Methodology and Practice of Optimization Problems

Making decisions and optimization problems incorporate several criteria and preferences, which usually lead to conflicting conditions. To build successful teamwork and meetings, decision makers should improve the quality of the allocation by taking an acceptable, transparent, and fair decision. On 10 June 2022 Nahid Rezaeinia will defend her thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
Making decisions and optimization problems incorporate several criteria and preferences, which usually lead to conflicting conditions. To build successful teamwork and meetings, decision makers should improve the quality of the allocation by taking an acceptable, transparent, and fair decision. On 10 June 2022 Nahid Rezaeinia will defend her thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
PhD Defense

27 May 2022 13:05

Methodology and Practice of Optimization Problems

On Friday 10 June 2022 Nahid Rezaeinia will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend her thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.

Prescribed topic for the trial lecture:

«Multi-objective optimization: Modelling challenges within the Sustainable Development Goals SDG 11 and SDG 12»

  • SDG 11: Sustainable cities and communities
  • SDG 12: Responsible consumption and production

Trial lecture:

12:30, AUD N, NHH

Title of the thesis:

«Contributions to the Methodology and Practice of Optimization Problems with Multiple Preferences»

SUPERVISOR:

Professor Mario Guajardo, Department of Business and Management Science, NHH

Summary:

Nowadays, making decisions and optimization problems incorporate several criteria, objectives, and preferences, which usually lead to conflicting conditions. To build successful teamwork and meetings, decision makers should improve the quality of the allocation by taking an acceptable, transparent, and fair decision.

Although the users’ preferences have an increasing effect on the structure of allocation process and helps in doing a fair allocation that gives equal opportunities to the users, it may also increase the level of difficulty of the problem. Typically, there are two types of decision support tools for problems, which contain multiple criteria and multiple conditions. These are multi-objective approaches and multi-attribute approaches. This thesis consists of four chapters with particular attention to problems where a central decision maker must consider data on multiple preferences expressed by different persons.

Nahid Rezaeinia, PhD Candidate, Department of Business and Management Science, NHH.
Nahid Rezaeinia, PhD Candidate, Department of Business and Management Science, NHH.

The first chapter studies the conference-scheduling problem by considering attendees’ preferences. The main contribution of the paper is the development of a decomposition approach, first schedules sessions to time blocks, and then it schedules talks within the sessions.

The second chapter is motivated by an actual problem of allocation of students to business projects in a master’s program in Norway. The essay introduces an assignment problem and discusses modelling and solution approaches to incorporate both efficiency and fairness criteria.

The third chapter derived from the previous chapter and focuses on the methodological side of the trade-off between efficiency and Jain’s fairness index in the integer unbalanced assignment problem. Since the Jain’s fairness index is a non-concave function, which increases the difficulty of solving the optimization problem, the paper’s main contribution is developing reformulations to overcome this issue.

The fourth chapter focuses is on a decision-making situation where all conflicting criteria need to be considered in the rural road location selection process. This paper contributes to developing a multi-methodology approach and evaluating the alternatives, considering decision makers’ preferences.

Defense:

14:15, AUD N, NHH

Members of the evaluation committee:

Associate Professor Sigrid-Lise Nonås (leader of the committee), Department of Business and Management Science, NHH

Associate Professor Nubia Velasco, University of The Andes, Colombia

Associate Professor Cristóbal Miralles, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain

The trial lecture and thesis defense will be open to the public.