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: Vincent Gosselin, Co-founder of Taipy

In the Python ecosystem, numerous packages are available to:

• Build powerful AI and Operations Research (OR) algorithms
• Visualize data effectively
• Manage back-end functions

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.

7 JUNE 2024 WEBINAR RECORDING

About the speaker:

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:

1. how Pro Bono OR was established, and grew into the service it is today,
2. what Pro Bono OR looks like for volunteers,
3. how the Pro Bono OR journey unfolds for the charities we support.

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.

3 MAY 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 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

Speaker: Dr. Antti Korhonen, CEO, Detech Decision Technologies, Finland

The presentation discusses optimization solutions for strategic financial decision-making and enterprise-wide risk management in financial institutions. The software is a sophisticated prescriptive analytics solution based on a stochastic dynamic optimization approach and solves highly complex real-world financial planning problems under uncertainty. The application is an integrated platform for banking, insurance, pension funds, wealth management and multinational financial groups.

The software computes dynamic, multi-period financial strategies with concrete action plans that fulfill diverse management goals, priorities and regulatory requirements. The strategies help institutions to prepare simultaneously for multiple economic and financial market scenarios in uncertain operating environments. The computed forward-looking strategies lead to considerable improvements in performance when compared with more traditional approaches. This improvement in performance becomes particularly noticeable in exceptionally difficult and turbulent operating environments.

5 APRIL 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 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

Speaker: Joaquim Gromicho, Professor of Business Analytics at the University of Amsterdam and Science and Education Officer at ORTEC

Joaquim A.S. Gromicho acts as Science and Education Officer for ORTEC and is full professor of Business Analytics at the University of Amsterdam. He received his PhD in Optimization in 1995 from the Erasmus University Rotterdam, before spending two years as Assistant Professor at the University of Lisbon. He serves the Dutch Statistics and OR Society as editor in chief of STAtOR, a magazine on applications and impact, and the steering committee of the EURO Practitioner’s Forum.

In the era of generative AI and powerful ML packages prevalent in the Python ecosystem, the significance of Mathematical Optimization remains paramount. Recognizing the historical confinement of this tool to the realm of Operations Research experts, Krzysztof Postek, Alessandro Zocca, Jeff Kantor, and I have embarked on a mission to democratize its accessibility. In our collaborative effort, we’ve authored a hands-on, accessible yet ambitious manual, tailored for a diverse audience, including students and professionals. This comprehensive guide not only delves into traditional (mixed-integer) linear optimization but also explores network, convex, conic, stochastic, and robust optimization.

Scheduled for release by Cambridge University Press as an inexpensive textbook in 2024, our book, also available under a Green Open Access license, is designed to empower learners with practical insights. The latest prepublication version is accessible at https://ortec.com/en/featured-insights/insights/math-optimization-python. Realistic examples accompany each topic, and to further enhance the learning experience, we provide an online companion. This resource comprises 50+ fully functional notebooks readily deployable in Google Colab, serving as practical starting points to address diverse real-life challenges you may encounter.

For your convenience, the companion is available at https://mobook.github.io/MO-book/intro.html, within the permissive MIT license. Note that AMPL ported it to their own modelling language at https://mo-book.ampl.com/.

During this webinar, I will demonstrate representative content of the book in action and will also showcase how ChatGPT serves as a valuable collaborator in my professional endeavors, offering insights into its role in my workflow.

2 FEBRUARY 2024 WEBINAR RECORDING

2 FEBRUARY 2024 PRESENTATION

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: Carlos Henggeler Antunes, INESC Coimbra, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

Demand response programs play a key role in the energy transition, offering potential benefits to multiple players: grid operators (alleviating congestion in networks), retailers (enabling to manage wholesale buying and retail selling prices) and consumers (reducing the energy bill without jeopardizing comfort). This work presents a modular set of mixed-integer linear programming models of appliance operation aimed at being incorporated in autonomous Home Energy Management Systems allowing for the integrated optimization of all energy resources. The models consider different cost objective function components (energy and power costs, monetized discomfort) as well as dealing with the user’s discomfort derived from operating appliances out of the habitual periods, settings, and temperature ranges. The models are developed in a building block manner to be used with different objectives of economic and comfort nature.

12 JANUARY 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 Scientist, SAP

We discuss solutions to two business processes performed during Airport/Airline Ground Operations.

The first is the challenging task of optimal allocation of Stands and corresponding Tow plans for a large number of aircrafts flying in and out of airports. The second task is the subsequent planning and monitoring of Turnaround processes required for orchestrating all ground handling activities.

The presentation will showcase solution approaches to these highly time-critical operations, both for planning and recovery. The solutions adhere to strict dependency rules as required by operations and provide improved accuracy for Target Off Block Time slot requests to Air Traffic Control (ATC) by incorporating real-time IOT data, ML predictive algorithms for improved duration estimates and Optimization for optimal allocation while balancing multiple objectives.

The study was done with a large commercial airline with data from their productive scenarios.

1 DECEMBER 2023 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.