Speaker: Jean Pauphilet, London Business School

Title: Optimizing the path towards plastic-free oceans

ABSTRACT

Millions of tons of plastic are poured in the seas every year, damaging entire ecosystems from the coastlines up to the open waters. We partner with a non-profit organization and use optimization to help clean up oceans from plastic faster. Specifically, we optimize the route of their plastic collection system in the ocean to maximize the quantity of plastic collected over time. We formulate the problem as a longest path problem in a well-structured graph. However, since collection directly impacts future plastic density, the corresponding edge lengths are non-linear polynomials. After analyzing the structural properties of the edge lengths, we propose a search-and-bound method, which leverages a relaxation of the problem solvable via dynamic programming and clustering, to efficiently find high-quality solutions (within 6%-optimal in practice). On one-year of ocean data, our optimization-based routing approach increases the quantity of plastic collected by over 60% compared with their current routing strategy, hence speeding up the progress towards plastic-free oceans.

Website: https://jeanpauphilet.github.io/

Host: Hartanto Wong

Organisers: Surabhi Verma and Hartanto Wong