DAO-ISEM-IORA Seminar Series: Nicholas G. Hall

Nicholas G. Hall

BIZ1 0202

Vehicle Platooning

Vehicle platooning offers significant benefits, including reduced energy consumption, lower emissions, improved road utilization, enhanced safety, and reduced driver fatigue. As intelligent driving technologies continue to advance, platoon sizes are expected to increase substantially, making the efficient sequencing and resequencing of vehicles increasingly important. We study the vehicle platoon sequencing and resequencing problem on road networks with varying segment lengths under two fundamental objectives: minimizing total energy consumption and minimizing the maximum energy consumption of any vehicle. For the typically encountered combinations of vehicle and road characteristics, we provide a complete computational complexity classification, either developing polynomial-time algorithms or proving computational intractability. For several intractable cases, we design fully polynomial-time approximation schemes and polynomial-time heuristics with provable performance guarantees. A computational study demonstrates that the proposed heuristics achieve average solutions within 1% of optimal. We also consider settings in which only limited information about position-dependent energy savings is available and develop a heuristic with bounded worst-case performance. In addition, we present an efficient algorithm for on-road vehicle resequencing when only limited position changes are permitted. Together, these results provide a comprehensive algorithmic framework for energy-efficient vehicle platoon sequencing and resequencing.

Nicholas G. Hall is Berry Family Professor of Operations & Business Analytics, Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University. He holds B.A., M.A. degrees in economics (University of Cambridge), and a Ph.D. in Management Science (U.C., Berkeley). His research and teaching interests are in project management, scheduling, and sports analytics. He has published over 100 articles in Operations Research, Management Science, Mathematics of Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, Games and Economic Behavior, Interfaces, and others. He has served for over 47 years on the editorial boards of Operations Research and Management Science, and given over 450 academic presentations, 200 invited presentations in 29 countries, 21 conference keynote presentations, and 10 INFORMS tutorials. In 2018, as President of INFORMS, he initiated a government outreach program yielding 30 briefings at The White House and over 500 on Capitol Hill. A 2021 bibliometric study published in Operations Research ranked him 1st in the field of scheduling (1952–2019). He has authored 8 of the 128 most cited articles in the h-index of Operations Research. He served as President of Manufacturing and Service Operations Management society during 1999-2000. He is a Fellow of INFORMS. He is serving as Editor of the multimedia publication INFORMS Analytics Collections (2021-2026). In 2022, he published Supply Chain Scheduling (Springer, 706 pp), with Zhi-Long Chen.