Apresentação Pessoal

My main area of scientific activity is Operations Research and Management Science. Within Operations Research my main application area are the Cutting and Packing Problems, while from the techniques viewpoint my research is centered in the use and development of Metaheuristics approaches and their hybridization with Mathematical Programming based methods.

Cutting and Packing problems are hard combinatorial optimization problems that arise under several practical contexts, whenever big pieces of raw-material have to be cut into smaller items, or small items have to be packed inside a larger container, so that waste is minimized. These problems include hard geometric constraints when dealing with the optimization layer.

I have also worked on Vehicle Routing Problem, especially in the integration of route definition with the container loading problem. My research on Lotsizing and Scheduling problems in industrial contexts mainly builds on my expertise on Metaheuristics and optimization. 

I have been giving special attention in the last years to several problems arising in the Transportation sector, in particular, freight transportation. Therefore, new frameworks to assess and enforce cargo stability, both static and dynamic, weight distribution and other relevant goals in road transportation, have been developed, implemented and tested. Another important line of research is related to the car rental industry, where the integration of pricing and capacity planning decisions has been approached, under a revenue management framework.