[agents] PhD position - DSS for freight intermodal transportation

[Emmanuel Adam]

PhD position in DSS for freight intermodal transportation - University  
of Valenciennes(FRANCE)

*Title*: A reactive decision support system for freight intermodal  
barge transportation services

*Financial support*: Doctoral Contract for three years (2012-2015)

*Co-director of the PhD*: A. Artiba (UVHC/LAMIH)
*Thesis supervisors*:
- I. Bilegan (UVHC/LAMIH), e-mail: ioana.bilegan at univ-valenciennes.fr
- E. Adam (UVHC/LAMIH), e-mail: emmanuel.adam at univ-valenciennes.fr

*Research Laboratory*: LAMIH UMR CNRS/UVHC 8201, Valenciennes;
Research Team: Decision, Interaction and Mobility (DIM)

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**Application**:

The candidate needs a strong background in Computer Sciences and/or in  
Operations Research including methods of modeling and optimization,  
discrete-event system simulation, as well as algorithms and data  
structures in C/C++ language; multi-agent systems knowledge would be  
appreciated. French language is not required. The scholarship is open  
to all nationalities.

An international internship of six months will have to be completed  
during the PhD thesis period, with the Professor T.G. Crainic, the  
Director of the Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory of the  
CIRRELT (Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks,  
Logistics and Transportation), Montreal, Canada.

To apply, please send by e-mail, to the thesis supervisors, the  
following documents: an extended CV (including a list of publications  
and scientific/technical reports), a certificate with scores and  
ranking during the last three years of academic studies, at least two  
letters of recommendation (or contacts of at least two referees) and a  
letter describing the motivations and the professional project of the  
candidate.

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**PhD Project**:

In the context of freight intermodal transportation, the goal of this  
research is to contribute to the development of sustainable  
transportation systems, and to allow and improve the modal transfer  
towards less polluting transportation modes, especially concerning the  
inland waterway network.

Taking advantage of a well-designed decision support system to manage  
intermodal transport activities is an essential asset. Up to now, many  
research initiatives and industrial projects tackled the complex  
problem of intermodal transportation chains organization, with a  
particular interest towards railways, as a ?greener? transportation  
alternative. Nevertheless, from this point of view, just a few  
published studies discuss about the inland waterway as an intermodal  
transportation alternative (Caris, 2011).

As a general framework, the approach of this type of transportation  
problems is as follows: on the basis of an existing demand knowledge,  
the service network design is done and services are planned on the  
middle-term (weeks, months), followed by the operational level  
activities optimisation on the short-term (hours, days) in order to  
minimise costs. The revenue management approach allows, at the  
operational level, the optimal assignment of services available  
capacities with respect to the forecasted demands, in order to  
maximise expected revenues of a company.

One of the innovative aspects of this research work is the application  
of revenue management concepts and thus the use of differential  
pricing strategies based on reasonable criteria for the clients. These  
policies are successfully applied in many different sectors, and are  
used by commercial airlines, for passenger transportation, for more  
than 30 years now. The concepts of revenue management have been  
proposed, in a basic form, in 1972 (Littlewood, 1972) and have not  
ceased to be developed and to gain in applications diversity (Boyd and  
Bilegan, 2003) since. Revenue management has become today a  
well-established research field in the domain of Operations Research  
(Talluri and van Ryzin, 2004). The constraints and specificities of  
applying revenue management to intermodal barge transportation make  
this research problem a challenging topic, which constitutes the  
central point of the doctoral study.

The second original aspect of this thesis is to provide demand  
forecasting by the use of a client behaviour modelling based on the  
multiagent system paradigm. Clients will be modelled with software  
agents that allow the definition of a typology of clients (by using  
roles), as well as of individual properties for each client. This  
?agentification? of clients allows the realization of more realistic  
simulations of their behaviours than by the use of classical models.  
The ?agentification? of service suppliers will also allow them to  
analyse, test and validate several strategies of transportation  
service offers. Some recent works have already shown the interest and  
pertinence of this approach (e.g. Cleophas 2012).

Those two approaches will lead to the design of a reactive decision  
support system to help the process of planning and management of  
intermodal transportation operations. The implementation of the  
decision support system will be done through the design of dedicated  
software, which will have to analyse the feasibility, the  
profitability and finally the acceptability of each incoming demand.  
This analysis and the decision-making will be done on the basis of the  
newest available information in the system, with respect both to the  
demand and to the transportation services offer. Information will be  
updated on a regular basis or in real-time, thus ensuring the  
reactivity of the system.

At the methodological and theoretical level, the project is concerned  
with problems of the following type: demand modelling and forecasting,  
optimal capacity allocation, stochastic and dynamic systems simulation  
and optimisation, and decision support systems design. At the  
application and implementation level, the project will benefit from  
the direct collaboration with a trans-frontier consortium made up of  
several major actors in maritime and river navigation and in inland  
waterway infrastructure management, in the Northern France and  
Belgium, who work together for the development of sustainable and  
integrated intermodal transportation innovative solutions.

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**Key-words**: revenue management, agent-based simulation, demand  
modelling, stochastic simulation, dynamic systems, decision support  
systems, intermodal freight transportation, inland waterway navigation.

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