FRS Seminar: Safe distancing in the time of Covid-19
22 Sep | Using Mathematical Optimisation algorithms from win turbine placement, Prof. Matteo Fischetti will discuss how to optimise social distancing layouts in an impactful yet safe way.
Safe distancing in the time of COVID-19
Speaker: external pageProf. Matteo Fischetti, University of Padova, Italy
Date: Thu, 22 Sep
Time: 3.00 - 4.00 pm (30 min presentation, 30 min Q&A)
Venue: On Zoom - external pagehttps://ethz.zoom.us/j/63154274943
The spread of viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 brought new challenges to our society, including a stronger focus on safety across all businesses. In particular, many countries have imposed a minimum social distance between people to ensure their safety. This brings new challenges to many customer-related businesses, such as restaurants, offices, etc., in locating their facilities under distancing constraints.
In this talk, we propose parallelism between this problem and the one of locating wind turbines in an offshore area. Even if the two problems may seem very different, there are many analogies between them. In particular, both problems require fitting facilities (turbines or customers) in a given area while ensuring a minimum distance between them. Similarly to nearby customers who can infect each other, also nearby turbines "infect" each other by casting wind shadows (the so-called "wake effect") that cause production losses. In both problems we want to minimize the overall interference/infection, hence optimal solutions will favor layouts where facilities are as spread as possible.
The discovery of this parallelism between the two applications allowed us to apply Mathematical Optimization algorithms originally designed for wind farms, to produce optimized facility layouts subject to social distancing constraints like those arising in the time of COVID-19 pandemic. These methods allow us to challenge the current (manual) layouts and provide new insights on how to improve them. In particular, we show that optimized layouts are far from trivial to design and that Mathematical Optimization can make an impact, helping businesses while ensuring safety1.
About the speaker
external pageMatteo Fischetti is a full professor of Operation Research at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua. In 1987 he received the “Best Ph.D. Dissertation on Transportation” prize awarded by the Operations Research Society of America, while in 2008 he won the “INFORMS Franz Edelman award” for the work “The New Dutch Timetable: The O.R. Revolution”. In 2015, he received by the Canadian Operational Research Society the “Harold Larnder Prize”, awarded annually to an individual who has achieved international distinction in Operational Research.
Dr. Fischetti is a member of the Editorial Board of the international journals Operations Research and Mathematical Programming Computation. His research interests include mixed-integer programming, combinatorial optimization, vehicle routing, scheduling problems, and polyhedral combinatorics. He published 130+ papers in international journals.
1 This is a external pagejoint work with Martina Fischetti and Jakob Stoustrup.