The MAI sessions and tutorials are described below. Please contact us on [email protected] to find out more.

1. Speed Networking 

Meet your peers in a friendly, informal way, through discussions in groups of 2-3 persons with pairings changing after a fixed time span of a few minutes.

OR is a team business, and knowing people you can turn to for ideas, feedback and support makes all the difference. But it is not always easy building your network, especially if you are shy or feel that you are an outsider. This welcoming session is a way of overcoming the barriers to networking, and enjoying yourself while you do it.

If you have business cards, do bring them along; if not, we’ll have plenty that you can use if you choose.

2. Fast And Furious: Lightning Talks 

At a conference like EURO, it is impossible to catch up with everything; and all too easy to stick to a single stream within your usual professional specialism. This session showcases some of the breadth of OR in action, with a set of 5-minute presentations handpicked to inspire, interest and extend your knowledge.

Some of the presentations will be designed for this session only, others will be abbreviated versions of full talks appearing elsewhere in the conference. We will hold this session early on in the conference to give the audience the best chance of catching up with the speaker later on, and maybe going to see the full talk and other items in the stream.

The talks will cover the full range of OR methodology across a variety of practical application areas.

3. The Quest for the Right OR Professionals – A Hiring Perspective 

Panel members include (TBC): Sander van Aken (Flixbus, chair), Henning Blunck (DHL), Michael Lindahl (Portchain)

In this panel session, we explore how recruiters of OR professionals, data scientists or analytics people go about it, and address burning questions relevant to both those recruiting professionals, as well as those looking to secure a new industry position.

How do companies and teams come to define the profile to hire, crafting the job ad? What skillset and traits do you look for, and how to you define that? How do you design a hiring process covering those aspects, and what are the challenges and best practices for the recruiting team themselves? What advice would the hiring team give their counterparts?

Join us to learn about each other’s challenges, best-practices, and ask your own questions during a Q&A.

4. Generative AI For OR People: Disruptor, Enabler, Or Distraction? 

Large Language Models (LLMs) have taken the world by storm since the release of ChatGPT. These models can work with large amounts of unstructured data, such as text and images. Their output is easy to understand, but they cannot reason and apply logic.

On the other hand, Mathematical Optimization Models require structured and complete data but provide optimal output. However, it can often be a challenge to collect the necessary data in an organization and ensure that users can interact with the final application and understand the output.

Can these very different models complement each other when we build OR applications?

This session will be led by Michael Lindahl. Michael has been building OR-powered decision applications across different industries for more than 10 years. Since the release of ChatGPT, he has been exploring the synergies between simple optimization and LLMs by building the application findgaven.ai on top of their API’s.

Michael will give an introduction to large language models, explaining their capabilities, the pitfalls, and how they can fit into the OR toolbox.

This will lead to discussion, with the audience invited to share not only their questions but also their own experiences, aspirations, and concerns.

5. Human-Machine Collaboration: Building Interactive Applications Quickly (Session: Knowledge sharing tutorial -1-)

Making impact with OR often requires an end-user or other stakeholders to interact with the models and algorithms you build, or with its outcomes. With interactive applications, we can leverage the true power of human-machine collaboration, e.g. by letting users guide your optimization model with their knowledge, or enabling them to explore multiple solutions. Developing fully-fledged front-end applications – or even discovering what is the right thing to develop – can however take up a tremendous amount of time. For some analyses or projects, it is not even worth the effort.

The Python-based framework Streamlit could be your new companion in these endeavours. In this tutorial, we demonstrate how we can use it to quickly develop a first version and iterate on that.

6. OR Goes Kubernetes: How To Run Long Running Optimization Jobs In The Cloud (Session: Knowledge sharing tutorial -1-)

While response time often matters in OR applications, in many cases it does not (think network design, tactical capacity planning, …). In these use cases, model usage will be dispersed over time and not warrant the constant provisioning of a high-end compute resource at all times. In our OR applications at DHL Group, we experienced that this often led to some boilerplate functionality that had to set up across use cases: Sequencing of requests, automatic deployment of workloads, status monitoring, result retrieval, etc. In this tutorial we will share what we are currently building to replace boilerplate code with a scalable, modern tech-stack to support the deployment of tactical decision support tools.

7. From Academia To Practice: Reflections From Those Who Have Taken The Leap

Panel members include (TBC): Ruben Ruiz, Martina Fischetti, João Paiva Fonseca

Just how different is it to work within an industry or a commercial consultancy, if you have been used to working from within academia? And how much easier is it to forge collaborations if you have experience of both sides? A panel of people who have made the move will share their experiences and lessons learned. The differences may not be the ones you expect.

8. What’s on your mind? – getting what you want from this conference 

At a conference like this, we want to interact with, and learn from, each other. Unfortunately, it’s sometimes just not so easy to bump into and connect with the right people to discuss the topics you want to learn about.

In this open space session, it’s the participants who bring in, and discuss about, topics which are on their mind. So you want to learn from others about a particular topic related to making an impact with OR in practice? Join us in this session where you set the agenda. At the start, we will collect the topics which are on your and others’ mind. Using this, we split in smaller groups, and you join the one(s) in which you are interested. As such, it’s you who shape the discussions, and can get a lot out of it.

No topic, just curious what’s on others’ minds? There will already be some kick-starter points available.

9. Which solver? 

Participants (TBC): Johan Kellerth Fredlund (Jeppesen), Dr Faheem (Amazon), Andreas Westerlund, Tobias Achterberg (Gurobi), Timo Berthold (FICO), Fred Guardi (Hexaly)

Practitioners who use MIP have a great choice of possible softwares. The huge choice can make it harder to make decisions; and that’s where this session should be invaluable.

Bringing together representatives from leading stand-alone MIP-solvers: Gurobi, Xpress and Hexaly with representatives of heavy users of one or more of these we try to answer questions like: Why use a 3rd party solver instead of specialised heuristics? What problems have companies experienced in this approach? And of course… which solver is the best in practice?

This is a reprise of a session first held in 2018. Since then, the landscape and the power of solvers has changed immeasurably, and we will be reviewing just how users can make the most of this.

10. Success, failure and the factors that influence outcomes 

Panellists include (TBC): Dennis Huisman, Frédéric Gardi

The speakers on this panel all have wide experience of working with stakeholders to deliver projects putting OR into practice. In the first part of the session, each speaker will talk about their experiences and learnings, and how these have shaped their own views on which factors influence whether an application could be (or will be?) a success, a failure or somewhere in-between. We will then invite audience questions, and open up the discussion: do these sound familiar? What are your own experiences? What lessons would you like to share on how to address them?

11. Tricks from the Trade for Large-Scale Optimization in a practical context (Session: Knowledge-sharing tutorial -2-) 

(Andreas Schmitt, Zalando)

Have you had to face up to optimization challenges, where you have had to develop and deploy heuristics in order to implement models into production environments? This session will use the speaker’s experience of a successful application as a starting point for discussion.

Practical optimization problems often quickly increase in scale and complexity, necessitating tailored solution approaches. Our talk describes heuristics designed to work along-side a Lagrangian decomposition method, leading to almost-optimal solutions. These have been developed in the context of the frequently applied ’predict-then-optimize’ paradigm, more specifically for markdown pricing strategies in the online fashion industry. We present empirical evidence for the heuristics’ effectiveness, drawing on pricing applications at Zalando SE.

This exposition will serve as a starting point for discussions: Participants will be encouraged to explore questions such as: What are your experiences with similar optimization challenges? How do you approach heuristic development in their work? What are effective approaches for deploying such models into production environments and measuring their impact?

12. Coding quality (Session: Knowledge-sharing tutorial -2-)

(Michele Quattrone, Air Liquide)

The implementation of well-thought-through quality strategies on the software lifecycle is becoming a requirement for many software developments, even for the early mock-up/prototyping phases. In this 45-minute tutorial, backed with a practical example, we will discuss together how our coding can benefit from this strong push, and what we can cherry-pick from hyping buzzwords such as DevOps, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, MLOps…in practice!

13. Human Centric Analytics (HCA): How To Foster The Human Centred Development Of Analytics That Augment Human Work Effectively. 

(Christina Phillips, LBS, Liverpool John Moores University)

In situations of high uncertainty and high human involvement, it can be difficult to implement analytical tools; on the other hand, those tools can serve to reduce and define the uncertainty. To achieve this level of use the human actors involved need to be empowered to understand and utilise the data that they produce and use. This requires both learning and experiment in a safe and creative space as mathematical tools, data and humans come together.
In this workshop we will use examples from industry interventions to introduce the ideas and concepts around HCA. We will discuss what works and what doesn’t, and why that is, and develop skills around choosing the right structuring methods and analytical approaches for differing situations.

Design is a key part of the process, and we will look at ways to keep in mind the iterative and empathetic journey that this helps to facilitate, while also looking at ways to integrate HCA into common working practices such as lean projects.

14. Not the Excellence in Practice Award: lifting the lid on practice 

Panellists include (TBC): Alberto Franco, Karsten Kieckhafer, Gilberto Montibeller

Submissions for the Excellence in Practice award naturally focus on the criteria being judged: the originality of the methodology, the scientific excellence, the impact, and so on. These usually tell an impressive story.

But anybody who has been engaged in a practical application will know that this only gives part of the picture – to get to the stage of an implemented application, there will have been many hurdles along the way: getting all the data, making sure it is correct, convincing all the stakeholders, overcoming fears and doubts of the people who have to change their way of working, and so forth.

In this session, past finalists from the Excellence in Practice award will give a short review of these aspects of their projects, considering how they dealt with the challenges and identifying key lessons. This will be followed by questions and discussion with the audience on the key issues and how we address them.