Come join ISE’s faculty and fellow students as they welcome Xu Sun from the University of Florida as he discusses the use of a battery-powered server when considering a dynamic scheduling problem for a multiclass, single-server queue.
As always refreshments will be served from 10:30 – 10:50 am in room 428 Daniels Hall.
As a model of a drone delivery system, we consider a dynamic scheduling problem for a multiclass, single-server queue. A distinctive feature of our system is that the server is battery-powered and each service would consume a certain amount of energy. Once depleted, the battery will be swapped out for a fully charge done. Thus, the total energy consumption for the duration between two consecutive battery swaps (hereafter referred to as a “cycle”) cannot exceed the capacity of the battery. The delivery system serves multiple demand streams, each having a class-dependent (per-time-unit) holding cost and energy consumption rate. The system manager strives to minimize the long-run average holding cost by dynamically making sequencing decisions subject to battery charge constraints. The exact analysis of the scheduling problem seems intractable. Therefore, we resort to an approximation in the heavy traffic regime. In that regime, we characterize the dynamics of the parcel delivery operation and derive the control policy where job classes are prioritized according to a workload-dependent dynamic index rule. However, unlike known results where the prioritizing process is made by dynamically assigning an available to a job from one of the classes, the prioritization is achieved by optimally selecting a portfolio of jobs that can be accomplished with a full battery at the beginning of each cycle
Dr.Sun serves as an Assistant Professor of Data Analytics and Applied Operations Research in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida. His research includes the analysis and optimization of stochastic service systems, the theory of stochastic process limits, and the design and control of sustainable urban transport systems. His research findings were published in premier OR/OM journals, includingManufacturing & Service Operations Management, Operations Research Letters, European Journal of Operations Research,Mathematics of Operations Research, and Stochastic Systems. He was a finalist in the Best Student Paper Competition in INFORMS Finance Section in 2017, a recent recipient of the Travel Award from the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications in 2018, and a winner of the Engineering Graduate Student Council Professional Development Scholarship from Columbia University.
