A new AIROSpringer Series volume and the case study of Provincia di Brescia

Finally the volume entitled “Operations Research and Data Science in Public Services”, dedicated to the 6th AIROYoung Workshop (February 23–25, 2022 – Rome, Italy), has been published in the AIRO Springer Series. Matteo Cosmi (University of Luxembourg), Lorenzo Peirano (University of Brescia), Marcella Samà (Roma Tre University), and I were the Special Volume editors of the volume, which contains five accepted contributions presenting both methodological and application-oriented results. For more details, check it out the preface we wrote to present them.

Among these, there is also a chapter I worked on together with Matteo Zavatteri (University of Padova), Marco Gussago (Ufficio Biblioteche, Provincia di Brescia), Fabio Bazzoli (Sistema Bibliotecario Sud Ovest Bresciano), and Romeo Rizzi (University of Verona). This chapter is dedicated to the case study of the interlibrary loan service of the Provincia di Brescia. In the current implementation of the service, libraries are divided into established groups, each associated with a fixed route. According to a predetermined calendar, each library is visited by a courier a few times a week. The transportation of the items in the network is performed by an external logistics firm, selected through a reverse auction. To assess this implementation in terms of routing and transportation costs, we propose a two-phase approach based on machine learning and mixed-integer linear programming, and we evaluate it on the data of 2019 by discussing its applicability in reality and providing a few insights.