2nd conference of the EURO Working Group on the Practice of Operations Research
2019-03-11 - 2019-03-12 | Bologna, Italy
The 2nd conference of the EURO Working Group on the Practice of Operations Research will take place on 11th and 12th March in the beautiful city of Bologna (Italy) and is going to focus on “Operations Research meets Machine Learning: how to get the most of both worlds to achieve excellent Decision Support Systems”.
To see the preliminary program, venue information and register (free), go to https://ormeetsml.eventbrite.com
The call for abstracts is closed. See you in Bologna!
Looking forward to meeting you in Bologna.
Here is the program and schedule in a nice flyer in pdf: EWG POR second conference 11-12.

EURO-k 2019
2019-06-23 - 2019-06-26 | Dublin, Ireland
It’s time for the big EURO conference, and again the working group is present with the Making An Impact track.
For more information here is the link to the official Making an Impact page at EURO-k 2019

Operations Research towards Technology Transfer: from Data to Actionable Knowledge
2019-09-05 | Department of Economics and Business Studies (DIEC), University of Genova, via F. Vivaldi, 5 - Darsena, Genova, Genova, Italy
Save the date: on September 5th, 2019, in the wonderful city of Genoa (Italy) will take place the workshop Operations Research towards Technology Transfer: from Data to Actionable Knowledge.
The meeting will bring together companies and researchers to exchange ideas, knowledge and expertise, promote collaborations and outline the forthcoming landscape for Operational Research driven innovation.
Furthermore, the workshop will be the opportunity to illustrate successful examples on the integration between Operational Research and Machine Learning and to foster a discussion on the potential for development in areas such as Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.
Practitioners and transfer facilitators in OR and Analytics, from academia, OR start-up, spin-off and intermediary organizations, are invited to present their experiences in exploiting the synergy of Operational Research with data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning to enable more effective business decisions and more productive systems.
The workshop is organized in the framework of the International Conference on Optimization and Decision Science – ODS 2019 (Genoa, Italy – 4-7 September 2019), in the wonderful city of Genoa (Italy), simultaneously with the XLIX Annual Meeting of AIRO, the Italian Operations Research Society.

Second International Workshop on High-Performance Business Computing
2020-03-26 - 2020-03-27 | Paderborn
For more information look here.

Euro Working Group - Practice of OR Meeting 2020
2020-09-28 13:00 - 2020-11-02 17:00 UTC | Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin, Berlin, Germany
The working group meeting have gone digital (due to COVID-19)
The online event continues in the form of a webinar series on Mondays at 4pm CET, until 2 November 2020.
To register please click here.

The recordings of talks can be accessed on YouTube
Some speakers are also making their presentations available in PDF form and we will have those published as soon as possible.

For the full program see the attached PDF below (click the picture):

First Friday Webinar - Programming by Optimization: Automated algorithm configuration, selection and beyond
2021-01-08 10:00 - 11:00 UTC
In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the use of automated algorithm design methods, such as automated algorithm configuration and portfolio-based algorithm selection, across many areas within operations research, artificial intelligence and beyond. These methods are based on cutting-edge machine learning and optimization techniques; they have also led to substantial advances in those areas.
In this tutorial, I will give an overview of these automated algorithm design methods and introduce Programming by Optimization (PbO), a principled approach for developing high-performance software based on them. I will explain how PbO can fundamentally change the nature of developing solvers for challenging computational problems and give examples for its successful application to a range of prominent problems from OR and AI – notably, mixed integer programming, the travelling salesman problem, AI planning, automated reasoning and machine learning.

EWG POR webinars organisers:
Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Patrick Schittekat (SINTEF), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic

First Friday Webinar - Progress and Challenges with the CP-SAT solver
2021-02-05 10:00 - 11:00 UTC
About this Event

CP-SAT won all gold medals in the Minizinc challenge in the tracks it participated in the last 3 years. It also proved 5 open problems in the MIPLIB 2017 suite, and improved bounds on a few more. In a sense, it realizes the old dream of having a good MIP solver and a good CP solver in the same engine. In this presentation, we will present how the SAT technology has enabled this merging of the two techniques in a competitive way, and concludes with the challenges and research opportunities in front of us.

EWG POR webinars organisers:
Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Patrick Schittekat (SINTEF), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic

First Friday Webinar - Optimizing emergency response systems
2021-03-05 10:00 - 11:00 UTC
Emergency response systems, e.g. fire and rescue services and emergency medical services, have been a popular area of study for operational researchers. However, unlike for the airline industry for instance, there do not exist an abundance of success stories, where advanced operational research models and methods have been implemented in practice. In this talk, I’ll present a few emergency response problems, including the classical fire station location problem, ambulance dispatching and relocation, and volunteer management, where OR have been used in practice. I will also discuss some of the challenges with practical implementations, and the trade-off between working on something that is useful in practice, and something that can be published in an OR journal.

EWG POR webinars organisers: Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Patrick Schittekat (SINTEF), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic

First Friday Webinar - Tackling supply chain disruptions in pandemics – learning from humanitarian logistics
2021-04-09 10:00 - 23:00 (Europe/Paris)
Humanitarian logistics plays an important part in responding to disasters, crisis, but also epidemics and pandemics. This talk is about what we can learn from humanitarian logistics in tackling supply chain disruptions in pandemics. The talk also gives examples and shares results from current research projects on the COVID-19 pandemic, and also discusses the challenges with the ever-changing parameters of pandemic response.

EWG POR webinars organisers: Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Patrick Schittekat (SINTEF), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic

First Friday Webinar - Operational Research and Quantum Computing: can they join forces?
2021-05-07 10:00 - 11:00 (Europe/Stockholm)
We experience the benefits of classical computing every day. However, there are challenges that today’s systems would never be able to solve. To stand a chance at solving some of these problems, we need a new kind of computing: Quantum Computing. During this session we will explore together what quantum computers are about, and how they might be applied to operational research and more specifically optimization problems. With this, you would be able to start exploring how quantum computing can help with your research.

EWG POR webinars organisers:
Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Patrick Schittekat (SINTEF), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic

First Friday Webinars - The Intersection of Operational Research and Public Communication
2021-07-09 17:00 - 18:00 UTC
The Intersection of Operational Research and Public Communication during the Covid-19 Pandemic

About this event

In May 2020, I joined the group Independent SAGE. At the time, I thought I was signing up to one or two public meetings on YouTube, but instead our profile grew and we discovered there was a large public appetite for more information about Covid and its spread in the UK. From the summer onwards, I have been giving regular updates on the latest Covid situation in the UK during Independent SAGE weekly briefings and have been invited regularly on the media fielding questions about various aspects of the Covid pandemic. In this talk, I will reflect on how my experience of working in Operational Research applied to health care has shaped how I have understood and communicated the Covid pandemic over the past year. This ranges from thinking through problem definition and unintended consequences, combining knowledge across different disciplines to deciding on where the information lies in the data and how best to present it.

EWG POR webinars organisers: Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Patrick Schittekat (SINTEF), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic

EURO 2021
2021-07-11 - 2021-07-14
In addition to the general invite we would also like to especially recommend the “Practice of OR” track that the working group organizes and that is especially aimed at practitioners of OR. More details on this track will be published later.

EURO 2021 is the largest and most important conference for Operational Research and Management Science (OR/MS) in Europe organized by EURO – the European Association of Operational Research Society and the Hellenic Operational Research Society (HELORS).
The conference will be held at the University of West Attica (UNIWA) in Athens located in the area of the Holy Olive Grove ‘Eleonas’ of the ancient Athenians, where Plato taught his students.
We have selected several outstanding Plenaries & Tutorial Speakers that will present the state-of-the-art in Operations Research and outline pathways of its future developments.
Participants will have the opportunity to submit their work for publication in a series of special issues of very important journals.
At the same time, we are preparing a wonderful and enjoyable program of social events to be held as part of the conference.
After a year of lockdowns and limited travel, we are optimistic that the EURO 2021 Conference will again provide an excellent opportunity for the OR community to meet in person in a city that in a unique way stands for the identity of Europe. Of course, all necessary precautions will be taken to ensure the health and safety of conference participants.
Euro 2021 acknowledges that virtual conferences can’t entirely replicate the conference experience, which normally involves face to face meetings and networking opportunities. However, Euro 2021 is fully prepared to adjust its strategy in case of any similar situation and to convert the physical congress to a hybrid or virtual one, with main objective that the new format will continue to meet the needs of the Euro 2021 community and to ensure a viable future for the association’s activities in scientific education and professional support. Registered participants will still be eligible to participate, authors whose abstracts were accepted will be published in the digital abstract book, with e-posters available for virtual consultation and industry to have a wide selection of sponsorship opportunities.
We invite researchers, academics, practitioners, and students interested in any branch of Operational Research, mathematical modelling or economic analysis to submit abstracts or organize sessions and attend a high quality and safe conference.

First Friday Webinars - Recent developments of real-time train scheduling optimization in the practice
2021-09-03 10:00 - 11:00 UTC
Trains running through railway networks are monitored and guided in real time by train dispatchers. They control train movements by taking various relevant decisions, such as where trains should pass and meet each other, when trains should arrive or depart from stations, which routes they must take, etc. These decisions become crucial when one or more trains are delayed, in order to reduce knock-on effects and quickly regain punctuality.
In the past decades a significant research effort has been devoted to developing optimization models and methods for (automatic) real-time train rescheduling (dispatching). However, such academic effort did not translate into a widespread use of such techniques in the practice of train dispatching. To the best of my knowledge, only a few fully or partially autonomous dispatching systems are or have been rolled out over the years to support dispatchers. The mathematics and data technology required for supporting the practice, at least to a certain extent, have been approaching maturity for at least 10-15 years, and are possibly fully mature now. So, what has impeded a more widespread development and deployment of such systems? In the talk, I will try to formulate an answer to this question and also discuss some recent developments and “gamechangers” which show that the situation is rapidly evolving.
I will start by describing the basic mathematical models and methods for representing and solving train (re-)scheduling problems. I will then describe a new system to dispatch trains in the greater Oslo area, an important portion of the Norwegian railway network which includes the large Oslo central station and all the adjacent lines. Although not in operation yet, the system has the highest level of readiness (TLR 9) and is currently undergoing on-field testing by professional dispatchers at Oslo Control Center.
After this I will quickly review the few, real-life dispatching systems which (to the best of my knowledge) are or have been in operation for supporting dispatchers in practice.
I will end the talk by analyzing which were the main hurdles for the penetration of optimization methods into the practice of dispatching and why things are changing now. This discussion may be of inspiration for other sectors with similar obstacles (such as, for instance, air-traffic control).
Recent developments of real-time train scheduling optimization image
EWG POR webinars organisers: Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Patrick Schittekat (SINTEF), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic

First Friday Webinars - OR in Practice
2021-10-08 10:00 - 11:00 UTC
Thanks to all great developments in mathematics and computing power, we are able to solve more complex problems within a reasonable amount of time. Machine learning and other AI-techniques can boost the power of OR. But are we also able to explain the outcome to the industry? Optimal is not always logical, which leads to challenges both in modeling and in implementation. In this presentation I like to share my thoughts, based on my professorship “Logistic Optimization” at Tilburg University and my long experience (in parallel) as “Optimization Evangelist” at ORTEC. ORTEC is a global and leading partner in data-driven decision support.

Goos Kant is a full professor of Logistic Optimization at Tilburg University. He is involved in the Master program of Business Analytics and Operations Research, as well as in the master program Data Science & Entrepreneurship at Jheronimus Academy of Data Science. He is the project leader of a large R&D project on horizontal collaboration in logistics. Goos is also managing partner at ORTEC, active as “Optimization Evangelist” in various (logistic) industries. Goos is involved in courses from MBA-schools TIAS and Nyenrode. He holds both an MSc and a PhD in Computer Science.

EWG POR webinars organisers: Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Patrick Schittekat (SINTEF), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic

First Friday Webinars - Improving Global Risk Management of Emerging Health Threats with Facilitated Decision Analysis
2021-11-05 10:00 - 11:00 UTC | Online
Professor Gilberto Montibeller (Loughborough University, UK; University Southern California, USA),
Professor L. Alberto Franco (Loughborough University, UK; University del Pacifico, Peru)
Emerging health threats, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, create extensive health, economic and social problems. A key challenge for health experts and policy makers is deciding how to balance and reduce the risk of these threats.
In this applied research project, we developed an advanced framework to support the prioritisation of emerging health threats. The project won the prestigious EURO Excellence in Practice Award conferred by the Association of European Operational Research Societies, during the 31st EURO Conference on Operational Research held in Athens this year.
The research project achieved the following impacts in two global organisations:
(i) enhanced the quality of health experts’ policy recommendations at the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and improved health risk control regulations;
(ii) informed the development of new international standards for the Food Standards Joint Programme of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization.
The contributions to Operational Research arising from the ongoing research programme are built upon three themes, which are focused on improving decision capability for the prioritisation of emerging health threats. These are tool development, process enhancement and competence building:
• Tool development encompassed the creation of rigorous decision analytic models to support decision making in the prioritisation of emerging health threats, as well as the design of risk management support tools that enable policy makers to use these models.
• Process enhancement focused on the redesign of decision processes to address the challenges posed by the prioritisation of emergent health threats, to enable the embedding of risk management support tools within organisational routines.
• Finally, competence building supported the development of health experts’ decision and risk analysis skills, together with the effective deployment of value-focused decision making and sound health risk management practices.
Health security is an important area of application for Operational Research and in this talk we will share our experiences in conducting these challenge and successful applied research projects.

Working Group meeting 2021
2021-11-16 13:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Berlin) | Online
See the working group meeting page.
For registration go to our EventBrite page

First Friday Webinars - Optimization Approaches in e-commerce: Network Design & Marketplace Dispatching
2021-12-03 10:00 - 11:00 UTC | Online
Presented by Çağrı Doğuş Iyican (Trendyol Express) and Yahya Ertuğrul Geçkil (Trendyol Express)
Trendyol Express (TEX) is the sub-branch in Trendyol that leads daily cargo operations. As in other cargo cases, it needs depots for storing, sorting and transporting to meet customer demand and manage seller supplies. In this context, TEX has two kinds of depots for its operations which are sorting centers and cross-docks (x-docks). Sorting centers are responsible for taking packages from sellers and delivering these packages to x-docks whereas x-docks are responsible for delivering packages to customers. In a growing market, first mile and last mile demands in e-commerce forces planners to design an efficient network in order to optimize delivery times. This project aims to find the optimal locations for sorting centers and x-docks under several operational constraints.
Increasing e-commerce demand is hard to satisfy because of delivery bottlenecks. Cargo capacity growth ratio is far below e-commerce sales growth. Also, delivery costs have a major effect on expenses for e-commerce companies. Furthermore, delivery management is crucial for customer satisfaction levels. However, as well as customers, the number of sellers taking place in marketplaces is also increasing dramatically. Since it is not possible to find out best practice for tens of thousands of sellers manually, it is quite possible that resources are wasted, customers can not reach their orders in desired time and sellers deal with unnecessary costs. Besides, managers waste weeks only to find out a feasible plan. A mathematical model is developed for solving the dispatching problem for marketplace sales beside backlog amount. The model aims to distribute backlog and sales by minimizing the total delivery time.

First Friday Webinars - Julia and Python - differences and features comparison on an example use case
2022-01-14 10:00 - 11:00 UTC | Online
Presented by Moulay Driss El Alaoui Faris, Energy Decision Scientist (Air Liquide)
Embedding OR functionalities in operational tools to address a large class of problems requires designing the software architecture to provide the required modularity.
In this talk we will present comparative design of component primitives (Nodes Arcs Boxes) in Python and Julia. A particular exploration question is how to use Julia for the design of object oriented software.

First Friday Webinars - Courier-oriented route optimization for last-mile delivery at Deutsche Post
2022-02-04 10:00 - 11:00 UTC | Online
Traditional last-mile delivery planning purely based on optimization methods often lacks important real-life aspects and thus does not satisfy relevant operational requirements. Only experienced couriers have tacit knowledge about the delivery area and its customers, forcing them to deviate from planned routes. They know where to find good parking spots, when to best approach certain business customers, and which neighbors to approach at what times when the actual recipient is not at home. This tacit knowledge is almost impossible to collect and maintain, let alone to incorporate in optimization algorithms.
Thus, we at Deutsche Post DHL developed an algorithm following a different approach: We aim at implicitly learning about this tacit knowledge from historical tours and combine this with optimization algorithms to plan routes that an experienced courier would choose. In this talk we will present details of our algorithm, which incorporates machine learning, statistics, and optimization in a novel way. Furthermore, we show how it impacted last-mile delivery planning at Deutsche Post after its rollout across Germany.

About the speakers
Speaker Ugur Arikan is an Operations Research Scientist in the Data Analytics Center of Excellence at Deutsche Post DHL. He got his MSc and PhD degrees in Industrial Engineering at Middle East Technical University. His PhD and postdoc studies focused on airline disruption management and distributionally robust traffic equilibrium, respectively. He joined DPDHL after his postdoc at Singapore University of Technology and Design. Currently, he focuses on last-mile delivery and service network design projects within the team.
Speaker Jonas Witt is working as Operations Research Scientist in the Data Analytics Center of Excellence at Deutsche Post DHL, currently focusing on last-mile delivery and service network design projects. He has a B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree in Mathematics from RWTH Aachen University as well as a doctoral degree from RWTH Aachen University on decomposition methods for mixed-integer linear programming. Besides his operations research expertise, he gained experience working on more general data analytics projects as consultant.

First Friday Webinars - Why puzzles are very interesting for OR consulting?
2022-03-04 10:00 - 11:00 UTC | Online
Presented by Alex Fleischer, Optimization Expert (IBM)
When trying to solve puzzles, practitioners train themselves on OR techniques (and other techniques). Puzzles are good ways for large and small companies to have OR practitioners from academia and consulting take a look at their specific issues (ROADEF / Euro challenges). Puzzles can support challenging students to show motivation and skills.
Why puzzles are very interesting with regards to equivalent computational challenges? We need to map real world concepts to mathematical concepts and that’s useful! They also tell a story, so they’re very easy to share and explain.
Kaggle challenges are part of the buzz around data science. During the presentation, I’ll mention other public challenges with examples: The IBM Ponder this challenge, the Decision Management challenge, and, not to forget, the “Comité International des Jeux Mathématiques”, and I will request the audience’s feedback with regard to deciding if challenges are good training paths for OR consulting and, also, if real-world business OR helps practitioners get better at challenge.

First Friday Webinars - How BT is using OR to make sustainable impact in resource management
2022-04-01 10:00 - 11:00 UTC | Online
Presented by Dr. Anne Liret, Research Manager (British Telecommunications)
In the face of the climate emergency, several measures are being taken to move to more sustainable sources of energy. The transport sector has increasingly adopted Electric Vehicles (EVs) in order to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions. This has led to the necessity of accounting for these technologies in the area of field services delivery. In particular BT Research have been developing technical solutions to support the introduction of EV into their large fleet operations. This led to new models to plan for new EV chargers deployment minimising the energy risk, and then to schedule jobs and charge activities of electric vehicles in the feasible operational manner for field engineers while minimising the productivity impact.
By optimising the infrastructure, the required investment can be determined as well as minimising the disruption to the operations caused by the rollout of the new VE fleet and infrastructure can be minimised. As usual in operational research applied to decision-making support, the measuring of the impact on real-case trials is key to make sure changes adoption is going smoothly.

First Friday Webinars - Optimisation for airports – London Heathrow
2022-05-06 10:00 - 11:00 UTC | Online
Dr Jason Atkin is a member of the Computational Optimisation and Learning lab in the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham. He has been working with NATS and Heathrow airport since he started his PhD on the topic in late 2003. Although he has also worked on various other airport optimisation and modelling problems, his work has primarily been focusing on real-world runway sequencing at the airport, considering the ‘often messy’ real world constraints and characteristics of the problems. Having previously been a software engineer in industry, he applied various software engineering techniques to the challenge, which gives a somewhat different perspective to the usual academic approaches.
This talk will discuss the work with NATS and Heathrow, which contributed to Heathrow being able to predict take-off times accurately enough to gaining CDM compliance. Various versions of the problem will be discussed, introducing both the real world situation at Heathrow and considering the various academic simplifications that have sometimes been used for similar problems, and their implications in the real world. Ongoing work with Heathrow is still providing further enhancements and improvements over time.

EURO Working Group on Practice of OR/Practitioners’ Forum past and planned activities are available to the Forum members, as well as the wider public. Register as a member for free, to get the regular updates on all activities: EWG POR Member registration page
The recordings and details from previous webinars are available here. Follow the Forum on Twitter and LinkedIN , and feel free to get in touch.

Comparing services: why hospitals should call
2022-06-03 10:00 - 11:00 UTC
About the speaker:
Ger Koole is full professor of business analytics and optimization at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is also founder and lead scientist of the call center workforce management company CCmath. He obtained his PhD at Leiden University in 1992 with theoretical work on the control of queueing systems.
Before moving to Amsterdam he held the postdoc positions at CWI and INRIA. Over the years, his interests moved to applications of optimization under uncertainty, especially in call centers, health care and revenue management.
Abstract:
In this talk, I will make a comparison between call centers and hospitals, from the point of view of operations management.
I will show how advanced prediction and optimization techniques impact call center operations and how academia and industry interact to move the field forward. We will compare this with the current state of our health care system, identify similarities and differences, and discuss what blocks further improvements in quality and efficiency.

EURO Working Group on Practice of OR/Practitioners’ Forum past and planned activities are available to the Forum members, as well as the wider public. Register as a member for free, to get the regular updates on all activities: EWG POR Member registration page
The recordings and details from previous webinars are available here. Follow the Forum on Twitter and LinkedIN , and feel free to get in touch.

Using prescriptive models for decision support in the planning and budgeting of infrastructure investments in Health - Use cases from Timor Leste and Vietnam
2022-07-01 10:00 - 11:00 UTC
The Geospatial Planning & Budgeting Platform is being developed by researchers and practitioners from Analytics for a Better World Institute in close collaboration with World Bank.
These digital decision-support interfaces focus on promoting inclusive and resilient access to social and economic infrastructure services, including for health. The Geospatial Planning and Budgeting Platform (GPBP) provides users with online, interactive, and collaboration-friendly interfaces for powerful descriptive and prescriptive decision support. The GPBP user interfaces for any given problem statements (or “use-cases”) are presented in two forms:
(i) an interactive website for non-technical end-users,
(ii) a Jupyter Notebook environment that allows for exploratory and background analytics and visualization to be made more transparent and accessible.
In this talk, the overview of two GPBP use cases – Health Facility Location Optimisation in Timor Leste and Stroke Case Accessibility Optimization in Vietnam – will be explained. The challenges and opportunities of this platform along with potential extensions and the plans for the way forward will also be discussed.

EURO Working Group on Practice of OR/Practitioners’ Forum past and planned activities are available to the Forum members, as well as the wider public. Register as a member for free, to get the regular updates on all activities: EWG POR Member registration page
The recordings and details from previous webinars are available here. Follow the Forum on Twitter and LinkedIN , and feel free to get in touch.

Making an Impact at EURO 2022
2022-07-03 - 2022-07-06
EURO 2022 Espoo, Finland
32nd EURO Conference will be held in Espoo, Finland, in Aalto University. Aalto University, founded in the merger of three universities in 2010, has long traditions in operations research and management science; indeed, EURO XII was organized in Helsinki in 1992.
The details and EURO 2022 key dates are available on the conference website: ESPOO EURO 2022 (euro2022espoo.com)
Making An Impact: The Practitioners’ Stream, organised by the EURO Practitioners’ Forum
˝Making an Impact˝ is a conference stream dedicated to helping OR practitioners improve their effectiveness, develop their skills and knowledge, and do a better job of OR in practice.
The MAI stream ( MAI EURO Espoo 2022 ) offers the chance not just to take part in really useful sessions to help your practice, but also to meet leading experts in the field and pick their brains to help with your knottiest problems – experts who may just have the solution you are looking for.
At Making an Impact, you will be able to:

share your challenges and opportunities with an international peer group
be inspired by others’ experience
build your network of like-minded people.

Making an Impact welcomes everyone who is interested in increasing the impact of practical OR, whether you are based outside or within academia.
The programme
Latest details of the 2022 programme can be found here.

Speed-networking Meet your peers in a friendly, informal way
Fast and furious: lightning talks Concentrated conference: short and snappy presentations (details of talks and speakers can be found here)
Rapid development of new models: an introduction to SPINE: Save time with SPINE
Collecting information from stakeholders: How to get what we need to design/calibrate our models
Show don’t tell; prove don’t claim: two tutorials on practical modelling
Ethical challenges in everyday OR practice An opportunity to consider how to do the right thing, more often
Making the OR/analytics sales pitch What works in getting customers – interactive discussion
What is ‘Excellent’ practical OR? A round-table on what constitutes excellence
Our identities: engaging with others Remote comms and real engagement
OR in action: Some practical applications of OR: challenges, achievements and learning.
Excursion To the HQ of UPM, forest industry leaders.

The Making an Impact stream at Espoo is being organised by Vladimir Fux, Tuomas Lahtinen, Joonas Ollilah, and some of the members of the Practitioners’ Forum coordinating committee: Joaquim Gromicho, Susanna Heipcke, Ruth Kaufman, Waldemar Kocjan, Adisa Mujezinovic, and Michele Quattrone.
To find out more, and see how you can contribute or get involved, email us at makinganimpact2022@gmail.com
About the EURO Practitioners’ Forum
The EURO Practitioners’ Forum (formerly the EURO Working Group on OR in Practice) aims to help develop supportive networks, and to support and assist OR practitioners, and in particular people whose primary purpose is applying OR in a business/government/charity or similar environment. We believe that practitioners can benefit enormously from networking, sharing experiences, learning from each other, and potentially collaborating with each other; and that there is even more benefit to be gained from cementing links between these practitioners and EURO’s academics.
Activities
Current activities include:

‘Making an Impact’ stream within EURO-k conferences;
an annual virtual or physical meeting;
a monthly webinar series, with recordings available on line.

You can join the Forum and/or the LinkedIn group here, follow us on Twitter (@EwgPor) or Eventbrite, or find recordings of our events, here: EURO Working Group on Practice of OR – Applying O.R. to make an impact (euro-online.org)

OR for policy evaluation: Evaluating public transport by multimodal schedule-based routing
2022-09-09 10:00 - 11:00 UTC
This seminar presents ongoing work on a joint project to develop a multimodal schedule-based routing application. This application is motivated by the necessity of transport policymakers to evaluate the potential impact of public transport investments at the national and European levels. In the first part of the seminar, we illustrate accessibility metrics that permit to evaluate the performance of a public transport system by combining the spatial distribution of the population of the region of interest with the average travel time between any pair of possible origin-destinations within that region. In the second part of the talk, we present Veloci-RAPTOR, the algorithm at the core of our multimodal schedule-based routing application that solves an all-pairs constrained path problem. We conclude with a perspective on ongoing activities.

EURO Practitioners’ Forum past and planned activities are available to the Forum members, as well as the wider public.
Register as a member for free, to get the regular updates on all activities: EPF Member registration page
The recordings and details from previous webinars are available here.
Follow the Forum on Twitter and LinkedIN , and feel free to get in touch.

EURO Practitioners’ Forum webinars organisers: Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic

Libra: EMC Platform for Exchange of Electricity Reserves
2022-10-07 10:00 - 11:00 UTC
About this event

Libra is the European platform for the activation and exchange of electricity reserves. The platform is used to select reserve offers for activation on replacement reserve (RR) and manual frequency restoration reserve markets (mFRR). At the center of the platform, an optimization algorithm is used to optimize the set of bids to activate in order to satisfy demands, maximize social welfare and compute the market clearing price while abiding by numerous market rules and taking into account many complex dimensions such as market coupling, time coupling, complex offers, etc.
Because of the criticality of the process, the market clearing algorithm has a very short time to run and must return a solution in all circumstances. Therefore, the optimization system must achieve very high performance and robustness.
After an introduction to the platform and its purpose, we will discuss the approach used to tackle this problem in practice and ensure meeting the performance and resilience goals.

Smart Truck Drayage Dispatching: From port-IO to driveMybox
2022-11-04 10:00 - 11:00 UTC
About this event

Truck drayage is essential to link locations and logistics nodes in the port and hinterland. In the Port of Hamburg, for example, about 90% of inter-terminal transports are handled by truck and severely contribute to the road traffic volumes, carbon emissions and situation at gates. An intelligent and automated optimization of truck drayage operations can be the basis for a more efficient appointment booking and facilitates an eco-efficient utilization of trucking capacities, as well as for coordinating available truckers based on real-time information and the use of mobile trucker apps. Previous research and a prototype called port-IO encouraged and impulsed the collaboration with EUROGATE Intermodal (EGIM), a leading drayage and intermodal transport provider in the Port of Hamburg (Germany), to develop an innovative decision support system for providing timely port-related truck operations. Besides developing efficient solution methods for solving rich vehicle routing problems, the dispatching system considered trailer swaps, truck appointment scheduling and multi-objective optimizations for covering emission-related objectives. The practical project paved the way for the start-up driveMybox, which was founded in mid 2019. The cloud-based digital platform fully organizes containerized truck transports by establishing fully digital processes and by using AI at its core. Since January 2020, container transports are fully managed by the platform, from the booking over the planning, optimization and execution to automated settlement. The platform is the first of its kind in the container logistics industry and transformed mainly paper-based processes into fully digital, transparent and optimized processes, where mathematical optimization, (meta-)heuristics and predictive analytics are used to further improve planing and operations. After a seven month beta phase and the final go-live in August 2020 (DVZ, 2020), the company transported thousands of containers and generated a multi-million turnover for 2021 (Hafen Hamburg, 2021). This year, new offices were opened in Milan (Italy) and Rotterdam to drive the expansion of the platform in Europe.
References
1. DVZ, 2020. driveMybox startet Plattform für Containertrucking. https://www.dvz.de/digitalisierung/startups/detail/news/drivemybox-startet-plattform-fuer-containertrucking.html
2. Hafen Hamburg, 2021. driveMybox: Digitale trucking-plattform startet Deutschlandweit durch. https://www.hafen-hamburg.de/de/presse/news/drivemybox-digitale-trucking-plattform-startet-deutschlandweit-durch–37110/

EURO Practitioners’ Forum (formerly the EURO Working Group on Practice of OR), aims to help develop supportive networks, support and assist OR practitioners, and in particular people whose primary purpose is applying OR in a business/government/charity or similar environment. We believe that practitioners can benefit enormously from networking, sharing experiences, learning from each other, and potentially collaborating with each other; and that there is even more benefit to be gained from cementing links between these practitioners and EURO’s academics.
EPF past and planned activities are available to the Forum members, as well as the wider public. Visit the website and register as a member for free, to get the regular updates on all activities: EPF Member registration page
Follow the Forum on Twitter and LinkedIN , and feel free to get in touch.

Autumn Workshop: Practice of OR – sharing experiences, building networks
2022-11-17 13:00 - 17:00 UTC
About this event

EURO Practitioners’ Forum (EPF) Autumn Workshop is an inspiring opportunity for meeting with OR and analytics practitioners from across Europe and beyond. Join us on gather.town during this unique event and make connections, learn, collaborate and share experiences of what works and what doesn’t when OR meets practice.
Programme includes: Plenary keynote, Lightning talks, Parallel sessions and more described below
Deadline for registration: 16 November 2022, 17:00 CET
When you register to this free event (REGISTRATION SITE), you will receive the link to our gather.town space. You’re welcome to drop in at any time pre-event: see the space taking shape, catch up on the programme details, and access resources and links to support OR practice.
Workshop gather.town space is specifically created in line with the programme, keeping in mind the importance of social interaction. Our workshop venue separate areas for different uses. The function of each segment of the space is dedicated to specific timeline and activities, as described in the programme below.
Workshop Programme
13.00 Welcome, introductions and exploration (Auditorium)
13.15 Practical OR in a tumultuous world (Auditorium)
Speaker: Matti Vuorinen, Director of Advanced Analytics at forestry giant UPM4
14.00 Open space: move about between different discussion topics, mingle with colleagues, and take the opportunity for a comfort break (Open space room)
15.00 OR in Action in 5 minutes: a stimulating, inspiring set of 5 minute talks showcasing practical OR (Auditorium)
15.45 More, better, deeper: Choose one of 5 parallel sessions to discuss a specific OR application area (Parallel Sessions room)
16.30 Closing session: feedback from parallel sessions, and next steps (Auditorium)
17.00 Close

Plenary
Matti Vuorinen, Director of Advanced Analytics at forestry giant UPM
“Practical OR in a tumultuous world”
Matti will be discussing the design of effective OR tools in the context of a rapidly changing environment. He will be using the example of UPM’s experience in developing OR tools that are used to make decisions that are critically dependent on the energy market. The current European energy market is in turmoil. Matti will be talking about how the OR tools are used to adapt to changes in the market environment. In particular, he will discuss the possible pitfalls of rushed changes to the electricity market mechanisms now that there is so much political pressure to control the prices.
Open space
Meet and talk to colleagues, and expand your thinking! (List of topics)
The open space session is in a virtual meeting room where we will have 8 or 9 small-group discussions around hot topics in the OR practitioner community. Topics will range from “Why OR is so easy in my company” to “What to do with Machine Learning in OR?”. There will also be space for extending the discussions around the plenary.
The discussion topics will be arranged in tables that anyone can access at any time to maximize the networking. Choose a topic to start with, then move on to a different group whenever you choose. If you are too still, you will be encouraged to switch to another topic; and everyone will be encouraged to talk.
OR in action in 5 minutes
A series of lightning talks that will showcase some of the rich variety of practical OR being undertaken across the OR community (session details).
Speakers include:
Nadine-Cyra Freistetter, Finnish Meteorological Institute: SuCCESs – Modelling Pathways to a Sustainable Society: presenting modelling that calculates scenarios for reaching sustainability goals up until 2100.
Yue Zhou-Kangas, UPM: Planting a million trees: how UPM Uruguay schedules seedling deliveries, to replace trees harvested from 300 plantations with seedlings raised in 14 nurseries
Colin Eden, Strathclyde University: Vicious cycles and Systemic Risk in a Pandemic discussing strategy development for tackling COVID 19
Sander van Aken, Flixbus: Talk problems to me: Understanding user needs for OR software development
Jasper van Doorn: describing the complexities of Integrated production and transportation scheduling in the compound feed industry
Ahmet Çinar, Trendyol, on the use of optimisation in e-commerce
More, better, deeper: exploring OR application areas
In this slot we invite you to engage in discussions around certain fields of OR, in one of 5 parallel sessions. Each session will start with one or two short presentations from people familiar with the subject, and will then open up into deeper discussion of the topic. A short report back from each session will be presented during the closing plenary, including, where appropriate, next steps to explore the issues further.
You will be able to choose which one of these five topic groups you want to join: Chemical/process industries; Aviation, OR in education, OR for good, Mobility. See below for details
Choose from the following:
Chemical/process industries – Claude Philippe Medard, SAP, Germany
We want to discuss Petrochemical Supply Chain Planning that creates production plans for multiple plants with feed onto one another (like the Naptha Cracker and Butadien feeds) as part of their Supply Chain Planning.
This requires highly performant solutions to non-linear optimization problems solved daily for multiple time-periods. We will hear a short example case study, where the solutions to these problems feed other plants’ production planning problems, that, in turn, feed into the logistics planning and scheduling upstream and downstream (nominations on pipelines, barges, railcars).
After this case study, we would like to discuss the urgent need to create enterprise level solutions to manage the end-to-end supply chain both for inbound and outbound logistics (pipeline, barge, railcar scheduling of nominations) and internal supply chains (non-linear production plans).
Aviation – Andy Harrison, Inawisdom, UK and Waldemar Kocjan, Jeppesen, Sweden
This session will discuss the role of OR in aviation and how it is helping the response to new and emerging threats, such as the Covid pandemic.
Speaker:
Tom Occleston (Atkins, UK) will be speaking on the application of OR to aviation security.
OR in education – Milagros Baldemor, Don Mariano Marcos Memorial State University, Philippines
OR in Education deals with the application of advanced analytical methods used in decision making in the field of education. It utilizes mathematical modelling and other diverse techniques to analyze complex situations in order for learners to fully understand analytical concepts that will help raise their level of awareness in solving real world problems.
Speakers:
Eduard Albay (Don Mariano Marcos Memorial State University, Philippines) will speak about Design Thinking-based teaching plans, evaluating and comparing students’ creativity as inputs to classroom teachers’ practices during and beyond the pandemic.
Ronald Aquino (Don Mariano Marcos Memorial State University) will present on the flipped classroom approach in teaching modern geometry.
OR for good – Joaquim Gromicho, Ortec, The Netherlands and Helena Ramalhinho, Pompeu Fabra University, Spain
OR makes things better. Usually that means: OR makes businesses better. The world needs improvement, and the United Nations have defined 17 objective criteria on what helps, see https://sdgs.un.org/goals. Having criteria enables OR! After all, the objective function becomes clear. But what about the variables, the constraints, and the parameters of the model? And more importantly, how do we go from model to impact? I will start by telling some success stories from the Analytics for a Better World institute and will discuss on how to scale such initiatives up in a way as to bring hope to our world. We only have one world, after all. Scarcity is also a powerful enabler for OR…
Mobility – Torkel Haufmann, SINTEF, Norway
The mobility sector contributes about a quarter of emissions in Europe, and Operations Research methods have a long history of contributing to better solutions in the area. We want to discuss the future of OR for mobility in light of new developments like electric vehicles, micro-mobility and mobility as a service. We’ll hear one or two examples of current applications of optimization in mobility. After this, we’d like to have a discussion about the models, algorithms and approaches needed to support the sector’s goals in the next 10 years.
Speaker:
Dag Kjenstad (SINTEF) will give a presentation with some details on a recent project about on-demand transportation in rural areas.

After the registration to the workshop, you are welcome to use the gather.town link at any time to set up your avatar, explore the space, catch up on the programme details, and access resources and links to support OR in practice. The space will remain available to workshop participants to meet each other, after the official close, if you want to keep the conversation going. (Instructions for attendees)
The event organisers will host and guide you through this exciting virtual workshop experience: Ruth Kaufman, Bjorn Thalen, Waldemar Kocjan, Michele Quattrone, Susanne Heipcke, Andy Harrison, Sofiane Oussedik, Adisa Mujezinovic, Claude Philippe Medard, Torkel Haufmann, Christian Timpe and Milagros Baldemor.

EPF Autumn Workshop details are also available in pdf (download), please share and join us online during this inspiring free event.

EURO Practitioners’ Forum (formerly the EURO Working Group on Practice of OR), aims to help develop supportive networks, support and assist OR practitioners, and in particular people whose primary purpose is applying OR in a business/government/charity or similar environment. We believe that practitioners can benefit enormously from networking, sharing experiences, learning from each other, and potentially collaborating with each other; and that there is even more benefit to be gained from cementing links between these practitioners and EURO’s academics.
EPF past and planned activities are available to the Forum members, as well as the wider public. Visit the website and register as a member for free, to get the regular updates on all activities: EPF Member registration page
Follow the Forum on Twitter and LinkedIN , and feel free to get in touch.

Analytics Transformation in a year - mission possible
2022-12-02 10:00 - 11:00 UTC
About this event

Telia, as many large organisations faced continuous struggle with keeping up to date analytics infrastructure through mergers and acquisitions, as well as adopting data structures in line with ever increasing speed of changes in business. Having joined Telia Lithuania to lead the transformation, I will talk through the timeline, inputs used to draw strategy, re-thinking the talent management in light of better support of digitisation initiatives and finally – what it takes to execute Analytics Transformation in short timeline.

EURO Practitioners’ Forum past and planned activities are available to the Forum members, as well as the wider public.
Visit the website and register as a member for free, to get the regular updates on all activities: EWG POR Member registration page
The recordings and details from previous webinars are available here.
Follow the Forum on Twitter and LinkedIN , and feel free to get in touch.

EURO Practitioners’ Forum webinars organisers: Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic
