Università della Svizzera italiana

Advanced metaheuristics for the probabilistic orienteering problem

Chou, Xiaochen ; Gambardella, Luca Maria (Dir.) ; Montemanni, Roberto (Codir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2020 ; 2020INFO020.

Stochastic Optimization Problems take uncertainty into account. For this reason they are in general more realistic than deterministic ones, meanwhile, more difficult to solve. The challenge is both on modelling and computation aspects: exact methods usually work only for small instances, besides, there are several problems with no closed-form expression or hard- to-compute objective functions....

Università della Svizzera italiana

Human-robot interaction with pointing gestures : intuitive interaction between co-located humans and robots

Gromov, Boris ; Gambardella, Luca Maria (Dir.) ; Giusti, Alessandro (Codir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2020 ; 2020INFO004.

Human-robot interaction (HRI) is an active area of research and an essential component for the effective integration of mobile robots in everyday environments. In this PhD work, we studied, designed, implemented, and experimentally validated new efficient interaction modalities between humans and robots that share the same workspace. The core of the work revolves around deictic (pointing)...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Path planning for mobile robots in the real world : handling multiple objectives, hierarchical structures and partial information

Guzzi, Jérôme ; Gambardella, Luca Maria (Dir.) ; Giusti, Alessandro (Codir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2018 ; 2018INFO010.

Autonomous robots in real-world environments face a number of challenges even to accomplish apparently simple tasks like moving to a given location. We present four realistic scenarios in which robot navigation takes into account partial information, hierarchical structures, and multiple objectives. We start by discussing navigation in indoor environments shared with people, where routes are...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Efficient combinatorial optimization algorithms for logistic problems

Papapanagiotou, Vasileios ; Gambardella, Luca Maria (Dir.) ; Montemanni, Roberto (Codir.) ; Schmidhuber, Jürgen (Codir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2018 ; 2018INFO011.

The field of logistics and combinatorial optimization features a wealth of NP-hard problems that are of great practical importance. For this reason it is important that we have efficient algorithms to provide optimal or near-optimal solutions. In this work, we study, compare and develop Sampling-Based Metaheuristics and Exact Methods for logistic problems that are important for their...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Code offloading in opportunistic computing

Ferrari, Alan ; Gambardella, Luca Maria (Dir.) ; Giordano, Silvia (Codir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2017 ; 2017INFO014.

With the advent of cloud computing, applications are no longer tied to a single device, but they can be migrated to a high-performance machine located in a distant data center. The key advantage is the enhancement of performance and consequently, the users experience. This activity is commonly referred computational offloading and it has been strenuously investigated in the past years. The...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Symbiotic interaction between humans and robot swarms

Nagi, Jawad ; Gambardella, Luca Maria (Dir.) ; Di Caro, Gianni (Codir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2016 ; 2016INFO003.

Comprising of a potentially large team of autonomous cooperative robots locally interacting and communicating with each other, robot swarms provide a natural diversity of parallel and distributed functionalities, high flexibility, potential for redundancy, and fault-tolerance. The use of autonomous mobile robots is expected to increase in the future and swarm robotic systems are envisioned to...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Matheuristics for robust optimization : application to real-world problems

Toklu, Nihat Engin ; Gambardella, Luca Maria (Dir.) ; Montemanni, Roberto (Codir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2014 ; 2014INFO008.

In the field of optimization, the perspective that the problem data are subject to uncertainty is gaining more and more interest. The uncertainty in an optimization problem represents the measurement errors during the phase of collecting data, or unforeseen changes in the environment while implementing the optimal solution in practice. When the uncertainty is ignored, an optimal solution...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Stochastic vehicle routing : from theory to practice

Weyland, Dennis ; Gambardella, Luca Maria (Dir.) ; Montemanni, Roberto (Dir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2013 ; 2013INFO002.

In this thesis we discuss practical and theoretical aspects of various stochastic vehicle routing problems. These are combinatorial optimization problems related to the field of transportation and logistics in which input data is (partially) represented in a stochastic way. More in detail, we focus on two-stage stochastic vehicle routing problems and in particular on so-called a priori...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Approximability of precedence constrained and robust scheduling problems

Mutsanas, Nikos ; Gambardella, Luca Maria (Dir.) ; Mastrolilli, Monaldo (Codir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2010 ; 2010INFO003.

We study the approximability of scheduling problems in different contexts. We first give a short introduction to the field of scheduling theory and present a simple single machine scheduling problem that will form the base for all variants considered in the remainder of this thesis. We point out that this scheduling problem, though long known to be efficiently solvable in its original form,...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Adaptive routing in ad hoc wireless multi-hop networks

Ducatelle, Frederick ; Gambardella, Luca Maria (Dir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2007 ; 2007INFO001.

Ad hoc wireless multi-hop networks (AHWMNs) are communication networks that consist entirely of wireless nodes, placed together in an ad hoc manner, i.e. with minimal prior planning. All nodes have routing capabilities, and forward data packets for other nodes in multi-hop fashion. Nodes can enter or leave the network at any time, and may be mobile, so that the network topology continuously...