Academic News & Opportunities

For the second year running, the AIMMS-MOPTA competition’s finals were organized virtually. Also for the second year running, a team from University of Edinburgh are the winners. Congratulations Team SolvED! The Optimistics from Universidad de los Andes and Flamerunners from Brown University finished in second and third place respectively. We appreciate the efforts of all the participating teams. They each presented creative solutions and made this year’s competition a success. More details to follow.If you have an AIMMS community account, you can subscribe to this post to get notified when the presentations are available. 

Every year, AIMMS and Lehigh University team up to organize the AIMMS-MOPTA Optimization Modeling Competition. This year, the challenge was to develop novel solutions to the H-SARA (Home - Service Appointment, Routing, and Appointment Scheduling) problem. The final presentations of the competition happened early August and the results have been announced.We got a chance to sit down with Prof. Karmel Shehadeh, who was recently appointed Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Lehigh University and was the faculty chair for the MOPTA competition this year. Karmel has expertise in the theory and application of operations research in healthcare operations and analytics. She has great advice for students interested in this field. Congratulations on your appointment at Lehigh University. Can you tell us about yourself, how you came to be involved in this field, and your research interests?I was born and raised in Amman. I was that kid who was very curious, loved math and

Save the date and pack your bags for Summer 2022! We're hosting a special event for academics like you. Rhymes aside, we're pleased to introduce AIMMS Campus, an event for academics and industry professionals to come together, learn, collaborate and get trained on many different topics. It gives you the opportunity to take your (future) career to the next level, grow your network, and expand your skillset, while having a lot of fun with like-minded people.Co-create AIMMS CampusWe would love to get your input to make this a great event. We are hoping the event will be in person, as travel restrictions are starting to ease up. Take our short survey (9 questions) for a chance to win an all-expenses-paid trip to AIMMS Campus.Take the survey

The results of the 12th Annual AIMMS-MOPTA Optimization Modeling Competition are in! The competition took place virtually this year. We are very happy to share that all three of this year’s finalists solved the problem quite differently and went beyond what we expected, each solution very valid on its own. Congratulations are in order for Team NP Die Hard from University of Edinburgh, who won the competition this year.About this year’s Problem StatementWhen we were designing the problem statement with Dr. Boris Defourny, Assistant Professor at Lehigh University, we wanted to explore how mathematical optimization and machine learning approaches can work in tandem. Like always, the problem also had to be open-ended.  It needed to have multiple correct solutions rather than one absolute solution. So, we settled on a Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (CVRP-TW) and added complexity by adding constraints or withholding data that is typically known in such problems to mimi

This year marks the 13th edition of the AIMMS-MOPTA Optimization Modeling Competition. This year's MOPTA conference will be held at Lehigh University from August 2-4, 2021. The 13th Optimization Modeling Competition is now open and submissions are due by May 21st, 2021. The goal of this year's competition is to develop frameworks to solve the H-SARA (Home - Service Appointment, Routing, and Appointment Scheduling) problem. The aim is to efficiently hire and assign teams to customers requesting service appointments at home. The different decisions that need to be optimized here are:How many service teams are required on a particular day? Which customers are serviced by which team and in which order?We believe this will be a problem of huge interest with the recent lifestyle changes brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, an increasing number of professionals are working remotely from their homes, driving up the load on internet networks. Internet providers need to ensure that th

We often get to speak with well-known Operations Research practitioners and professors who are dedicated to inspiring students and advancing the discipline. This time, we are excited to share experiences and insights from Prof. Laura Albert from University of Wisconsin-Madison. You might know Laura from her blog, Punk Rock OR, or her work on sports analytics. We interviewed her recently to get her take on how Operations Research is faring amid today’s uncertainty and what OR professionals can do to make a difference for social good.People in the OR community know you as a prolific researcher and blogger. Can you tell us briefly about yourself and how you came to work in this field? I was a bit of a latecomer to the field. During college, I took a course on optimization and figured out that I was very interested in how you can use mathematics to support interdependent decision-making. My PhD thesis focused on aviation security and for most of my career, I have been passionate about publ

We are pleased to announce Team ZIB from the Zuse Institute Berlin as the winners of the 11th AIMMS-MOPTA Optimization Modeling Competition. Team ZIB’s solution, report and modeling effort in AIMMS was selected as the most comprehensive among the three finalists at the MOPTA conference banquet, which took place at Lehigh University, Bethelehem on August 15, 2019. AIMMS is excited to continue supporting MOPTA. This year’s problem statement, designed by Boris Defourny (Lehigh University), continued the tradition of an interesting problem with multiple ways to solve it. The participants were asked to solve a packing problem. They were tasked with finding the best solution and recommending alternative solutions that were comparable in packing efficiency. As expected, all the three finalists took very different approaches to arrive at their recommendations. Team ZIB consisting of Felix Prause and Kai Hoppman, advised by Thorsten Koch, presented an extensive literature review of differen

A group of five students from Tilburg University (The Netherlands) made it to the finals of the prestigious INFORMS O.R. & Analytics Student Team competition. The team solved this year’s problem using AIMMS software. In this blog, they will tell us more about the competition and how AIMMS has changed their lives. Who We Are First of all, let’s introduce ourselves. Our team is comprised by two Research Master students in OR (A. Selvi and L.M. Roebers), one Master student in Quantitative Finance and Actuarial Science (N.J. Simons) and two Master students in Business Analytics and OR (T.W.A. Fleuren and W.L.C. Faro). This year, we represented Tilburg University in the INFORMS 2019 O.R. & Analytics Student Team Competition. As one of the six finalist teams out of the total of 292 teams that participated, we were given the opportunity to present our work at the INFORMS 2019 Business Analytics Conference (Austin, Texas). During the project, our team was supervised by Associate Professor Dr.