Spring 2014 Seminar Series

DATE: 2/20/2014
LOCATION: E62-650
TIME: 4:15pm
Reception immediately following

SPEAKER:
Shane Henderson

TITLE
Real-Time Control of Ambulance Fleets, and Simulation Optimization using High-Performance Computing

ABSTRACT
In the first part of the talk I will discuss ambulance redeployment, in which an ambulance fleet is controlled in real-time to attempt to ensure short response times to calls. I'll focus on the use of simulation optimization to tune approximate-dynamic programs that yield highly effective policies, along with a coupling approach to compute a bound on the optimality gap. This work has motivated us to develop simulation-optimization algorithms that exploit parallel computing capabilities. In the second part of the talk, I'll discuss our work in developing "ranking and selection" algorithms for high-performance computing environments, and show results for runs using up to 1000 cores.