Seminar: Practical applications of subadditive Euclidean functional theory

Here is an interesting talk by an ISE professor, Dr. John Gunnar Carlsson, which will be given on Wednesday (April 13th) in Christmas-Saucon Hall room 201 at 4:10 pm. Tea, coffee, and cookies will be served at 3:30 pm in XS 107 (math department commons room).

Abstract: Subadditive Euclidean functional theory deals with the asymptotic
behavior of various well-known combinatorial structures, such as travelling
salesman tours, minimum spanning trees, and minimum matchings.  In this talk
we describe two algorithms currently in use by the Boeing Company that make
use of major results in this subject.  The first problem is a stochastic
vehicle routing problem in which our goal is to partition a planar service
region into sub-regions so as to balance the workloads of a fleet of
vehicles; we assume that the locations of the vehicles' destinations are
unknown, but follow a given probability density.  In the second problem, our
goal is to describe the "worst-case" density that maximizes the workload of
a fleet of vehicles, given information regarding the first and second
moments of the (unknown) density function.

Speaker Bio:  John Gunnar Carlsson is an assistant professor in Industrial
and Systems Engineering at the University of Minnesota.  His research
interests include computational geometry, geometric probability, and
optimization.  He received an AB in mathematics and music from Harvard
University in 2005 and a PhD in computational mathematics from the Institute
for Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University in
2009.