EPF webinars are organized monthly and free, follow the EPF Eventbrite page to be notified when booking is live and get updates on the upcoming webinars.
Previous webinars:
EPF webinars are organized monthly and free, follow the EPF Eventbrite page to be notified when booking is live and get updates on the upcoming webinars.
Previous webinars:
Speaker: Dr. Alessio Trivella, Assistant Professor of Operations Research, University of Twente
In recent years, the Circular Economy has gained increasing attention from both academia and practice as a sustainable approach to resource management. However, the application of Operations Research (OR) methodologies to circular economy challenges has been relatively limited.
This seminar presents insights from the Horizon Europe project “IS2H4C: Industrial Symbiosis to Hubs for Circularity” (2024-2028), which aims to advance the concept of Hubs for Circularity (H4Cs) in four regions across Europe. H4Cs are innovative systems that go beyond industrial symbiosis networks by incorporating not only industrial clusters but also the surrounding urban and rural areas into a circular ecosystem. This shift to a more inclusive model presents unique challenges for resource allocation, energy management, and symbiotic matchmaking—areas where OR tools can play an important role.
We will explore early-stage work within the project, where OR techniques such as integer programming, stochastic optimization, and reinforcement learning are being applied to optimize resource flows within an H4C, manage its energy system, and facilitate industrial symbiosis. The ultimate goal is to integrate these decision-support tools in a digital collaboration platform to be used by the hubs in the project and beyond.
7 MARCH 2025 WEBINAR RECORDING
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: EPF Member registration page. The recordings and details from previous webinars are also available on this website. Follow the Forum on X and LinkedIN , and feel free to get in touch.
Speaker: Willem-Jan van Hoeve, Carnegie Mellon University
Over the last decade, decision diagram-based optimization has emerged as a novel and innovative approach to solving discrete optimization problems. This presentation provides an overview of this methodology, focusing on three computational paradigms: (1) stand-alone decision diagram-based solvers, (2) integration into constraint programming, and (3) integration into linear and integer programming. Applications include graph theoretic problems, scheduling, and vehicle routing. In particular, combining decision diagrams with network flow theory—via a process called `column elimination’—has resolved previously unsolved benchmark instances for problems such as graph multi-coloring, vehicle routing with time windows, and pickup-and-delivery with time windows. These advancements highlight the potential of decision diagram-based optimization as a powerful tool for addressing complex optimization challenges across domains.
About the speaker:
Willem-Jan van Hoeve is the Carnegie Bosch Professor of Operations Research at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on developing new methodologies for mathematical optimization with applications to network design, scheduling, vehicle routing, data mining, and others. He made notable contributions to the areas of constraint and integer programming, and most recently pioneered the field of decision diagrams for optimization. Van Hoeve’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and two Google Faculty Research Awards. He has consulted for a variety of companies including FedEx Ground, Exxon Mobil, PNC Bank, Bosch/Siemens, and Charter Steel, as well as a number of non-profit organizations. Van Hoeve is the recipient of the INFORMS Computing Society Harvey J. Greenberg Research Award, the Tepper School’s MBA Teaching Award (twice) and MSBA Teaching Award, and several best paper awards. His academic service includes the Board of Directors of the INFORMS Computing Society, Chairperson of the INFORMS Student Competition Committee, the Steering Committee of CPAIOR conference series, and the Executive Committee of the Association for Constraint Programming. Van Hoeve is currently Associate Editor of the INFORMS Journal on Computing, Associate Editor of Operations Research, and Associate Editor of Artificial Intelligence.
7 FEBRUARY 2025 WEBINAR RECORDING
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: EPF Member registration page. The recordings and details from previous webinars are also available on this website.
Follow the Forum on Twitter and LinkedIN , and feel free to get in touch.
Speaker: Franco Peschiera, PhD, Baobab soluciones
In the last decade, the cloud has motivated many business in OR to offer their optimization services through REST APIs. From modellers to solver suppliers, each platform provides access to the owner’s product. Most of the times this access is tied to the use of the product.
In combinatorial optimization there is no silver-bullet (or free lunch), each solution method (MIP model, CP model, meta-heuristic, add-hoc heuristic, etc.) is suited to solve different problems. Only offering a limited range of solution methods risks losing the power to solve some problem efficiently.
Finally, except a few exceptions (VRP, TSP), most problems do not have a clear data interface that is standardized. This makes it hard to benchmark different approaches to a given problem.
To address these problems (vendor lock, no-free-lunch, lack of standardization), Cornflow was created as a free (as in freedom) problem-agnostic and solver-agnostic deployment server for optimization problems. It hosts problems as flexible data-structures (json schemas) and solution methods as code (usually python code but not exclusively). This allows full customization of problems and their solution methods. For example a VRP-like problem can be solved with Concorde, a CP-SAT model, column-generation with gurobi or a 2-opt heuristic. While a Nurse-Rostering-like problem can be solved with a traditional MIP model, Timefold or some clever matheuristic.
We believe that by keeping the deployment server open, we will make it easier for problem providers (i.e., industry) and solution providers (i.e., academia) to build on top of each other’s work and collaborate more easily.
About the speaker:
Franco Peschiera is an engineer, a programmer and a scientist. He loves solving puzzles, organizing stuff and customer service. During his free (and not-so-free) time he’s a father, a cyclist and a professional skeptic.
Franco has a double degree in industrial engineering from the PUCP (Lima) and UPM (Madrid) universities and a PhD in Industrial Engineering from ISAE-SUPAERO (Toulouse). He founded a successful OR software (baobab soluciones) company based in Madrid where he worked 10 years as various roles, including project leader, chief technical officer, and consultant in several optimization projects in the car, aerospace, oil and pharmaceutic industries, among many others.
He also founded a yet-to-be-succesful clothing-rental company based in Lima/Rome (HackPacking), is the proud maintainer of the PuLP mathematical modelling library and maintains several other open source tools for Operations Research. You can find him in: LinkedIn and github.
17 JANUARY 2025 WEBINAR RECORDING
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: EPF Member registration page. The recordings and details from previous webinars are also available on this website.
Follow the Forum on Twitter and LinkedIN , and feel free to get in touch.
Speakers: Sander Van Aken & Myriam Thömmes (Flix SE)
Flix has rapidly become a global player in the long-distance passenger transportation market, operating in 44 different countries across 4 continents with brands as FlixBus, FlixTrain, Greyhound (US) and Kamil Koc (Turkey). Being a travel-tech company at heart, we harness the power of ML and OR to tackle the most complex business challenges. In this talk, we will first give a brief overview of the business problems we are addressing with ML and OR solutions. We’ll then deep dive into one specific network planning use case to showcase how we deal with the real-world complexity of our global business model, and how we turn this into our advantage to deliver pragmatic OR solutions. Beyond the methodological part, we illustrate how approaching OR product development as a multi-disciplinary collaboration forms a key ingredient to success. Finally, we give some insight how we continuously iterate on both problem and solution space to deliver actual business value.
6 DECEMBER 2024 WEBINAR RECORDING
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: EPF Member registration page. The recordings and details from previous webinars are also available on this website.
Follow the Forum on Twitter and LinkedIN , and feel free to get in touch.
Speaker: Vincent Gosselin, Co-founder of Taipy
In the Python ecosystem, numerous packages are available to:
Yet, over 85% of Data Science Pilots fail to move beyond the pilot phase and into production.
In this tutorial, we will showcase how Taipy empowers you to rapidly develop comprehensive Decision Support Systems in just a few hours.
After exploring Taipy’s intuitive low-code and no-code GUI creation features, we’ll dive into scenario management with real-world industry examples.
Our aim is to facilitate the faster and smoother adoption of data science and OR solutions for end users.
Feedback and potential collaborations welcome.
8 NOVEMBER 2024 WEBINAR RECORDING
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: EPF Member registration page. The recordings and details from previous webinars are also available on this website.
Follow the Forum on Twitter and LinkedIN , and feel free to get in touch.
Speaker: Claude Philippe Medard, Principal Data Science, SAP Deutschland SE
Authors: Claude Philippe Medard, Nidhi Sawhney (Principal Data Scientist, SAP) and Jean-Christophe Pazzaglia (SAP LABS France AI CX Center Lead), SAP LABS France, Mougin France
How to develop smart investment strategies for E-Mobility solutions? The solution addresses challenges faced by microgrid asset owner for e-mobility operations where they need to regularly decide the best investment options in terms of energy options like grid, solar, battery and projected demand from smart buildings and electric vehicles. The constant challenge faced by microgrid asset operators are how to ensure running e-charging facilities at optimal cost, where to invest to ensure maximal self-consumption and minimizing waiting times, and how to plan based on different demand growth assumptions with right trade-offs between cost and service quality.
We investigate a solution that comprises of:
GenAI assisted Optimization Solution on SAP BTP
Harness the power of SAP BTP with Generative AI Hub combined with Mathematical Optimization to empower business users to simulate, optimize and action investment decisions.
Simulate multiple demand and supply scenarios to analyze impact on KPIs.
The solution (optim model) has multiple modes to cater to different decision horizons:
1. Operational demand & response plans for production of solar power and battery usage along with consumption of grid in view to fulfill constant and ready to wait energy demands.
Demand Predictions at different granularities together with with apis for solar power predictions.
Production and consumption plans are computed at the hourly level across years.
2. Extension with investment decisioning across 10 year horizons for various types of solar power production and battery storage capacities.
Execution wise: Integrate with SAP E-mobility, Cloud For Energy and Ariba to go from decision making to optimal decision execution.
WEBINAR RECORDING
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: EPF Member registration page. The recordings and details from previous webinars are also available on this website.
Follow the Forum on Twitter, LinkedIN and Eventbrite.
Speaker: Alex Tschan, Project Manager, ALDI SE & Co. KG Murr
ALDI SÜD Germany launched the ‘Data-Driven Special Buys’ project in response to pandemic-related supply chain disruptions, market shifts, and increasing competition. This initiative combines advanced analytics and operations research with employee engagement to optimize product lifecycles. Ensuring practical relevance and applicability in business, including the satisfaction of all stakeholders involved (stores, national buying, project management, German board), was a high priority.
Methods used include: (1) multi-period optimization models (MIPs) for product allocation optimization, considering product demand and stock-keeping costs; (2) machine learning classification methods for store product allocation (“SAM”); (3) a proprietary algorithm (“ANA”) for just-in-time reallocations between stores; (4) a multi-period dynamic programming model (“DAVE”) for nationwide inventory control; (5) a sophisticated version of DAVE (“DAVE SDP”); (6) multivariate regression analyses for budget allocations of small product quantities for stores; and (7) a smartphone application (“Market-Whispering”) to engage 50,000 employees in product selection.
The project faced coordination challenges and required a strategic shift from decentralized to centralized inventory control. Proprietary software for the special buys product range improved operational efficiency, impacting the daily operations of 40,000 employees, and led to annual savings of several million euros in Germany.
About the speaker:
Alex Tschan is a Manager for Research and Development at ALDI SÜD Germany, in the division of Project Management & the National Buying and Procurement Committee. As a trained industrial engineer and an external PhD student with a focus on data-driven approaches for promotional products in retail, Alex combines technical expertise with practical experience to drive innovative solutions in retail operations.
WEBINAR RECORDING
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: EPF Member registration page. The recordings and details from previous webinars are also available on this website.
Follow the Forum on Twitter, LinkedIN and Eventbrite.
Speaker: Ryan O’Neil, CTO and Co-Founder of Nextmv
More and more, data science and decision science practitioners are seeking to combine machine learning forecasts with actionable and optimized decisions. This can include anything from predicting traffic patterns for delivery scheduling to consumer buying behavior for inventory management. But bridging these two disciplines can be challenging.
In the on-demand logistics space, these worlds are colliding more frequently with practitioners generating demand forecasts that feed into shift scheduling models that feed into vehicle routing models. Getting to an 80% good solution for the optimization side is not hard. What is hard is the remaining 20% where people tend to over-optimize their models using fixed inputs (which makes the model more brittle in the face of uncertainty). What if, instead, we could take those 80% solutions and use horizontal compute to scale them up in the face of uncertainty?
In this talk, we will explore what has made blending ML and OR outputs challenging, the roles of deterministic and stochastic optimization in relation to ML, and how scenario testing techniques via horizontal computing provide an expedient and more accessible path for combining these worlds.
Ryan O’Neil is CTO and cofounder of Nextmv (nextmv.io). Previously, he led the Decision Engineering department at Grubhub and Zoomer, which owned forecasting, scheduling, routing, and simulation. Ryan worked as an Operations Research Analyst at MITRE, and led software teams at The Washington Post, Yhat, and Polimetrix. During this, he earned a PhD in Operations Research at George Mason University, and wrote his dissertation on real time routing for pickup and delivery problems.
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: EPF Member registration page. The recordings and details from previous webinars are also available on this website.
Follow the Forum on Twitter, LinkedIN and Eventbrite.
EURO Practitioners’ Forum webinars organisers: Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Torkel Haufmann (Sintef), Adisa Mujezinovic
Speaker: Ruth Kaufman, co-founder, Pro Bono OR and EURO Practitioners’ Forum chair
Doing OR for free: the UK OR Society’s Pro Bono OR service, where you can volunteer your skills to help organizations in need!
Pro Bono OR connects charitable organisations with skilled OR analysts who are willing to give their time for free. Our volunteers use a broad array of OR techniques and approaches to help UK-based NGOs identify their critical issues, explore different options, and explain their impact. We give executives the power to make more effective decisions and build more impactful organisations.
Come along and learn:
We will start with a brief review of what sort of skills OR people offer to non-profit clients, and what sort of organisations we serve. We will use case studies and examples to demonstrate the difference we’ve made for NGOs and volunteers over our 11 year history.
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: EPF Member registration page. The recordings and details from previous webinars are also available on this website.
Follow the Forum on Eventbrite, Twitter and LinkedIN , and feel free to get in touch.
EURO Practitioners’ Forum webinars organisers: Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Torkel Haufmann (Sintef), Adisa Mujezinovic