In my recent course on transportation and distribution systems for undergraduate business students I used a week talking about vehicle routing problems (VRP). Since their math skills aren’t that high the focus was not on algorithms instead I tried to talk about the general structure of the problem. Here the site logvrp.com is very good and provide a way of making a realistic problem case. Logvrp is a web based vehicle route planner software cable of minimize transportation costs and to minimize fleet mileages. It uses Google maps to display routes and trips. Moreover, it supports many different VRP problems. Current two heuristics are implemented and can be run simultaneously on a problem instance. This is a good thing since the students can see that the heuristics behave differently on the same instance and that there is no general winner. I created an exercise about a small-sized company located in […]
Yearly Archives: 2011
During the fall 2011 I have been teaching the course “Transportation and distribution systems” an optional course for undergraduate students. We have considered various topics within transportation such as its role in the global economy, modal choice, 3PL, VRP problems, flow problems, airline management, ITS, green logistics etc. Each week the students was given an exercise where they in most cases had to formulate and solve an mathematical programming model. I also have tried to introduce CPLEX OPL studio to them with minor success. Mostly they like to formulate their models in Excel and with OpenSolver it is possible even for quite large models.
The 28. November 2011 I was participating in the first YDOR conference at Aarhus University, Business and Social Sciences. First, a big thank to the organizer Sanne for still considering me as young. Next a thank to all the participants which all presented interesting topics. It was quite interesting
Yesterday I participated in a short course about how to teach large classes. Focus was on how to align teaching for constructive learning, collaborative learning techniques and other active learning tricks. The main point can be summarized in this statement “If students are to learn desired outcomes in a reasonably effective manner, then the teacher’s fundamental task is to get students to engage in learning activities that are likely to result in their achieving those outcomes… It is helpful to remember that what the student does is actually more important in determining what is learned than what the teacher does.” (Shuell, 1986: 429)