Events

The transportation of hazardous materials (hazmat) has drawn significant attention from various stakeholders due to the undesirable impacts on the environment and public health. Focusing on the connection between the traffic and the risk associated with the hazmat shipments, the present research aims to assist the regulator in designing a policy of dual tolls, imposed on both hazmat and non-hazmat shipments, to mitigate the hazmat risk in a road network.

Supervisor: Fatih Erenay

Automatic generation of text is an important topic in natural language processing with applications in tasks such as machine translation and text summarization. In this thesis, we explore the use of deep neural networks for generation of natural language. Specifically, we implement two sequence-to-sequence neural variational models - variational autoencoders (VAE) and variational encoder-decoders (VED).

A Cross-Dock (CD) is a synchronized unit of a supply chain network, used to sort the goods received from inbound trucks (from a warehouse or factory), and load those products to outbound trucks (for delivery of the goods to retail stores in the supply chain network). Most cross-docks use forklifts, and other manual material handling equipment (MHE) to process the goods on pallets received from inbound trucks. Those pallets are sorted and loaded onto outbound trucks.

Supervisors

Frank Safayeni

Selcuk Onay

This paper investigates the impacts of two environmental policies: pollution abatement subsidy and emission tax, on a three-tier supply chain, where the manufacturer distributes via multiple competitive retailers and invests in a pollution abatement technology in manufacturing. The government pursues social welfare maximization, while the manufacturer and retailers are profit driven. We find that the subsidy policy offers the manufacturer greater incentives to abate pollution and yields higher profits for channel members.

Supervisors

Mark Hancock, Management Sciences

Miguel Nacenta, Management Sciences

Is communicating via Skype or other video media equivalent to a face-to-face meeting? We have known for some time that after interacting face-to-face, people can predict the cooperative behaviour of strangers with better-than-chance accuracy. But is this ability affected when communications are mediated by video technology? This study reports four laboratory experiments examining how different communication conditions affect cooperation prediction efficacy.