Abstract
Car sharing, car clubs and short-term rentals could support the transition toward net zero but their success depends on them being financially sustainable for service providers and attractive to end users. Dynamic pricing could support this by incentivizing users while balancing supply and demand. We describe the usage of a round trip car sharing fleet by a continuous time Markov chain model, which reduces to a multi-server queuing model where hire duration is assumed independent of the hourly rental price. We present analytical and simulation optimization models that allow the development of dynamic pricing strategies for round trip car sharing systems; in particular identifying the optimal hourly rental price. The analytical tractability of the queuing model enables fast optimization to maximize expected hourly revenue for either a single fare system or a system where the fare depends on the number of cars on hire, while accounting for stochasticity in customer arrival times and durations of hire. Simulation optimization is used to optimize prices where the fare depends on the time of day or hire duration depends on price. We present optimal prices for a given customer population and show how the expected revenue and car availability depend on the customer arrival rate, willingness-to-pay distribution, dependence of the hire duration on price, and size of the customer population. The results provide optimal strategies for pricing of car sharing and inform strategic managerial decisions such as whether to use time- or state-dependent pricing and optimizing the fleet size. © 2025 The Authors

Abstract
The Prisoner Transportation Problem is an NP-hard combinatorial problem and a complex variant of the Dial-a- Ride Problem. Given a set of requests for pick-up and delivery and a homogeneous fleet, it consists of assigning requests to vehicles to serve all requests, respecting the problem constraints such as route duration, capacity, ride time, time windows, multi-compartment assignment of conflicting prisoners and simultaneous services in order to optimize a given objective function. In this paper, we present anew solution framework to address this problem that leads to an efficient heuristic. A comparison with computational results from previous papers shows that the heuristic is very competitive for some classes of benchmark instances from the literature and clearly superior in the remaining cases. Finally, suggestions for future studies are presented.

Abstract
This paper studies the process of cutting steel bars in a truck suspension factory with the objective of reducing its inventory costs and material losses. A mathematical model is presented that focuses on decisions for a medium-term horizon (4 periods of 2 months). This approach addresses the one-dimensional 3-level integrated lot sizing and cutting stock problem, considering demand, inventory costs and stock level limits for bars (objects-level 1), springs (items-level 2) and spring bundles (final products-level 3), as well as the acquisition of bars as a decision variable. The solution to the proposed mathematical model is reached through an optimization package, using column generation along with a method for achieving integer solutions. The results obtained with real data demonstrate that the method provides significantly better solutions than those carried out at the company, whilst using reduced computational time. Additionally, the application of tests with random data enabled the analysis of both the effect of varying parameters in the solution, which provides managerial insights, and the overall performance of the method.

Abstract
In online three-dimensional packing problems (3D-PPs), unlike offline problems, items arrive sequentially and require immediate packing decisions without any information about the quantities and sizes of the items to come. Heuristic methods are of great importance in solving online problems to find good solutions in a reasonable amount of time. However, the literature on heuristics for online problems is sparse. As our first contribution, we developed a pool of heuristics applicable to online 3D-PPs with complementary performance on different sets of instances. Computational results showed that in terms of the number of used bins, in all problem instances, at least one of our heuristics had a better or equal performance compared to existing heuristics in the literature. The developed heuristics are also fully applicable to an intermediate class between offline and online problems, referred to in this paper as a specific type of semi-online with full look-ahead, which has several practical applications. In this class, as in offline problems, complete information about all items is known in advance (i.e., full look-ahead); however, due to time or space constraints, as in online problems, items should be packed immediately in the order of their arrival. As our second contribution, we presented an algorithm selection framework, building on developed heuristics and utilizing prior information about items in this specific class of problems. We used supervised machine learning techniques to find the relationship between the features of problem instances and the performance of heuristics and to build a prediction model. The results indicate an 88% accuracy in predicting (identifying) the most promising heuristic(s) for solving any new instance from this class of problems.

Abstract
One of the main challenges of one-way carsharing systems is to maximize profit by attracting potential customers and utilizing the fleet efficiently. Pricing plans are mid or long-term decisions that affect customers' decision to join a carsharing system and may also be used to influence their travel behavior to increase fleet utilization e.g., favoring rentals on off-peak hours. These plans contain different attributes, such as registration fee, travel distance fee, and rental time fee, to attract various customer segments, considering their travel habits. This paper aims to bridge a gap between business practice and state of the art, moving from unique single-tariff plan assumptions to a realistic market offer of multi-attribute plans. To fill this gap, we develop a mixed-integer linear programming model and a solving method to optimize the value of plans' attributes that maximize carsharing operators' profit. Customer preferences are incorporated into the model through a discrete choice model, and the Brooklyn taxi trip dataset is used to identify specific customer segments, validate the model's results, and deliver relevant managerial insights. The results show that developing customized plans with time- and location-dependent rates allows the operators to increase profit compared to fixed-rate plans. Sensitivity analysis reveals how key parameters impact customer choices, pricing plans, and overall profit.

Abstract
In a housing market of Shapley and Scarf, each agent is endowed with one indivisible object and has preferences over all objects. An allocation of the objects is in the (strong) core if there exists no (weakly) blocking coalition. We show that, for strict preferences, the unique strong core allocation respects improvement-if an agent's object becomes more desirable for some other agents, then the agent's allotment in the unique strong core allocation weakly improves. We extend this result to weak preferences for both the strong core (conditional on nonemptiness) and the set of competitive allocations (using probabilistic allocations and stochastic dominance). There are no counterparts of the latter two results in the two-sided matching literature. We provide examples to show how our results break down when there is a bound on the length of exchange cycles. Respecting improvements is an important property for applications of the housing markets model, such as kidney exchange: it incentivizes each patient to bring the best possible set of donors to the market. We conduct computer simulations using markets that resemble the pools of kidney exchange programs. We compare the game-theoretical solutions with current techniques (maximum size and maximum weight allocations) in terms of violations of the respecting improvement property. We find that game-theoretical solutions fare much better at respecting improvements even when exchange cycles are bounded, and they do so at a low efficiency cost. As a stepping stone for our simulations, we provide novel integer programming formulations for computing core, competitive, and strong core allocations.