Abstract: In recent years, some of the most talked-about developments in the transportation sector include the use of drones, the introduction of last-mile delivery services, and the use of large-scale mapping data. Along with these new developments comes a host of new problems and trade-offs. We will discuss two such problems and use the “continuous approximation paradigm” to reveal basic insights about those factors that influence them most significantly.
Bio: John Gunnar Carlsson is the Kellner Family Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California. He received a Ph.D. in computational mathematics from Stanford University in 2009 and an A.B. in music and mathematics from Harvard College in 2005. He is the recipient of Popular Science magazine’s Brilliant 10 Award, the AFOSR Young Investigator Prize, the INFORMS Computing Society (ICS) Prize, and the DARPA Young Faculty Award, and serves as an Associate Editor for Operations Research, Management Science, Transportation Science, and Computers and Operations Research.