A VLAIO-funded development project delivering an automatic dispatching module for non-emergency medical transport, which builds and continuously re-optimises the daily trip schedule and crew assignments — with human dispatchers always in the loop.
A capacitated school bus routing problem with accessibility constraints, solved on real De Lijn data for the municipalities of Diest and Gavere. A good illustration of how a hard routing problem looks once mobility constraints are added.
Planning daily routes for the mobile unit of the Belgian police, where the objective is not just to cover the beat but to keep the route unpredictable, so that patterns cannot be learned and exploited.
Documenting the existing packaging policy for Atlas Copco’s AIRnet and piping components, then optimizing it with a mixed-integer model and metaheuristics, with the aim of halving annual distribution and storage costs.
A PRISMA-based scoping review of 81 operations research studies on planning non-emergency medical transportation, extracted with a reproducible three-LLM pipeline, which shows how far the field still is from operational reality.
A new type of metaheuristic framework, developed during my PhD, in which an outer simulated annealing searches the parameter space of an inner semi-random greedy constructive heuristic — instead of searching the solution space directly.
A case study that takes the semi-flexible feeder service out of the benchmark and into the real world, simulating a deployment along the N177 between Boom and central Antwerp against the existing De Lijn bus lines.
A systematic review that classifies every demand-responsive public bus system in the literature by its degree of responsiveness, and shows how few semi-flexible many-to-one systems have been studied in the real-time setting.
The central research line of my PhD: designing a semi-flexible feeder bus service that sits between the predictability of a traditional route and the efficiency of a fully flexible on-demand service, together with the exact and heuristic methods needed to operate it.
Networks (2022) | Transportation Research Part C (2021) | Transportmetrica A (2023) | IFORS 2023 talk
A school choice assignment problem for a real district: place 8,500 students across 86 schools within capacity while honouring ranked preferences, a protected share of places for priority students, and the rule that children with relatives at a school get preference there.
Designing a greenfield plant for a manufacturer of 21,000 electric golf carts a year: takt time and line balancing for a high-customization line, a kitting supermarket for parts supply, the facility layout, and a discrete-event simulation to check the whole thing holds together.
An audit of Milliken Europe’s chemical division in Ghent against the seven principles of supply chain management, with a chapter on variability and three concrete changes to propose.
A complete method and time study of a workstation at Van Hool: critically studying how the work is actually done, measuring it by direct time study and work sampling, and designing an optimized standard work method with a defensible standard time.
A home-care distributor had to decide whether to keep delivering in-house or outsource, and from which of two depots. A periodic inventory and routing model over a 12-week cycle, with service level verified by Monte Carlo.