Nenad Mladenovic

Session topic: Intelligent Algorithm

Session chairman: Nenad Mladenovic, a research professor and a team leader in Mathematical institute, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, Serbia. He used to work in Serbia, Canada, UK and France as a professor. As a researcher, he got many visiting positions at more than dozen universities. He is a Member of Academia Europea and has published more than 200 papers. He serves as an editor-in-chief of one OR journal and being the editorial board member of more than dozen international journals. His international reputation can be seen by more than dozen plenary and invited talks just in last 5 years. He was the leader of many industrial projects such as Human nutrition in Yugoslav Army, Avis rent a car - Information system, Pooling in ULTRAMAR oil company, Hydro Quebec and Unit commitment, Pipeline design in South Gabon oil fields, Maintenance of railway infrastructure in France. He has been leading a research team in Serbia with more than 20 researchers in the past 15 years.

Title: Efficient and robust optimization methods for railway infrastructure logistics and maintenance

Abstract: Maintenance of railway infrastructure is very important and costly activity. It is an important part in railway traffic planning within a country. Maintenance should be performed periodically, on each part of the railway track, including so-called capillary networks. However, optimization problems that occur are very complex and hard. Therefore, heuristics are usually used in solving. In this talk I will present several such problems that are formulated as logistics and maintenance optimization problems. The robust techniques are mostly based on Variable neighborhood search (VNS) and Formulation space search (FSS), meta-heuristics that, together with my collaborators, I proposed in 1995 and 2005, respectively.