transportation

Efficiency in modern industrial operations requires that available resources are deployed in an optimal manner. The study of facility location is concerned with the placement of one of more facilities in a way that meets a particular objective, such as minimizing transportation costs, providing a high level of service to customer or capturing market share. This project, by exploiting the mathematics of computational geometry and algorithmic graph theory, develops new tools to aid in the location of facilities to optimally serve the demands of customers.

The forest industry is an extremely important sector of Canadian economic activity as it represents the largest part of Canada’s trade surplus and 3% of its GDP. Canadian forests sustain an industry that continues to support a significant number of jobs. The worldwide increase in competition and excess production capacity have considerable implications for the situation of the Canadian forest industry and threaten its position in international markets.

 
About twenty-five years ago a spelunker was lost in a Pennsylvania cave system. A mathematician at Pennsylvania State University was asked to help design an efficient search of the cave system. This mathematician happened to be a graph theorist and as a cave system may be modelled as a graph, it led him to introduce the general problem of searching graphs.