Professor Bodhibrata Nag

Bodhibrata Nag and Katta G. Murty(University of Michigan), "Diesel locomotive fueling problem (LFP) in railroad operations", 49 OPSEARCH(Springer)(2012):315–333. DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s12597-012-0082-5 About 75 % of the world’s railroads operate with diesel fuel. Even though European railroads rely on electric traction to a large extent, US railroads rely mostly on diesel fuel (100 % of US freight is hauled by diesel locomotives). Like in other industries there is intense competition to keep costs low; and in railroad operations based on diesel locomotives, the cost of fuel and its delivery is the major component of the overall cost. Since the cost of fuel is highly location dependent (due to local taxes and transportation costs between supply and demand points), locomotive fueling problem discussed in this paper is a critical problem in railroad operations. Given: the set of yards, the set of trains to operate, the locomotive assignments to trains, and the fuel cost and capacity data; this problem deals with finding the fueling plan for the various trains to minimize the total cost of fueling the locomotives. We describe three different algorithms, two based on greedy method and one using MIP model, that we used to solve this problem and highlight the summary of solutions obtained by each of them for comparisons of these algorithms.

Bodhibrata Nag, Jeetendra Singh and Ved Mani Tiwari,"Choosing the appropriate project management structure, project financing, land acquisition and contractual process for Indian railway mega-projects: a case study of the Dedicated Freight Corridor project", Journal of Project, Program & Portfolio Management, 3 (2012): 39-54. Available at http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/pppm/article/view/2791/3487 & https://ssrn.com/abstract=2928686 A large number of railway mega-projects are planned or are under implementation for capacity augmentation, for serving the needs of trade, specific regions or industry sectors. Since transport capacity is one of the main levers of economic progress, it is essential that augmentation of transport capacity is not held up. It is therefore essential to choose the appropriate project management structure, project financing, land acquisition and contractual process to ensure design, construction and commissioning of projects without cost and time overruns. These choices have to be made keeping in view the context of the organisational technical capacity, financial capability, contractor capacity, and industry and trade growth pattern. This paper examines the various project management structures, methods of project financing, land acquisition and contractual processes along with their advantages and disadvantages. The paper takes the specific case of the Dedicated Freight Corridor project to examine the appropriateness of options.

Bodhibrata Nag and Katta G.Murty(University of Michigan), "Organizing National Elections in India to Elect the 543 Members of the Lok Sabha", Algorithmic Operations Research 7(2013): 55–70. Available at http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/AOR/article/view/20395 & https://ssrn.com/abstract=2928689 There are 833 thousand polling stations in all of the 543 parliamentary constituencies spread over 35 states of India. On the day elections are being held in any one of these polling stations, a minimum of 4 Central Police Force(CPF) personnel must be deployed there, to maintain law and order and guarantee that voters can vote freely without being intimidated by anyone. As the number of CPF personnel available for this activity is limited, it is not possible to hold the Indian General elections on a single day over the whole country. So the set of 35 States of India is partitioned into a number of subsets, with elections in each subset of states being held on a single day. This partition is required to satisfy the constraints that the states in each subset are contiguous, and the subsets themselves must be contiguous. We present a method for organizing the Indian General Elections subject to these constraints, and minimizing the total number of election days required, and the total cost for the movement of CPF personnel involved. The method is based on the shortest Hamiltonian path problem, a tour segmentation problem defined in the paper, and the bipartite minimum cost flow problem.

Bodhibrata Nag, "A Dynamic Programming Algorithm for Optimal Design of Tidal Power Plants", Journal of The Institution of Engineers (India): Series B(Springer)(2013) Volume 94, Issue 1, Page 43-51. DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s40031-013-0041-4. Awarded the "The Union Ministry of Energy-Department of Power Prize" for the best paper published on Power Development and Utilization at the 29th Indian Engineering Congress 2014. https://www.ieindia.org/NewsPDF/recipent/29th_IEC.pdf A dynamic programming algorithm is proposed and demonstrated on a test case to determine the optimum operating schedule of a barrage tidal power plant to maximize the energy generation over a tidal cycle. Since consecutive sets of high and low tides can be predicted accurately for any tidal power plant site, this algorithm can be used to calculate the annual energy generation for different technical configurations of the plant. Thus an optimal choice of a tidal power plant design can be made from amongst different design configurations yielding the least cost of energy generation. Since this algorithm determines the optimal time of operation of sluice gate opening and turbine gates opening to maximize energy generation over a tidal cycle, it can also be used to obtain the annual schedule of operation of a tidal power plant and the minute-to-minute energy generation, for dissemination amongst power distribution utilities.

Bodhibrata Nag, "Public Procurement- case study of the Indian Railways", Journal of Institute of Public Enterprise (2013) Volume 36, Issue 1 & 2, Page 45-70. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2323257 Indian Railways is one of the world’s largest public sector organizations. Its network, traffic, organization and extent of vertical integration are gigantic. This paper undertakes a critical examination of its procurement process to understand the procedures and institutional mechanisms which have evolved over time for safeguarding institutional interests. The paper examines issues such as organizational structure, procurement organization, source selection methodology, procurement oversight and regulation and their impact on the economy, efficiency, transparency and accountability aspects of procurement. It is found that a unique combination of internal vigil, external oversight by independent bodies and organizational characteristics contribute to robust procurement processes.

Bodhibrata Nag, "A MIP model for scheduling India's General Elections and Police movement", OPSEARCH(Springer) (Oct–Dec 2014) 51(4):562–576. DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s12597-013-0160-3 Conducting the General Elections for the 543 members of the Parliament of India across the 833 thousand polling stations spread over the 35 States is a mammoth exercise. Deployment of the Central Police Forces is essential to complement the role of the State police during the elections. However paucity of Central Police Forces necessitates the conduct of elections over stages. This paper proposes and demonstrates a MIP model to (a) schedule the elections with a minimum number of stages (b) sourcing the appropriate number of security personnel from the most convenient Central Police Forces bases (c)scheduling movement of security personnel between stages with the objective of minimizing men-miles.

Bodhibrata Nag,"Combating Corruption in Indian Public Procurement- some exploratory case studies", Journal of Institute of Public Enterprise (2015) Volume 38, Issue 1 & 2, Page 1-34.Available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=2928667 This paper has adopted the exploratory case study method of analyzing a few recent cases of public procurement irregularities documented by the vigilance departments and the CAG available in public domain to inquire into the following issues :(a) how do irregularities and instances of corruption persist in spite of safeguards and thereby find the deficiencies of the current procurement processes and control mechanisms, (b) recommending appropriate corruption prevention methods for arresting the deficiencies in the Indian context. The recommendations following the case analyses are the need for comprehensive set of measures including strengthening the accountability, monitoring and whistleblower mechanisms, training of procurement officials and building a strong information system.

Bodhibrata Nag and Ashok Banerjee, "On a few strategies for a sustainable turnaround of the Indian Railways", Journal of Institute of Public Enterprise (2016) Volume 39, Issue 1 & 2, Page 16-36. Available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=2928581 The paper focuses on evaluation of the few turn around strategies available with the Indian Railways to improve its operating ratio. The strategies examined are (a) choice of electric traction and the pace of electrification (b) improvement of utilization of network capacity (c) bench marking of maintenance expenses (d) bench marking staff deployment and (e) inflation indexed tariff. The paper demonstrates that judicious application of these strategies can have substantial impact on the profit margin of the Indian Railways.

Ranjan Pal(University of Michigan), Konstantinos Psounis(University of Southern California), John Crowcroft(University of Cambridge), Pan Hui (University of Helsinki) and Bodhibrata Nag et.al, "When Are Cyber Blackouts in Modern Service Networks Likely?: A Network Oblivious Theory on Cyber (Re)Insurance Feasibility", ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, Vol. 11, No. 2, Article 5 (July 2020), https://doi.org/10.1145/3386159

Ranjan Pal(University of Michigan), John Crowcroft(University of Cambridge) and Bodhibrata Nag et.al, "Will Catastrophic Cyber-Risk Aggregation Thrive in the IoT Age? An Economic Take on Managing Aggregate Heavy-Tailed Risks", ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, Volume 12, Issue 2, May 2021, Article No.: 17, pp 1–36, https://doi.org/10.1145/3446635

Ranjan Pal(University of Michigan), John Crowcroft(University of Cambridge), Yong Li (Tsinghua University), Sasu Tarkoma (University of Helsinki) and Bodhibrata Nag et.al, "Preference-Based Privacy Markets", IEEE Access (Volume 8), Date of Publication: 07 August 2020, DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3014882