Remy Spliet obtains NWO Open Competition M - Science grant

The NWO M-grants in the Science domain are intended for realising curiosity-driven, fundamental research of high quality and/or scientific urgency. The M-grant offers researchers the possibility to elaborate creative and risky ideas and to realise scientific innovations that can form the basis for the research themes of the future.

Remy Spliet is working as an associate professor at the Econometric Institute of Erasmus School of Economics. His field of research is Operations Research, specialising in transportation. His research focuses predominantly on vehicle routing problems. He has worked on different variants of the vehicle routing problem, developing both heuristic and exact algorithms. His work on heuristics typically follows from working with industry partners on real-world applications, like with AH.nl and ORTEC. His work on exact algorithms is typically more fundamental in nature and deals with challenges at the forefront of the scientific community.

The awarded ‘New Directions for Vehicle Routing’ project investigates better, stronger, faster software for vehicle routing. Vehicle routing is the process of designing routes for vehicles, for example to deliver parcels, resupply stores and collect waste. Although software exists which finds usable but not optimal routes for real-world applications, software that creates optimal routes are too slow to be applied in practice. Using optimal routes in practice results in reducing for example costs, energy consumption, emission, congestion, and noise. In this study, mathematical research is done with the goal to develop new procedures of creating optimal routes faster than before.