A Great Start to the New Academic Year and Our Research on UAVs!

 It was an exciting first week at UMass Amherst of the new 2022-2023 academic year.

I am delighted to again be teaching my Transportation & Logistics class this Fall. The students with their enthusiasm for a subject that I love keep me energized. And, this week, we discussed innovations in transportation technologies, including UAVs (sometimes referred to as drones).

Coincidentally, although last year, I had the great honor of giving a keynote at the outstanding Optimization and Decision Sciences conference (ODS 2022), which took place in Firenze (Florence), Italy, just before classes began, this year, I could not squeeze in this conference since it overlapped with the first week of classes. Nevertheless, I was delighted that my collaborators, Dr. Gabriella Colajanni and Professor Patrizia Daniele, both of the University of Catania, were able to attend and to present our latest work on UAVs. This year's ODS conference took place in another stunning location - Ischia! And, amazingly, we did the galleys for the paper on which our presentation was based this past Tuesday; the presentation took place on Wednesday, and our paper, "Centralized supply chain network optimization with UAV-based last mile deliveries," was published in the journal Transportation Research C this Thursday. It is open access and can be viewed here. The results therein demonstrate how a hybrid fleet can enhance profits and also reduce air pollution.

Professor Patrizia Daniele kindly sent me the photos below of Dr. Colajanni presenting our paper, a nice lunch get-together, and additional photos.

In the photos above are from l-r: Dr. Daniele Sciacca, Dr. Georgia Fargetta, Dr. Gabriella Colajanni, Professor Patrizia Daniele, and Professor Laura Scrimali. 

The slide deck of our presentation at the ODS conference can be downloaded here.

And just a few weeks ago, our paper on UAVs and 5G with a focus on three phases of disaster management, "A three-stage stochastic optimization model integrating 5G technology and UAVs for disaster management," was published in the Journal of Global Optimization. This paper is also open access and was co-authored with Dr. Gabriella Calajanni, Professor Patrizia Daniele,  Dr. Daniele Sciacca, and Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney. In the Spring semester, I teach a course on Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare, and we discuss the four phases of disaster management. Great to have such excellent collaborators to engage on such topic research with.