Some work in other areas



  • Optimal market-mix planning system for a large canadian bank

      • For many years banks designed their promotional efforts to aim at the broadest possible markets in hopes of recruiting new clients. Recently, competitive measures have forced them to focus instead on a strategy of market segmentation designed to sell specific products to markets that present the best present and future opportunity for profit. Consequently, banks have begun developing marketing strategies similar to those of the retail industry. In one large Canadian bank, a new marketing approach called the "street-corner strategy" was proposed for selling the right product to the right client. However questions remain unanswered. What kinds of clients do banks want? Which products should they sell them? This article proposes a model enabling bankers to find the market-mix that will maximize profits, under the constraints of feasible marketing strategy, competition, and the effects of changing interest rates. We have designed a deterministic optimization model that quickly finds a solution that maximizes bank profits while respecting operational constraints. The model was tested on the data for the province of Québec and it yielded potential profit increase of 25% for a three year period. This model can be used to help marketing departments assess their constraints, to evaluate changes in product costs, and to adjust their strategies to increase profitability.

    • LAROCHELLE, J.-F., SANSÒ, B., Optimization of the Market-Mix in the Banking Industry, INFOR, 38, 4, 390-406, 2000.

  • Instantaneous power peak optimization in a subway system

      • In a subway system, when a train leaves one station to go to another power consumption increases and, at one point, reaches a peak. When such peaks occur simultaneously, the total power peak of the system can be very large. On the other hand, if departures are totally desynchronized, it could affect the overall operation of the system. We deals with the problem of finding a procedure to desynchronize train departures during a typical rush hour operation so that overall power peaks are minimized and the frequency, safety and operational constraints of the system are respected. The model, applied to Montreal subway system, yielded 17% reduction in power peaks with less than 5 second line delays for train desynchronization.

    • SANSÒ, B., GIRARD, p., Instantaneous Power Peak Reduction and Train Scheduling Desynchronization in Subway Systems, Transportation Science, 31(4), 312-323, 1997.

  • Planning models for the platoon approach of ATIS systems

      • The idea of platooning has been proposed for very long highways in order to reduce their congestion. It was uncertain, however, how/if platooning could be incorporated into urban sites presenting severe bottlenecks. Such bottlenecks produce important constraints in the design of platoon systems. We chose to study the case of Champlain Bridge, which is one of the most congested areas of Montréal. We developed a set of formulas to account for the severe bottleneck restrictions and proposed several scenarios to put in place the platoon approach. The study shows that under some conditions, platooning could, in fact, not only be feasible but cold also lead toward great improvements in terms of performance.

    • STEMATE, L, SANSÒ, B., CRAINIC, T., Integrating Platooning into Urban Transportation Planning, Working papers, Centre de recherche sur les transports, Université de Montréal, 1995.

  • Reliability and urban transportation planning.-The Montréal bridges case.

      • Traditional performance measures in urban transportation do not specifically take into account what happens in the network after an accident. However, accident play a primary role in network performance. In this work, we propose a framework to evaluate network performance by taking into account not only accident site, but also accident removal time, information given to users and users behavior. We specifically studied the case of accidents in Montréal South Shore bridges.

    • SANSÒ, B., MILOT, L., Performability of a Congested Urban Transportation Network when Accident Information is Available, Transportation Science, 33, 68-79, 1999.
    • SANSÒ, B., MILOT, L., A Reliability Model for Urban Transportation Planning, extended abstract, Tristan 2, Capri, Italie, 1994, 6 p.
    • SANSÒ, B., MILOT, L., A Performance Model for Urban Transportation Networks, ORSA/TIMS, Phoenix, Arizona, 1993.




    Home