Research

International Journals and Peer-Reviewed Conferences (Publications and Preprints)

*Student researchers in italics

  • PenDer: Incorporating Shape Constraints via Penalized Derivatives
    • Authors: Akhil Gupta*, Lavanya Marla, Ruoyu Sun, Naman Shukla and Arinbjörn Kolbeinsson*
    • Accepted to AAAI 2021.
  • Dynamics of Disruption and Recovery in Air Transportation Networks
    • Authors: Max Z. Li, Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Hamsa Balakrishnan, Sang Hyun Shin*, Darsh Jalan*, Aritro Nandi* and Lavanya Marla
    • Accepted to the Ninth International Conference on Research in Air Transportation (ICRAT), June 23-26, 2020, Tampa, Florida. [Abstract]
    • Best Paper Award in System Performance track at ICRAT
    • Invited paper, CEAS Aeronautical Journal
  • The Impact of Climate Change on Airline Network Recoverability
    • Authors: Jane Lee*, Lavanya Marla and Parth Vaishnav
    • Transportation Research  – Part D, Accepted. [SSRN Copy]
  • Managing EMS Systems with User Abandonment in Emerging Economies
    • Authors: Lavanya Marla, Sarang Deo and Kaushik Krishnan*
    • IISE Transactions, published online. [SSRN Copy][DOI]
  • Dynamic Airline Disruption Management under Airport Operating Uncertainty
    • Authors: Jane Lee*, Lavanya Marla and Alexandre Jacquillat
    • Transportation Science, Vol 54(4), June 2020. [SSRN Copy][DOI]
    • Awarded Honorable Mention for the 2018 Anna Valicek Competition for original and innovative research, by AGIFORS.
  • Strategic Service Logistics Games with Customer-Induced Competition
    • Authors: Lavanya Marla, Jungeun Shin* and Sanyukta Deshpande*
    • Under 3rd round review, Management Science. [SSRN Copy]
  • Near-optimal Sampling Policies for Path Selection in the National Airspace
    • Authors: Jing Gao*, Ankur Mani and Lavanya Marla
    • Under review.
  • Short and Wide Network Paths
    • Authors: Lavanya Marla, Lav R. Varshney, Devavrat Shah,  Nirmal A. Prakash* and Michael E. Gale*
    • Under review. [arXiv]
  • Robust Modeling and Planning: Insights from Three Industrial Applications
    • Authors: Lavanya Marla, Alexander Rikun, Gautier Stauffer and Eleni Pratisini
    • Operations Research Perspectives, Volume 7, 2020, pp 100150. [DOI, SSRN Copy]
  • How to Incorporate Monotonicity in Deep Networks while Preserving Flexibility?
    • Authors: Akhil Gupta*, Naman Shukla, Lavanya Marla and Arinbjörn Kolbeinsson*
    • Accepted to the Workshop on Machine Learning with Guarantees, NeurIPS 2019, Vancouver, BC, Canada. [arXiv]
  • Adaptive Model Selection Framework: An Application to Airline Pricing
    • Authors: Naman Shukla*, Arinbjörn Kolbeinsson*, Lavanya Marla and Kartik Yellepeddi
    • Accepted to the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) Real-world Sequential Decision Making Workshop, 2019, Long Beach, California, 2019. [arXiv]
  • Dynamic Pricing for Airline Ancillaries with Customer Context
    • Authors: Naman Shukla*, Arinbjörn Kolbeinsson*, Ken Otwell, Lavanya Marla and Kartik Yellepeddi
    • Accepted to the 25th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, August 04-08, 2019. [arXiv]
    • Awarded Best Presentation at the 2019 AGIFORS Revenue Management Study Group conference
  • Cyber-Physical Simulation and Optimal Mitigation for Shipping Port Operations
    • Authors: Gabriel A. Weaver and Lavanya Marla
    • In Proceedings of the 2018 Winter Simulation Conference, Dec 9-12, Gothenburg, Sweden. [SSRN Copy]
  • Robust Optimization: Lessons Learned from Aircraft Routing
    • Authors: Lavanya Marla, Vikrant Vaze and Cynthia Barnhart
    • Computers and Operations Research, Vol 98, October 2018, pp. 165-184. [SSRN Copy] [DOI]
  • Data-driven Omniscient Bounds and Greedy Policies for Ambulance Allocation and Dynamic Redeployment
    • Authors: Lavanya Marla, Yisong Yue and Ramayya Krishnan
    • Under review. [SSRN Copy]
  • An Empirical Analysis of Bike Sharing Usage and Rebalancing: Evidence from Barcelona and Seville
    • Authors: Ahmadreza Faghih-Imani*, Robert Hampshire, Lavanya Marla, and Naveen Eluru
    • Transportation Research: Part A Policy and Practice, Vol 97 (2017) 177-191. [DOI]
    • Top-10 most cited paper, Transportation Research – Part A, 2016-2019 
  • Robust Ambulance Allocation Using Risk-based Metrics
    • Authors: Kaushik Krishnan*, Lavanya Marla and Yisong Yue
    • In Proceedings of the Intelligent Transportation Systems Workshop of COMSNETS (International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks) 2016, Bangalore. [DOI] [IEEE Explore]
  • Vehicle Routing Problem with Time-Windows: A Deterministic Annealing Approach
    • Authors: Mayank Baranwal*, Pratik M. Parekh*, Lavanya Marla, Srinivasa M. Salapaka and Carolyn Beck
    • In Proceedings of the American Control Conference, 2016, Boston. [DOI][IEEE Explore]
  • Integrated Airline Disruption Management and Flight Planning to Tradeoff Delays and Fuel Burn
    • Authors: Lavanya Marla, Bo Vaaben and Cynthia Barnhart
    • Transportation Science, Vol 51, No. 1, February 2017, pp. 88-111. [DOI][link]
  • A Decomposition Approach for Robust Commodity Pickup and Delivery with Time-Windows under Uncertainty
    • Authors: Lavanya Marla, Cynthia Barnhart and Varun Biyani*,
    • Journal of Scheduling, Vol 17, Issue 5, 2014. [DOI] [link]
  • An Efficient Simulation-based Approach to Ambulance Allocation and Dynamic Redeployment
    • Authors: Yisong Yue, Lavanya Marla and Ramayya Krishnan
    • In Proceedings of the 26th Conference on AI held by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), July 22-26, 2012.
    • Acceptance rate 25%, similar to NIPS [link]
  • A Decomposition Approach for Shipment Pickup and Delivery for Time-windows under Uncertainty
    • Authors: Lavanya Marla and Cynthia Barnhart
    • In Proceedings of the Multidisciplinary International Scheduling Conference: Theory and Applications, August 9-12, 2011. [link]
  • Congestion in a Competitive World: A Study of the Impact of Competition on Airline Operations
    • Authors: Nikolas Eggenberg and Lavanya Marla
    • In Proceedings of the Swiss Transport Research Conference (STRC) September 9-11, 2009. [link]

Working Papers

  • Lavanya Marla, “Efficient Performance Bounds for Dynamic Decisions on Large-Scale Time-Space Networks”, preprint available upon request.
  • Mayank Baranwal*, Lavanya Marla, Srinivasa M. Salapaka and Carolyn Beck, “A Unified Statistical Physics Approach for a Large Class of Vehicle Routing Problems”, preprint available upon request, to be submitted shortly to IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
  • Naman Shukla, Arinbjorn Kolbeinsson, Lavanya Marla and Kartik Yellepeddi, “From the Average to the Individual Customer: A Field Experiment on Airline Ancillary Pricing”.
  • Gabriel Weaver and Lavanya Marla, “A Threat and Response Model for Automated Guided Vehicles at the Port of Auckland”, in preparation.
  • Lavanya Marla and Achal Bassamboo, “Information Relaxation Bounds for Ambulance Dispatch and Allocation Policies”.
  • Sanyukta Deshpande* and Lavanya Marla, “Joint Location and Coverage Models for Competitive Ambulance Services in Emerging Economies”.

Honors and Awards

  • University of Illinois Center for Advanced Study Fellow 2021-22, pending Board of Trustees approval.
  • Best Presentation Honorable Mention for student Jing Gao, INFORMS Aviation Applications Section 2020.
  • Best paper award, System Performance track, International Conference for Research and Air Transportation (ICRAT) 2020.
  • COVID-19 Research grant from Jump-ARCHES center.
  • KDD Startup Research Award for paper with Deepair Solutions, 25th ACM SIGKDD, 2019.
  • Top-10 most cited paper in Transportation Research – Part A, 2016-2019, “An Empirical Analysis of Bike Sharing Usage and Rebalancing: Evidence from Barcelona and Seville”.
  • Best Technical Presentation, AGIFORS Revenue Management Study Group Conference, AGIFORS, May 2019.
  • Gift Grant from Deepair Solutions, September 2019 – May 2020.
  • National Science Foundation (NSF), NRI 1830639 (Co-PI) INT: COLLAB: Synergetic Drone Delivery Network in Metropolis, 2018 – 2021; with Profs. Naira Hovakimyan, Srinivasa Salapaka, Ranxiao Wang, Marco Pavone and Xiaofeng Wang.
  • Anna Valicek Award Honorable mention — Jane Lee (2018).
  • Gift Grant from Deepair Solutions, September 2018 – May 2019.
  • Awarded Cross-Regional Collaboration Grant for 2017-2018 by the INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics (TSL) Society, sponsored by Kalyx Warehousing; with Prof. Gitakrishnan Ramadurai as Co-PI.
  • Awarded as Co-PI award continuation CIRI grant by US Department of Homeland Security, July 2017 – June 2018, with Dr. Gabriel Weaver as PI.
  • Awarded as Co-PI, CIRI grant by the Department of Homeland Security, in January – June 2017, with Dr. Gabriel Weaver as PI.
  • United States-India Educational Foundation (USIEF) Indo-US 21st Century Knowledge Initiative grant, 2015-2018, with Prof. Milind Sohoni as Co-PI.
  • Awarded (as Co-PI) US Department of Transportation grant to establish a University Transportation Center (UTC) at Carnegie Mellon University, January 2012.
  • Invited speaker, Inaugural Transportation Science and Logistics Society Annual Workshop, June 2011.
  • Winner, 2010 Ann Hershfang graduate scholarship, awarded by WTS-Boston.
  • Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, 2008-09. Awarded through MIT’s Global Airline Industry Center.
  • National Merit Scholarship Fellow, National Council for Educational Research and Training, Government of India, 1998 – 2004.

Professional Activities

  • Invited referee for international journals: Management Science, Transportation Science, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, AAAI, Decision Sciences, Networks, Journal of Air Transport Management, Transportation Research-Part C, Transportation Research- Part A, Transportation Research-Part D, Journal of Scheduling, Annals of Operations Research, Production and Operations Management, Networks and Spatial Economics, Socio-Economic and Planning Sciences, Computers and Industrial Engineering, Flexible Services and Manufacturing, Decision Analysis, 4OR.
  • NSF Panel Member, CMMI, 2020.
  • Judging committee, INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics Society’s Best Dissertation Prize, 2020.
  • Invited International Referee, Hong Kong Research Council (2014, 2017).
  • Invited International Referee, Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (2018).
  • Judging committee, INFORMS Aviation Applications Section’s Best Dissertation Prize, 2017.
  • Cluster Chair, INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics Society, INFORMS Annual Meeting 2017, Houston, TX.
  • Invited Scientific Committee member, First Transportation Science and Logistics Society Conference, 2017.
  • Chair, Best Student Presentation Award committee for the Aviation Applications Society, INFORMS Annual Meeting 2016.
  • Invited Keynote speaker for the Society of Women Engineers, UIUC Chapter, Fall 2015.
  • Mentoring students at the UIUC INFORMS chapter.
  • NSF Panel Member, CMMI, 2014.
  • Judging committee, INFORMS Aviation Applications Section’s Best Dissertation Prize, 2014.
  • Judging committee, IIE Transactions – Best paper Award for INFORMS, 2013.
  • NSF Panel Member, Cyber-Physical Systems, 2013.
  • Session Chair and organizer for Aviation Applications Session, INFORMS Annual Meeting 2011 and 2012.
  • Organizing Committee Member of the 5th Annual INFORMS Professional Colloquium (IPC), April 26, 2009, at the INFORMS Practice Conference 2009, Phoenix, AZ, USA
  • Co-organizer, MIT CTL (Center for Transportation and Logistics) seminar series, 2005.
  • Member of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).