MS Mathematics Students Recognized at Research & Creative Activity Fair
Jordan Sahs and Brad Tuttle were awarded Best Graduate Poster Presentation at the15th Annual Student Research and Creative Activity Fair for their project “OPS Bus Scheduling: A Heuristic Approach to a 3-Tier Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem with Inter-Depot Routes”.
Omaha Public Schools (OPS) currently faces a shortage of bus drivers. OPS uses a Two-Tier Bus Transportation System and would like to investigate if switching to a Three-Tier Bus Transportation System would be cost-effective through the means of reducing the total number of busses used, and consequently the number of drivers, for all bus routes to and from all schools. Through their research, Brad and Jordan found that "The OPS Bus Scheduling project is able to produce feasible routes that reduce the number of buses used by OPS by 20%. Since the goal of the project was to both show that it was feasible for OPS to switch to a Three-Tier bus routing system and that it was a beneficial enough change to pursue such a change, OPS will take the results of our project and use it as a basis to have a larger traffic company/department officially develop software that will be used to deploy actual routes."
"This project came to us during PIC math of the Spring 2022 semester," says Jordan. "Since then, we spent the Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 semesters working with Fabio in our own time." PIC Math (Preparation for Industrial Careers in Mathematical Sciences) is a hands-on course that expose students to the process of working on a real-world project from business, industry, or government from the initial meeting with a client to reporting results at the end. During the PIC Math course, students learn skills that will prepare them for a non-academic career in the mathematical sciences.
Jordan Sahs is a graduate mathematics student at UNO whose work/course study's usually tend towards mathematical optimization/Operations Research. In addition, she helps run Problem of the Week and tutors computer science and math to those around UNO and UNL campuses. Her goal after graduating from UNO is to earn her PhD in Operations Research and eventually to continually teach future students the joy of this field. She likes to give more than she takes in education, so everything she does tends to focus around providing free accessible math education for all - like the UNO Problem of the Week books.
Brad Tuttle is a graduate math student and former mathlete. As a mathlete, he considered himself a pure math student and even disliked the idea of applied math until taking Dr. Vitor's Deterministic Operations Research class in Fall 2021. His primary focus has been Operations Research and Statistics ever since.