2nd conference of the EURO Working Group on the Practice of Operations Research

Bologna, March 11-12, 2019

The second conference of the EURO working group on Practice of OR ended successfully: the two-day meeting brought together more than 130 practitioners and academics of Operation Research and Machine Learning to discuss on “OPERATION RESEARCH MEETS MACHINE LEARNING. How to get the most of both worlds to achieve excellent Decision Support System”.

The event represented a strategic meeting place for comparing best practices and new ideas of technologies on how to transform data into a business value.

The outstanding speakers were numerous, among them Mauricio Resende, principal scientist of Amazon, and Raffaele Maccioni, founder and CEO of ACTOR Group.

The book of abstracts and the following presentations authorised for publication provide an overview of the event:

• From data to decisions. The challenges of the digitalization and the franz edelman award experience by Raffaele Maccioni, ACTOR
• Optimizing a bike sharing system by Damien Blanchon, IBM France
• Empirical Model Learning. An Industrial Point of View by Alessio Bonfietti, MIND IT
• Machine Learning and Optimisation. An ongoing journey by Matteo Pozzi, Optit
• Attention, Learn to Solve Routing Problems! by Wouter Kool, ORTEC
• Using machine learning to help solve online vehicle routing problems by Nitin Ahuja, PTV Group
• No Routes Wasted for Waste Collection: Exploring real-time information through ML techniques to improve waste collection by Tânia Ramos, Universidade de Lisboa
• Optimization via Machine Learning-based Simulation: Application to Modern Call Centers Management by Stefano Gualandi, Università degli Studi di Pavia

The parallel sessions held on Tuesday 13^th were focused on:

• Does the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) make European.  Analytics different from the rest of the world? Moderator: Joaquim Gromicho, ORTEC
• How does OR-based DSS benefit from ML technology? Moderator: Sofiane Oussedik, IBM France
• Optimizing from data: will ML marry OR? Moderator: Daniele Vigo, University of Bologna
• What does the analytics maturity curve look like? What is it likely to become? Moderator: Matteo Pozzi, Optit

Finally, the conference was an opportunity to take stock of the relevant initiatives in OR and ML in the Emilia-Romagna Region (Italy) thanks to:

• Marina Silverii, Director of ASTER (Bologna, Italy) who presented an overview of the regional experiences, laboratories and industrial and research projects
• Rita Cucchiara, Cini National Lab AIIS and Unimore
• Daniele Vigo, AIRO Associazione Italiana di Ricerca Operativa, University of Bologna and Optit

Together with the EWG on Practice of OR, the conference has been supported by IBM, ACTOR, AIRO, FICO, OPTIT, ORTEC, PTV Group, Fondazione Golinelli, under the auspices of ASTER and of the Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering of the University of Bologna.

Some pictures of presenters

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