HEC Montréal

About: HEC Montréal is a education organization based out in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Context (language use) & Vehicle routing problem. The organization has 1221 authors who have published 5708 publications receiving 196862 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Montreal & HEC Montreal.

Risk Management and Corporate Governance: The Importance of Independence and Financial Knowledge for the Board and the Audit Committee

Abstract: The new NYSE rules for corporate governance require the audit committee to discuss and review the firm's risk assessment and hedging strategies. They also put additional requirements for the composition and the financial knowledge of the directors sitting on the board and on the audit committee. In this paper, we investigate whether these new rules as well as those set by the Sarbanes Oxley act lead to hedging decisions that are of more benefit to shareholders. We construct a novel hand collected dataset that allows us to explore multiple definitions for the financially knowledgeable term present in this new regulation. We find that the requirements on the audit committee size and independence are beneficial to shareholders, although maintaining a majority of unrelated directors in the board and a director with an accounting background on the audit committee may not be necessary. Interestingly, financially educated directors seem to encourage corporate hedging while financially active directors and those with an accounting background play no active role in such policy. This evidence combined with the positive relation we report between hedging and the firm's performance suggests that shareholders are better off with financially educated directors on their boards and audit committees. Our empirical findings also show that having directors with a university education on the board is an important determinant of the hedging level. Indeed, our measure of risk management is found to be an increasing function of the percentage of directors holding a diploma superior to a bachelor degree. This result is the first direct evidence concerning the importance of university education for the board of directors.

Drone routing with energy function: Formulation and exact algorithm

Abstract: Drone delivery is known as a potential contributor in improving efficiency and alleviating last-mile delivery problems. For this reason, drone routing and scheduling has become a highly active area of research in recent years. Unlike the vehicle routing problem, however, designing drones’ routes is challenging due to multiple operational characteristics including multi-trip operations, recharge planning, and energy consumption calculation. To fill some important gaps in the literature, this paper solves a multi-trip drone routing problem, where drones’ energy consumption is modeled as a nonlinear function of payload and travel distance. We propose adding logical cuts and subgradient cuts in the solution process to tackle the more complex nonlinear (convex) energy function, instead of using the linear approximation method as in the literature, which can fail to detect infeasible routes due to excess energy consumption. We use a 2-index formulation to model the problem and develop a branch-and-cut algorithm for the formulation. Benchmark instances are first generated for this problem. Numerical tests indicate that even though the original model is nonlinear, the proposed approach can solve large problems to optimality. In addition, in multiple instances, the linear approximation model yields routes that under the nonlinear energy model would be energy infeasible. Use of a linear approximation for drone energy leads to differences in energy consumption of about 9% on average compared to the nonlinear energy model.

Some Applications of the Generalized Vehicle Routing Problem

Abstract: The Generalized Vehicle Routing Problem (GVRP) is an extension of the classical Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) in which the vertex set is partitioned into clusters and vehicles must visit exactly one (or at least one) vertex per cluster. The GVRP provides a useful modelling framework for a wide variety of applications. The purpose of this paper is to provide such examples of applications and models. These include the Travelling Salesman with Profits, several VRP extensions, the Windy Routing Problem, and the design of tandem configurations for automated guided vehicles.