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  4. Theory and Practice of Large-scale Logistics: Offline Contextual Bandits and Decomposition Methods

Theory and Practice of Large-scale Logistics: Offline Contextual Bandits and Decomposition Methods

File(s)
Tan_cornellgrad_0058F_15284.pdf (3.23 MB)
Permanent Link(s)
https://doi.org/10.7298/rcrq-xt69
https://hdl.handle.net/1813/121112
Collections
Cornell Theses and Dissertations
Author
Tan, Samuel
Abstract

This dissertation addresses two important problems in large-scale logistics, motivated by first-hand experience in industry and military settings. The first part focuses on offline contextual bandits, drawing from work at Uber on driver incentive programs. I introduce Empirical Soft Regret (ESR), a novel loss function for value-based learning that addresses limitations of accuracy-based approaches in misspecified settings. Unlike standard methods that fail when reward models are poorly specified, ESR provably yields policies that asymptotically achieve optimal performance while remaining compatible with gradient-based optimization. The value of this approach is demonstrated through applications in health datasets, news recommendation, and computational materials science. The second part addresses large-scale logistics involving simultaneous routing and scheduling of commodity deliveries across intermodal networks. In collaboration with the United States Marine Corps and Navy, I develop a mixed-integer programming formulation for expeditionary warfare logistics that captures the various physical constraints placed on the network. To address computational limitations, I propose an efficient solution method based on dual decomposition that leverages Lagrangian duality to split the problem into smaller, computationally tractable subproblems. This work bridges the gap between operations research theory and practice, demonstrating how theoretical foundations can be successfully translated into practical solutions for complex real-world logistics challenges.

Description
172 pages
Date Issued
2025-12
Keywords
Contextual Bandits
•
Dual Decomposition
•
Large-scale Logistics
Committee Chair
Frazier, Peter
Committee Member
Kallus, Nathan
Henderson, Shane
Degree Discipline
Operations Research and Information Engineering
Degree Name
Ph. D., Operations Research and Information Engineering
Degree Level
Doctor of Philosophy
Rights
Attribution 4.0 International
Rights URI
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Type
dissertation or thesis

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