Andy Deng, 2017, Operations Research and Financial Engineering

Andy Deng ’17

My project focused on how to optimally organize a fleet of electric vehicles (EVs) to fulfill customer requests for trips in the state of New Jersey. I wrote a computer program that simulates a day of operation: customers calling in, cars accepting and completing trips, cars recharging, profit earned, etc. Imbedded in the simulator is a policy that decides what cars should do. Throughout the summer, I tested and compared different policies using the profit earned by each policy. Besides gaining a lot more experience writing code from scratch, I learned about how to use a policy called Value Function Approximation and how to use Dynamic Programming to estimate the value functions. In addition, my colleagues exposed me to a variety of similar resource allocation problems through their research projects. While my research is not complete, I will be continuing work on this project as my senior thesis.