Fall 2009 Seminar Series

DATE: September 24th
LOCATION: E51-325
TIME: 4:15pm
Reception immediately following in the ORC ConferenceRoom, E40-106

SPEAKER:
Srinivas Bollapragada

TITLE
Dispatching Trains on Rail Networks; Optimizing Insurance Portfolios

ABSTRACT
Over the past fourteen years at GE Research I had the opportunity to work on a number of interesting problems from diverse industries. In this talk I will describe some of my recent work including the following.

 

Movement Planning Algorithm: A movement plan is a detailed plan for moving trains in a rail network over a time horizon of 8 to 12 hours. It is also called a meet-pass plan because it involves planning meet locations where trains traveling in opposite directions can get past each other as well as pass locations where fast trains can get past slower trains traveling in the same direction. Currently, dispatchers develop movement plans manually. We developed and implemented an algorithm at a major railroad company to automatically dispatch trains to increase average velocities.

 

Portfolio Optimization: Portfolio managers in the insurance industry are faced with asset-liability portfolio optimization problems where investment decisions are to be made to maximize return and minimize risk while matching the characteristics of the assets with those of the liabilities. For real world problems with thousands of assets, it is not possible to generate portfolio efficient frontiers in reasonable times. We developed and patented a novel, sequential linear programming algorithm that can generate efficient frontiers for large problems in a few minutes. Our algorithm is currently being used to manage assets worth over $100 billion.