Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1748-346X
Date of Award
Spring 4-2026
Document Type
Thesis (Ph.D.)
Department or Program
Engineering Sciences
First Advisor
Vikrant Vaze
Second Advisor
Klaus Keller
Abstract
Public sector decisions, such as how governments allocate resources, deliver services, and plan for the future, shape daily lives profoundly. Operations research offers powerful tools to improve these decisions, yet gaps remain in identifying problems that matter to stakeholders and are useful in practice. A priori problem definitions may not fully capture stakeholder priorities or the feedback through which decisions influence constituent responses. Co-design offers a complementary pathway by helping identify relevant questions and key feedback to incorporate into optimization models. This dissertation explores how co-designed operations research can improve decision-making in two public domains: school transportation and coastal adaptation planning.
Excessively long school bus rides can harm student performance and well-being. Through collaborative engagement with a rural school district, this dissertation identifies reducing commute time as the central challenge, tied to two related concerns: under-utilized buses and localized congestion near schools during drop-off. To address these concerns, this dissertation formulates a school bus routing problem that minimizes student travel time and develops a novel cluster-and-route heuristic. An iterative feedback mechanism then links routing decisions to downstream effects, capturing how shorter commute times shift ridership from cars to buses and ease under-utilization and congestion.
Coastal erosion and flooding pose an existential threat to small communities that rely on beach nourishment. Informed by a broader co-design effort with coastal stakeholders, this dissertation develops a multi-objective robust decision-making framework to address the central question these communities face: when to retreat, if at all. The framework identifies strategies for timing and sequencing nourishment and retreat decisions under uncertainty. By modeling how adaptation actions affect observable state variables such as beach width and aggregate property valuation, the framework captures how physical and economic conditions evolve and shape decisions across the planning horizon.
Together, these applications show how operations research, informed by stakeholder co-design and attentive to feedback between decisions and outcomes, can meaningfully improve public systems. The school bus routing application demonstrates a 22–25 % improvement in student commute time, while the coastal adaptation framework recommends managed retreat two decades earlier than existing benchmarks when accounting for uncertainty and balancing multiple planning objectives.
Recommended Citation
Hegde, Prabhat, "Co-Designed Public and Societal Operations Research for Decision Analysis in Complex Systems: Applications to Transportation and Coastal Adaptation Planning" (2026). Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations. 470.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/dissertations/470
