Euro is the "Association of European Operational Research Societies"
within IFORS, the "International Federation of Operational Research Societies"
EURO Excellence in Practice Award 2013 - Finalists
The three finalists of the 2013 EURO Excellence in Practice Award are:
Andreas Brieden, Steffen Borgwardt, Peter Gritzmann
Geometric Clustering for the Consolidation of Farm- and Woodland
In many regions farmers cultivate a number of small lots that are distributed over a wider area. This results in a non-favorable cost- structure of production. The classical form of land consolidation is typi- cally too expensive and too rigid, whence consolidation based on lend-lease agreements has been suggested. Of course, the underlying mathematical clustering problem is NP-hard even in the most simple cases. We devel- oped a new mathematical model, where in e ect the centers of gravity of the clusters are pushed apart. The analysis of the mathematical structure of the model provided proof of its favorable properties (existence of feasi- ble power diagrams) and allowed the derivation of ecient approximation algorithms (based on the approximation of certain semi-norm level sets by polytopes) with a provably small worst-case error bound. Implementations of the algorithms together with additional customized tools particularly for an indepth economic evaluation of the redistribution lead to successive land{ lease actions in practise. Our tools even entered the curriculum of a school for training farmers, and are also applied in forestry.
Medium-Term Rail Scheduling for an Iron Ore Mining Company
In mineral supply chains, medium-term plans are made for scheduling crews, production, and maintenance. These plans must respect constraints associated with loading and unloading, stockyard capacities, fleet capacities, and maintenance and production requirements. Additionally, compliance with grade quality depends on blending minerals from different sources. In this paper, we present an optimization tool developed for a major multinational iron ore mining company to manage the operations of its supply network in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The tool produces plans for time horizons from a few weeks to two years, while addressing the nonlinearities that blending introduces. The plans our tool produces allow the company to ship a higher amount of iron ore than it did when it followed the plans obtained by its former manual approach. The company’s planners now rely solely on our tool because it has enabled them to schedule up to one million additional tonnes of material per annum and has reduced the planning time from five hours to less than one hour.
“SPRINT: Optimization of Staff Management for Desk Customer Relations Services"
We illustrate a Decision Support System for Staff Management of Desk Customer Relation Services (DCRSs). The system, called SPRINT, incorporates state-of-the-art forecasting and optimization methods has been developed for a large multi-utility company in northern Italy that manages a large network of DCRS. After two year of service SPRINT has achieved very high level of service and introduced relevant savings in terms of resource consumption devoted to DCRSs.
