PENSION-LOGUE #1

To start, I wish you all a wonderful New Year 2025!

The year that passed (2024) marked my first year as a “retiree”, or “pensionist”, since my academic (and overall professional) career officially ended on 31.12.2023. So it is perhaps natural to ask, what’s the scoop?

In a blog posted on 1.1.2024, I attempted to give a review of that career, see HERE. In it, and among other things, I predicted that it would be unlikely for me go to a Greek ”καφενείο” (coffee place) to play backgammon (using a popular Greek phrase for what retirees are supposed to do). And indeed, I sadly confess that I did not play backgammon in 2024, neither at a Greek καφενείο (of the many I have been) nor anywhere else. In fact, I have not played backgammon for many years, so whenever I do it again I will surely be rusty.

The few years that preceded my retirement were transient, in the sense that when I decided to retire (decision was made in mid-2020), I planned a “phased” retirement, which entailed a gradual reduction of work from September 2021 until the end of 2023. Upon agreement with my boss (also known as the PSEXIT agreement), official working hours were gradually reduced during that period, and until they went all the way to zero from 1.1.2024 on. I figured that this would be better than an abrupt transition from 100% to zero in one day. I was right, it was definitely better, however at times I got the impression that the reduction concerned only the salary and not the actual work output. To be fair, I surely had more time to engage in extracurricular activities. Travel was one of them, and indeed I had more time to travel for leisure, and I fondly remember that period for all that extra travel, especially in France. I even received a “fouetteur” certificate for whipping chantilly in Chantilly. And visited the Normandy beaches.

(here in Arromanches, "Gold" beach)

Another extracurricular activity was painting, and indeed during the transition period I made a number of paintings, see HERE. All of these paintings are now in Sifnos.

So the phased scheme worked just fine. More significant, two important research projects were completed during that period, MBM SUSHI and AEGIS, the latter being my last project (among 55 or so).

Did the phased period result in a reduction in the (per year) number of papers, citations, or bibliometric stats? Not really, quite the opposite was actually (and surprisingly) the case. Momentum probably.

Then as of 1.1.2024, I joined the retiree club. Did my academic activities shut down? Not really. Among other things:

·       Continued to co-supervise a PhD

·       Gave a number of invited lectures

·       Taught two short courses (in Greece and Norway).

·       Evaluated some proposals to the EU

·       Reviewed a number of papers (much reduced)

·       Co-authored a number of papers (none as main author)

·       Participated in a research project (not mine)

·       Continued to follow the IMO discussion on carbon emissions L

·       Even received an award for a 2023 paper

My bibliometric stats marginally improved in 2024, see HERE. But I am sure that soon they will be abysmally bad.

In terms of extracurricular activities, there was some travel, including the US, Denmark and France. We even went to a Celtics home game, which they actually lost. And we watched the solar eclipse up in New Hampshire (huge traffic jams).

I also celebrated, with other former colleagues, the 50^th anniversary of my graduation from NTUA in 1974.

Sadly, there was no painting in 2024. But I have plans, as soon as our house ceases to look like a warehouse (it may take a while).

All in all, and as far as I can tell, I am still standing.

PS (NEW) CAREER VIDEO PODCAST HERE

 

THE BACKGAMMON BLOG

First of all, I wish you a healthy and prosperous New Year!

The time has finally arrived. As per previous plans, and as of 1 Jan. 2024, what I define as my "active academic career" has been completed. From a formal perspective, I have retired and have called it a career- so to speak, that is. From a substantive perspective, a big page is turned. 

So let's take a look: this has been an academic career of (at least) 44.5 years, or 534 months. In a strict sense, it started on 1 July 1979 when I started as an Assistant Professor at MIT, and it ended on 31 Dec. 2023 when I retired as a Professor at DTU. 

More precisely, below are all of the academic positions I have held thus far:

• Assistant Professor, MIT (7/1979-6/1983)
• Associate Professor, MIT (7/1983-6/1989)- with tenure from 7/1985
• Professor, NTUA (6/1989-5/2013)
• Professor, DTU (5/2013-12/2023)

I do not count my time as a Research Associate (Postdoc) at MIT (9/1978-6/1979), prior to starting as an Assistant Professor. Nor do I count 4 years as a Research and Teaching Assistant when I was a graduate student at MIT (9/1974-8/1978). Had I counted those too, it would be almost 50 years- in fact my 50 year jubilee graduation from NTUA (1974) is this year, 2024 (=1974+50).

It is surely a daunting task to look back and reflect at the quasi-random sequence of events that formed that career. 15 years in Boston and MIT (1974-1989). 24 years in Athens and NTUA (1989-2013). 10.5 years in Copenhagen and DTU (2013-2023). And in between, 5.5 years in Piraeus (1996-2002), as CEO of the Port. Equally daunting is to go over what has been produced all these years. 

In a sense, history and others will evaluate this work, if anybody is interested, that is. But below is an imperfect and incomplete attempt to give a personal account, with an emphasis on research.

First, a disclaimer: I can now confess that I really did not plan any of this when I finished my undergraduate studies at NTUA in 1974 and was ready to go to MIT.  Most surely I did not plan to have an academic career; I did not plan to switch interest from hard core naval architecture and marine engineering to operations research and transportation logistics; I surely did not plan to return to Greece in 1989; I did not plan to go the port of Piraeus in 1996 and surely I did not plan to go to DTU.

Over my academic career, I dealt with many different research areas that were very diverse and some had very little or zero commonality with other areas. For instance, is there anything in common between routing of vehicles in an urban setting and maritime safety? Or, between oil spill response and maritime emissions?  Or, between ocean acoustic detection and shortsea shipping? I did not do this on purpose, it just happened. For me personally this diversity has been pretty exciting. Scroll down for a list of areas.

My port of Piraeus CEO career involved a completely different dimension, and it was sometimes schizophrenic to see the same topic from two perspectives, the academic perspective and the real world perspective, and realize there was a huge gap between the two. It was indeed a once in a lifetime experience, and the port of Piraeus was a great school. See HERE for more on Piraeus.

My involvement in sustainable shipping started in 2008 with a very small project on ship emissions sponsored by the Hellenic Chamber of Shipping (see HERE). And then there were many additional projects and as it turned out this has been the main focus of my research activity in recent years.  

My participation in the activities of the IMO (International Maritime Organization) started in 2006, as a member of the Greek delegation, and involved both IMO's Maritime Safety Committee (MSC) and the Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC). In 2007 I chaired a group on environmental risk evaluation criteria as applied to oil pollution, something that lasted 4 years. I was also in various MEPC groups on greenhouse gases (GHGs), which is a topic that I have followed in recent years. See HERE for an incomplete list of IMO documents (only those under the Greek delegation are included- there are also some under the Danish delegation). 

Among the 55 research projects of which I have been the Principal Investigator (PI) or co-PI (11 at MIT, 32 at NTUA, and 12 at DTU), 25 were EU projects. Among the latter, I was the consortium manager in 3, all at NTUA.  The full list of all these projects is HERE. An estimate of the total funding of these projects is close to 16 million € (2023 prices). 

A link to NTUA projects is HERE; the Lab for Maritime Transport (LMT) web site (www.martrans.org) gives a pretty accurate account of all of my NTUA activity and also hosts many of my papers including some from MIT. There is no similar link for MIT projects, or for DTU projects, However, links to some web sites of individual DTU projects are included if you go to each major research area- see below.

Major research areas

I  tried to group all of my research into several major research areas. I mainly did this for my own use, to separate the forest from the trees, see list below. For more details on what was accomplished on each area, what were the related projects, what were the papers, etc,  you can click the corresponding link. Numbers in parentheses are total # of papers in refereed journals, papers in refereed conferences, books, and book chapters associated with each area. Other conferences, internal reports, or other publications are NOT included in these numbers. No guarantee this is a 100% complete list, but I would say it is pretty close to that.

So here is the list:

Vehicle routing etc (18)

Ocean acoustic detection (7)

Oil spills (32)

Ship automation, autonomous shipping (10)

Maritime safety and security (15)

Shortsea and coastal shipping (13)

Ports (14)

Green freight transportation and corridors (17)

Ship speed models and optimization (16)

Maritime emissions (73)

Other research (28) - these are diverse topics that do not fall under any of the above.

Total (243)

Note that there is no 100% mapping of papers vs (funded) projects, as there are many papers that were not funded by any project.  Example: around 60% of the journal papers that I published at DTU were not funded by any project! There are also some funded projects that produced no papers!

Also note that there may be overlaps, as a publication in one area may be considered to (also) fall in another area. However, there is no double counting: I assigned each publication only to one area. 

Refereed papers by journal.

For honors, distinctions and awards, including bibliometrics, see HERE.

For editorial service, see HERE.

For teaching, see HERE. 

For miscellaneous activities, see HERE.

For advice/service to international bodies, see HERE

Acknowledgments

All this would not be possible were it not for the help and support of many people, initially starting from the various supervisors I had throughout my studies and then moving on to the many colleagues, co-authors, other associates and students, and various research partners in academia and industry, who were involved in my research. To all these, too many to list here individually, I can only be grateful.

To all my employers, and to all the agencies that funded my projects, thank you for the opportunity.

Above all, I am grateful to my parents Nikos and Irene who supported me through my studies and saw some parts of this career (until 1994 and 2011 respectively). Also to my wife Aleka and children Anastasia and Nikos who have been a constant source of emotional support and for putting up with me for all the travels that I had to make (for my trips on business see HERE).

The road ahead

And then what happens next? Not 100% clear yet. I will transcend to Professor Emeritus at DTU. I will continue co-supervising a PhD thesis at DTU and I am on the committee of some NTUA PhD theses. I have some papers in the pipeline, and maybe I will write some additional ones. Between the two extremes, (a) continue as before and (b) stop completely (and I know examples in both cases), I will be somewhere in between. 

It is unlikely I will go to a Greek καφενείο to play backgammon (using a popular Greek phrase for what retirees are supposed to do). I may be engaged in some activities as an external consultant. I want to continue being engaged in some scientific and policy stuff that I am interested in. Surely I will have more time to do things that I was unable to do before, like spending more time with my family, or leisure travel. Painting and photography are two candidate activities. 

Whatever it is, I will try to keep you posted.

FAREWELL PARTY GALLERY

POST SCRIPTUM

I  coined the term "PSEXIT" to the whole career exit scheme. For some Psexit FAQs, see HERE:

See also:

CAREER PODCAST FROM AN "O.R." PERSPECTIVE 

Also featuring (but not limited to): Pelé, the Rolling Stones, the Boston Celtics, and Claude Monet.

Audio podcast on Spotify

Various blogs on citations

ORCID page

Painting gallery

PLAYING BASKETBALL FOR THE CELTICS (MUST SEE!!)

OIL SPILLS: how it all began

Background:  fall of 1978, and after I had just defended my PhD thesis at MIT and had just started working there as a Research Associate (postDoc). At that point in time, a faculty position at MIT was possible, but I had no concrete written offer. Things were up in the air and would depend on many things- I was also looking elsewhere, outside MIT.

I then received a visit from Dean Horn and another one from Dan Nyhart. The two visits were unrelated but turned out to be pivotal for one of my most important projects at MIT. They were also pivotal for the start of my academic career at MIT.

Dean Horn was not a dean at MIT. In fact, he wasn't even a faculty member. A former Navy captain, he was the director of the MIT Sea Grant College Program. He came to my office and talked to me about the so-called Henry L. Doherty endowed professorship in ocean utilization. The professorship was for junior faculty members, and it provided a $20,000 per year support for research in any topic in the "ocean utilization" area. To get the award, a candidate had to submit a research proposal. That was to be evaluated by the Sea Grant steering committee (consisting of several MIT faculty members), and the winner would get the award for 2 years starting July next (in this case, 1979). Horn told me that he wanted to encourage me to apply for the professorship.

The offer sounded interesting. I learned that the $20,000 a year was exempt from MIT overhead, and that made it even more attractive. Of course, I had to find a topic, and write a good proposal about it. I realized that many people were eligible for the award, and that many proposals would be submitted.

The second visit was from Dan Nyhart. Nyhart had a joint faculty appointment in Ocean Engineering and in the Sloan School. He was a lawyer, teaching "legal/regulatory" courses at MIT. In OE, he was interested in ocean law and the Law of the Sea, among other things. Nyhart asked me if I were interested in joining him in a research proposal for oil spill cleanup systems. He had recently participated in a meeting at Sea Grant with some industry representatives, and told me that there was strong interest in such a proposal from Congress. 1978 was the year of the AMOCO CADIZ oil spill in France, and the time was ripe for new research in this area. The way this worked was the following. We would submit a proposal to Sea Grant, which would then turn it over to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for evaluation and eventual funding. I then learned that Sea Grant was a national program within NOAA, that MIT Sea Grant was one of several Sea Grant colleges, and that NOAA belonged to the Department of Commerce.

The idea appealed to me, and I said yes. Nyhart and I would be the two co-principal investigators of the project, which was to start in July 1979 too (if successful). Since I had no idea on the subject, I started reading. I discovered that there were a lot of opportunities of using Operations Research (OR) techniques for addressing important decisions in oil spill cleanup. There was also a panel discussion at MIT on this topic. A Norwegian tanker owner, Erling Naess, was the keynote speaker.

It then occurred to me that in parallel to the oil spill proposal I would write with Nyhart, I could write an oil spill proposal for the Doherty professorship as well, and use the extra money as matching support. I discussed the idea with Ira Dyer, my Department Head, and he was positive. I decided for  the Doherty proposal to focus on the "OR" aspects of the problem. Feedback from the proposal reviewers indicated I should focus on the "small spill" problem. I revised the proposal and waited for the final evaluation. That was scheduled for early spring 1979. In contrast, I would learn about the Sea Grant proposal a bit earlier, around January 1979.

Indeed, in early January 1979, Dyer walked into my office. He said he was just back from the Sea Grant committee, and that my proposal with Dan Nyhart on oil spills had received the top grade. "The final awards are not yet out," he said, "but I can tell you it is impossible for the top proposal not to receive some funding." 

I finally heard about Doherty sometime later in March 1979, and under some interesting circumstances. I had arranged to go to Chicago for an interview with Northwestern University for a faculty position there, when I was told by my secretary that Ira Dyer had come into my office looking for my resume, and that he wanted to see me as soon as possible. I went into his office and he told me this: "You are commanded to be at the office of Walter Rosenblith (the Provost) at 11 am tomorrow. I am not allowed to tell you why, but I can nevertheless tell you that the Sea Grant committee has recently convened."

It became obvious that I had won the Doherty professorship. And indeed, in Rosenblith's office the next day it became official. Dyer was also there, and so was Dean Horn, the director of Sea Grant. The group was completed by Robert Seamans (Dean of Engineering), and Alfred Keil (former Sea Grant director). Calvin Campbell, the official MIT photographer was also there. Rosenblith handed me a letter confirming the award, effective July 1, 1979. The award was announced at the “MIT Tech Talk” about a week later.

And so started my academic career on July 1, 1979, with this Doherty professorship at MIT. Also, this is how the MIT Oil Spill project started, one of my most important projects at MIT, and one that produced two PhDs (Babis Ziogas and George Tharakan, both in 1982) and several papers in good journals and conferences.

In parallel to the MIT Oil Spill project, I also had two other projects when I started at MIT. A project on ocean acoustic detection, with support from the Office of Naval Research, and a project on dial-a-ride systems, with support from the US Department of Transportation. 

See also HERE.

REFEREED PAPERS BY JOURNAL

#journals: 46

#journals with 1 paper: 22

#journals with >1 papers: 24

#papers: 110

#sole-author papers: 24

Max #papers in a journal: 10 (2 cases)

Max span between consecutive papers in same journal: 46 years (1978, 2024)

Max #of authors in a paper: 82

 

Order of journals is alphabetical.

 

Annals of Operations Research (1)

American Journal of Mathematical and Management Sciences (1)

Applied Mathematical Modelling Journal (1)

Cleaner Logistics and Supply Chain (3)

Communications in Transportation Research (2)

Environmental Engineering and Management Journal (1)

European Journal of Operational Research (3)

European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research (1)

European Review of Service Economics and Management (1)

Engineering (2)

Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal (1)

FME Transactions (1)

Frontiers of Engineering Management (1)

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics (1)

Int. J. Decision Sciences, Risk and Management (1)

Int. J. Ocean Systems Management (1)

IOP Conference Series, Materials Science and Engineering (1)

Journal of Hazardous Materials (2)

Journal of Marine Science and Technology (1)

Journal of Ship Research (2)

Journal of the Acoustical Association of America (4)

Journal of the Operational Research Society (1)

Journal of Transportation Security (1)

Management Science (2)

Marine Pollution Bulletin (1)

Marine Technology (5)

Maritime Business Review (2)

Maritime Economics and Logistics (10)

Maritime Policy and Management (5)

Maritime Transport Research (3)

Nature Energy (1)

Networks (2)

Ocean Engineering (2)

Operations Research (4)

Procedia- Social and Behavioral Sciences (3)

Research in Transportation Business and Management (1)

Samfundøkonomen (1)

Sustainability (5)

Transactions RINA (1)

Transportation Research Part B (3)

Transportation Research Part C (3)

Transportation Research Part D (10)

Transportation Research Part E (2)

Transportation Research Record-TRB (1)

Transportation Science (3)

WMU Journal of Maritime Affairs (6)

Advice/expert service to international organizations, agencies or associations

(in blue: when at NTUA; in black: when at DTU)

Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition (CPLC) (secretariat run by the World Bank)

Invited expert, shipping expert workshops on GHG policy induced economic impacts on States and related mitigation options  (2018, 2019)

European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra

Invited expert/contributor, report on identifying key priorities in support to the EU macro-regional Strategies implementation (2017)

European Commission, Brussels

Expert, Management Committee on Freight Transport Logistics (COST 310): Representative of Greece (1989-1991).     

Expert, Maritime Transport  R&D Expert Group: Representative of Greece (1989-1990, 1992-1994),

Rapporteur, Working Group on “Ports and the Land/Sea Interface” (1993-1994).

Member, Maritime Transport Telematics R&D Panel (1993-1994).

Expert, Management Committee on EDI in Ports (COST 330): Representative of Greece (1994-1998).

Expert, CREST Ad Hoc working group on Transport: Representative of Greece (1993-1994).  

Expert, Transport Research Committee: Representative of Greece (1994-1998).

Expert, ExtraWeb project, Benchmarking Group, Representative of Greece (2003- 2006).

Invited expert, European Climate Change Programme (ECCP) Working Group 6: Reducing Greenhouse Gas emissions from ships, (2011).

Invited expert, European Sustainable Shipping Forum (ESSF) Subgroup on Competitiveness: Representative of Denmark (2014-2017).

International Association of Dry Cargo Shipowners (Intercargo), London

Advisor for IMO (2017-2019, 2024)

International Association of Maritime Economists (IAME)

(elected) Member of IAME Council (2020-2024)

Invited reviewer for IAME conferences (2013 on)

International Association of Ports and Harbors (IAPH), Tokyo

Member, Port Operations and Logistics Committee (2005- 2019).

Member, Port Environment Committee (2005-2019).

Member, Climate and Energy Committee (2019 on)

Member, Risk and Resilience Committee (2019 on)

Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS), USA

(elected) International Liaison Officer, Transportation Science and Logistics (TSL) section (2013-2017)

Chair, TSL Best Paper Award Committee (2020) (member 2018-2019)

International Maritime Organization (IMO), London

Service/participation in ΙΜΟ/MEPC[1] activities, as advisor to Greek delegation (2006-2013)

Service/participation in ΙΜΟ/MSC[2] activities, as advisor to Greek delegation (2006-2011)

Chair, correspondence and working groups on environmental risk evaluation criteria, IMO/MEPC (2007-2011)

Member, IMO/MEPC expert group on market based measures, representing Greece (2010-2013)

Co-author, several papers by Greece, IMO/MEPC (2007-2013)

Service/participation in ΙΜΟ/MEPC activities, as advisor to Danish delegation (2019 on)

Main author, paper by Denmark, France and Germany on impact assessment of short-term measures to IMO/MEPC (2020)

Invited speaker, IMO/UNEP/Norway Zero and Low Emission Innovation Forum (2021)

Invited contractor, tender for comprehensive impact assessment of measures (2023)-did not respond

Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)/International Transport Forum (ITF), Paris

Invited expert, various workshops of Common Interest Group on Decarbonizing Shipping (2016-2022)

Invited expert, workshop on Decarbonizing Hard to Abate Sectors (2022)

Invited expert, workshop on Coastal Shipping (2022)

Contributor, OECD/ITF Transport Climate Action Directory/Decarbonizing Transport Initiative (2020)

Contributor, OECD/ITF report on Carbon Pricing in Shipping (2022)

United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), Geneva

Invited expert, Group of Experts on Climate Change and Adaptation for International Transport Networks (2011-2013)

United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Geneva

Invited expert, Multi-Year Expert Meeting on Sustainable Freight Transport (2015-2019)

Invited reviewer, Review of Maritime Transport (2018, 2023)

Ιnvited expert, workshops on Impact Assessment of GHG Reduction Measures (2020, 2023)

---

[1] Marine Environment Protection Committee

[2] Maritime Safety Committee

VEHICLE ROUTING, etc (1977-2020)

Vehicle routing (and related problems- VRPs) was centrally the topic of my PhD at MIT. Even though this is not the research area in which I have the highest number of publications, it is surely the one for which I have the highest number of citations. In Google Scholar, my top 5 publications, citations-wise, are in this area. 

Most of my publications in this area were written when I was at MIT, however there have also been some publications afterwards, both when I was at NTUA and when I went to DTU. Below is a rough description.

MIT

My PhD thesis at MIT, supervised by Amedeo Odoni (a professor at the Departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics and of Civil Engineering), was completed in September of 1978. It examined two methodologically related problems: (a) the optimal sequencing of aircraft landings, and (b) the single vehicle dial-a-ride problem, both static and dynamic. In both problems, dynamic programming algorithms were developed. The thesis won the 1978 PhD dissertation award of the Transportation Science and Logistics (TSL) section of ORSA, the Operations Research Society of America (a precursor of INFORMS)- that prize was awarded in 1979.  Papers No. 1 and 2 below were published as a result of the PhD thesis. 

According to the literature, Paper No. 1 is the first paper that talked (among other things) about dynamic VRPs. When you put Dynamic Vehicle Routing in Google Scholar, two of the top 3 results are my papers. 

Research on dial-a-ride continued while I was a faculty member at MIT, in the context of the following two projects, both funded by two separate agencies of UMTA, the Urban Mass Transportation Administration of the US Department of Transportation:

      ·       “Simple Performance Models for Flexible-Route Feeder Transportation Systems” (September 1980- September 1983) University Research Program, UMTA. Amedeo Odoni and I were Co-Principal Investigators.

      ·        “Advanced Dial-A-Ride Algorithms Research Project” (December 1980- September 1983)   Panatransit Integration Program, UMTA. Amedeo Odoni, Nigel Wilson and I were Co-PIs. Nigel was a professor at the Civil Engineering Department at MIT.

Papers No. 7 and 8 below were produced as a result of this research, however in parallel I also wrote papers No. 3, 4, 5 and 6 which were also related.  

Paper No. 6 is my favorite paper of all time (!), discussing asymptotic optimality in heuristic VRP algorithms. It was not funded by any project.  

Paper No. 7 was associated with the PhD thesis of Jang Jei Jaw, supervised by Amedeo Odoni (I was on his PhD thesis committee). That paper was ranked No. 40 (or top 1.5%) in Web of Science citations among 2,697 papers published in Transportation Research Part B (Methodological) during the period 1979-2019.

Later at MIT I also did research on the routing and scheduling of ships, and more precisely:

 ·       “Dynamic Cargo Ship Routing and Scheduling Problems: Analysis and Solution Techniques” (July 1982- June 1983). MIT Center for Transportation Studies (CTS). Jim Orlin (a colleague at the Sloan School of Management) and I were Co-PIs.

·       “Analysis and Solution Algorithms of Sealift Routing and Scheduling Problems” (March 1983- May 1988). Office of Naval Research (ONR). Jim Orlin and I were Co-PIs.

Both projects were with Jim Orlin, who started his academic career at MIT the same time as me (July 1979). I knew Jim from the MIT Operations Research Center, of which I was among the affiliated faculty. The first project was seed money from the MIT CTS. We used that money to get the bigger project from ONR. The actual money came from the US Military Sealift Command (MSC), who wanted us to develop algorithms to route and schedule their cargo ships in the case of a mobilization situation. 

Paper No. 9 was –at least indirectly- connected to this project, in fact it was an invited chapter on dynamic vehicle routing problems in a vehicle routing book by Bruce Golden and Arjang Assad.

Papers No. 10 and 12 were also connected to this project, being associated to the PhD theses of Tai Up Kim and Paul Thompson, respectively (I supervised both). Kim was an Ocean Engineering student, and Thompson was with the MIT OR Center. Co-authors in paper No. 10 were (the late) Marius Solomon (Northeastern Univ.) and Tom Magnanti (MIT Sloan), in addition to Tai Up Kim. 

Paper No. 11 (with John Tsitsiklis, MIT EECS) was a paper on dynamic shortest paths when arc costs were Markovian, which was partially funded by the following Draper Lab project, which I got just before I left MIT in 1989 and which actually started when I left MIT!

• Advanced Algorithms for Automated Mission and Trajectory Planning” (July 1989- June 1990).The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory.

See also the "other research" section and look for Project Athena at MIT. 

NTUA

I had no vehicle routing projects at NTUA. In fact my position there was on maritime transport economics and management and had only a marginal connection with OR, let alone vehicle routing. However, I managed to write some VRP- related papers, some in my spare time, for instance paper No. 13, a survey on dynamic VRPs.

But it was paper No. 14 that was odd (in a sense). Published in EJOR, some 16 years after I had last published a VRP paper, it was a paper on pick up and delivery problems, whose dynamic programming algorithm I was proud to personally encode in Fortran 95! That was actually the first code I wrote since my PhD thesis, some 33 years earlier. That paper marked my first attempt to re-engage in OR. I decided to re-engage after realizing that this was where most of my citations were, whereas most of my publications in other areas produced far less citations. I wrote that paper in my spare time. 

DTU

On paper at least, DTU was a better environment for VRP (or OR) research than NTUA, and my position there was in transport optimization. However, the only VRP- relevant project was Concoord (a multi-partner project coordinated by Tom van Woensel of Univ. Eindhoven). Within that project I wrote a survey paper on dynamic VRPs (paper No. 15), with Min Wen and Christos Kontovas. That paper is No. 2 (or top 0.18%) in downloads and No. 21 (or top 2%) in Web of Science citations among nearly 1,100 papers published in Networks during the period 1999-2020.

Paper No. 16 (a bit controversial as it criticizes papers that put methodology before the actual problem formulation) was not funded by any project. 

Papers No. 17 and 18 were on ship weather routing and were funded by the SIMOS project at DTU:

• SIMOS, DTU partner in a project on ship weather routing, DTU Space Leader, funded by Denmark’s Innovation Fund (2017-2020). 

Prior to SIMOS, we also had another ship weather routing project:

• BLUESIROS, partner in a project on maritime weather routing, DTU Space leader, funded by the European Space Agency (2016-2018).

I also organized and chaired the ROUTE 2014 and ROUTE 2018 workshops on behalf of DTU, and kept alive the tradition started by Oli Madsen of DTU. It was great seeing many VRP experts once again.

A partial set of VRP papers/articles/PPTs of mine can be found HERE. 

Some papers in other areas (for instance ship speed optimization combined with route optimization) can also be considered to fall in the VRP area. See section on ship speed.

VRP-related papers:

 

1.     Psaraftis,H.N., 1980, A Dynamic Programming Solution to the Single-Vehicle Many-to-Many Immediate-Request Dial-A-Ride Problem, Transportation Science 14, No.2, 130-154.

2.     Psaraftis,H.N., 1980, A Dynamic Programming Approach for Sequencing Groups of Identical Jobs, Operations Research 23, No.6,1347-1359.

3.     Psaraftis,H.N., 1983, Analysis of an O(N²) Heuristic for the Single-Vehicle Many-to-Many Euclidean Dial-A-Ride Problem, Transportation Research 17B, No.2, 133-145, 1983.

4.     Psaraftis,H.N.,k-Interchange Procedures for Local Search in a Precedence- Constrained Routing Problem, European Journal of Operational Research 13, No.4, 391-402.

5.     Psaraftis,H.N., 1983, An Exact Algorithm for the Single-Vehicle Many-to-Many Dial-A-Ride Problem with Time Windows, technical note, Transportation Science 17, No.3, 351-357.

6.     Psaraftis,H.N., 1984, On the Practical Importance of Asymptotic Optimality in Certain Heuristic Algorithms, Networks 14, No.4 587-596.

7.     Jaw, J-J,A.R.Odoni, H.N.Psaraftis, N.H.M.Wilson, 1986, A Heuristic Algorithm for the Multi-Vehicle Advance-Request Dial-A-Ride Problem with Time Windows, Transportation Research 20B, No.3, 243-257.

8.     Psaraftis,H.N., 1986, Scheduling Large-Scale Advance-Request Dial-A-Ride Systems, American Journal of Mathematical and Management Sciences 6, Nos.3-4, (special issue on vehicle routing with time windows) 327-367.

9.     Psaraftis,H.N., 1988, Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problems, in Vehicle Routing: Methods and Studies, B.Golden and A.Assad (eds), North Holland.

10.  Psaraftis,H.N., M.M Solomon, T.L.Magnanti, T.U. Kim, 1990, Routing and Scheduling on a Shoreline with Release Times, Management Science 36, No.2 212-223.

11.  Psaraftis,H.N., J.N.Tsitsiklis, 1993, Dynamic Shortest Paths in Acyclic Networks with Markovian Arc Costs, Operations Research  41, No. 1, 91-101 (special issue on Dynamic and Stochastic Transportation Models).

12.  Thompson,P.M., H.N.Psaraftis, 1993, Cyclic Transfer Algorithms for Multi-Vehicle Routing and Scheduling Problems, Operations Research 41, No. 5, 935-946.

13.  Psaraftis, H.N., 1995, Dynamic Vehicle Routing: Status and Prospects, Annals of Operations Research  61, 143-164.

14.  Psaraftis, H.N., 2011, A multi-commodity, capacitated pickup and delivery problem: The single and two-vehicle cases, European Journal of Operational Research 215,   572–580.
15. Psaraftis, H.N., M. Wen and C.A. Kontovas, 2016, Dynamic Vehicle Routing: Three Decades and Counting, Networks Vol. 67, issue 1, 3-31,  DOI 10.1002/net. 21628.
16. Psaraftis, H. N., 2017, Ship routing and scheduling: the cart before the horse conjecture, Maritime Economics and Logistics, Vol. 17, Issue 2, 1-14.

17. Zis, T., Psaraftis, H.N., Ding, L., 2020, Ship weather routing: a taxonomy and survey, Ocean Engineering, vol. 213, DOI: 10.1016/j.oceaneng.2020.107697.
18. Zis, T. and Psaraftis, H.N., 2020, Weather Routing in Maritime Shipping: a Review and Future Outlook. Transportation Research Board 98th Annual Meeting, Washington D.C., USA, January 2020.