems. The study is based on a review of the literature on waterborne transport and waiting and rebalancing strategies. This is followed by a case study where the found...

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: On exploration of solution reuse in VRPTW

Solving routing problems efficiently is instrumental in minimizing operational costs in logistics. These routing problems are hard to solve and often take a lot of time to find a good solution. In this thesis, we present a methodology that tackles the challenge of efficiently solving recurring instances of the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time...

Optimising storage assignment, order picker routing, and order batching for an e-grocery fulfilment centre: An exact and heuristic approach

With (e-)grocery retailers striving to increase their efficiency and subsequently reduce their costs, the opportunities that lie in optimising the order picking process of the supply chain is of key importance. The complex nature of assigning articles to an optimal storage location, having efficient routing of order pickers, and optimised...

Learning to Make Routing Decisions Based on Expert Examples

Logistics and mobility services play a major role in our society, and efficient routing is a crucial part of this. However, even though routing problems have been widely researched, the solutions provided by algorithms do not always match drivers' expectations. Routing costs used by these algorithms are often based on one or a few parameters,...

Revoke and Update: A More Flexible Payment Protocol for Payment Channel Networks

Payment channel networks (PCNs) are a promising solution to the blockchain scalability problem. They move payments off-chain, i.e., not all payments have to be included in the blockchain. Thus, they do not require that every payment is broadcast to all participants and verified by them. Not requiring global consensus reduces latency, computation...

Integrated modeling of utility networks in the urban environment

In recent years, there has been an exponential growth in the need for 3D spatial information, particularly 3D models representing the geographic information of the urban environment. The existence of a comprehensive integrated 3D model representing the condition of the underground utility networks in accordance with the above-ground city objects...

Optimal routing of individual vehicles in stochastic urban networks: A method to find optimal routes for generic cost functions, including reliability and travel time

Current day routing systems use predicted travel times to calculate optimal routes. Some routing algorithms even use predicted traffic lights states to optimize these routes and to improve the expected travel time. But all these methods optimize the expected travel time and do not take reliability into account. Reliability is a major service...

Implementation of Receiver Preferences in a Parcel Locker Network for Last Mile Deliveries

With the current growth of e-commerce, couriers need to serve a bigger demand and it is often the case that receivers are not at the location when their parcel is delivered. The use of parcel lockers is seen as a good option for improving the problem of failed deliveries. However, implementing a parcel locker network has an impact on both...

Mapping of quantum algorithms on a quantum chip: 2D topology with nearest neighbor interaction

Quantum algorithms can be described by quantum circuits which consist of quantum bits (qubits) and quantum gates. Such a circuit description assumes that any kind of interaction between qubits is possible. However, quantum chips have limited qubits connectivity only allowing, for instance, nearest-neighbor (NN) interactions. That means, qubits...

Reducing pipe penetration costs in shipbuilding: A new engineering & production approach to eliminate manual cutting by use of large predetermined openings

Western shipyards have to distinguish themselves by complex ships with short delivery times. This entails that in most cases the production already starts while the engineering has not even been finished. If the pipes and cables are not routed when the steel plate are cut by the CNC machine, the associated penetrations have to be cut manually...

An increased coordination in the organisation of transport in the floriculture supply chain

This research concerns the analysis of the organisation of transport of cut flowers from Dutch growers. The performance of transport in the current supply chain is analysed with a focus on the total transport costs, and the service level which is primarily defined by the lead time of products. Based on the assessment of the current performance...

A Domain Specific Language for Computation-in-Memory

The memory-wall problem is a big challenge that classical Von Neumann-based computer systems face. This problem is caused by the increasing performance gap between the main memory and the central processing unit. The novel Computation-in-Memory (CiM) architecture can solve the memory wall problem by using emerging memristor technology to perform...

Airport Surface Planning under Uncertainty

This thesis describes a solution to the Ground Movement Problem, formulated by Atkin et al. in 2010. It is described as a routing and scheduling problem and involves directing aircraft to their destinations in a timely matter, with the aim to either reduce the overall travel time and/or to meet some target time windows. A Markov Decision Process...

Designing the Video Capsule Endoscopy care path at Maasstad hospital

Healthcare is becoming more customer driven (CGI, 2014). Patients become more involved with their own health, and become an expert. The needs of these patients are changing regarding doctors and hospitals. Healthcare therefore becomes more person-centered, which asks for a change of hospitals. The patients are picking the hospital of their own...

Do we really need A Priori Link Quality Estimation?

Traditionally, link quality estimation (LQE) has been viewed as an a priori step in sensor network routing protocols because it filters out unreliable links before data transmission. Recent results, however, show that protocols can perform well without a priori LQE. Because getting rid of LQE seems rather counter-intuitive, the aim of this work...

Dynamic Routing using Ant-Based Control

Currently most car drivers use static routing algorithms based on the shortest distance between start and end position. But the shortest route is different from the fastest route in time. Because existing routing algorithms lack the ability to react to dynamic changes in the road network, drivers are not optimally routed. In this thesis we...