2010 Program

The default venue for the monthly lectures is RMIT, Access Grid Room. 8.9.66

Melbourne time

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• 2009 Program

Scheduled Events for 2010

Date	Speaker	Topic
November 17, Full day	You!	Recent Advances in Operations Research
October 20, 6:00PM	Tom Montague	AMSI Industry Internships
August 18, 6:00PM	Philip Kilby	The trade-off between flexibility, solution quality and execution cost in Vehicle Routing Problems
June 16, 6:00PM	Simon Dunstall	Developing a Transport Infrastructure Planning System
May 19, 6:00PM	Geoff Prince	New Directions at AMSI
May 7, 1:00PM	Boaz Golany	Resource Allocation in a Tactical Arms Race with Temporary Advantages
April 21, 6:00PM	Domenico Salvagnin	Fast Approaches to Robust Railway Timetabling
March 17, 5:30PM	AGM	Hunter Valley Coal Chain Coordinator - Overview

Venue: RMIT Access Grid Room, 8.9.66 (Building 8, level 9, room 66)

Time: 9:00AM - 4:00PM, Wed, November 17, 2010

Program: Lectures by ... TBA

Topic:: Recent Advance in Operations Research (incorporating the Student Conference)

Recent advances is a one day forum designed to give members the opportunity to exchange ideas and promote growth and activity in the OR community. Both recent interesting and/or novel applied work along with research activities are sought for this day. This year we will incorporate the annual student conference within the recent advances programme.

Please submit abstracts on or before Wednesday 10th November, 2010, to plochert@bigpond.net.au

Registration Fee (including light lunch):

Members $65 Retired members $35 Student members Free Non-members $70

Registration Form

For security you may prefer to register on the day, but .... for catering purposes it is essential that you complete and return the registration form by 15th November 2010.

Full (tentative) programe and abstracts of presentations (PDF).

Tentative programme:

08:45 - 9:00 Registration 09:00 - 9:10 Opening remarks 09:10 - 9:35  D Foster: Personal Operations Research and OR in the Voluntary Sector 09:35 - 10:00 R Snyder: Intermittent demand forecasting with exponential smoothing 10:00 - 10:25 Andreas Schutt: Solving RCPSP and RCPSP/max by Lazy Clause Generation 10:25 - 10:45 Morning Tea 10:45 - 11:10 Damon Gulczynski: A Worst Case Analysis for the Split Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem with Minimum Delivery Amounts 11:10 - 11:35 Sebastian Ruther: A multi-commodity flow problem for the integrated aircraft routing, crew pairing, and tail assignment problem 11:35 - 11:55 Mohsen Reisi Ardali: Nurse Scheduling With Column Generation 11:55 - 12:20 Lanbo Zheng: Planned Maintenance Scheduling for the Hunter Valley Coal Chain 12:20 - 13:20 LUNCH 13:20 - 13:45 Matthew Baxter: Decision Support System for Machine Replacement in Forestry 13:45 - 14:10 Tristan Barnett: Applying Mathematics To Poker Machine Regulations To Increase Consumer Protection 14:10 - 14:35 Andreas Ernst: A Hybrid Lagrangian Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for the Degree-Constrained Minimum Spanning Tree Problem 14:35 - 14:55 Afternoon tea 14:55 - 15:20 Moshe Sneidovich: Fooled by Robustness: A Perspective from the Land of the Black Swan 15:20 - 15:55 Leorey Marquez: Modelling Centrelink customer network pathways 16:00 CLOSING REMARKS

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Venue: RMIT Access Grid Room. 8.9.66

Time: 6:00PM, Wed, October 20, 2010

Program: Lecture by Tom Montague, AMSI

Topic:: AMSI Industry Internships

Abstract
The AMSI industry internship program is now in its forth year of operation. This presentation will cover the goals, history recent developments of the program and provide examples of the interesting problems addressed by interns, academic mentors and their industry partners. It will also include an overview as to how to take advantage of this opportunity.

Bio:
After working as a biologist at Monash University on seabird ecology Tom completed his D.Phil in the Wildlife Conservation research Unit at Oxford University in 1993. He then worked as an ecologist for Landcare Research in New Zealand before returning to Australia and taking up a position as a science advisor to the Victorian government in 2002. It was around this time he realized how much industry and Australians need to improve their understanding of mathematical sciences if we were to build our industrial capability. His current job as industry marketing manager at AMSI is all about building the capabilities of business, industry and government and AMSI.

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Venue: RMIT Access Grid Room. 8.9.66

Time: 6:00PM, Wed, August 18, 2010

Program: Lecture by Philip Kilby - NICTA and ANU

Topic:: The trade-off between flexibility, solution quality and execution cost in Vehicle Routing Problems

Abstract
The Vehicle Routing Problem considers the delivery of goods to a set of customers using multiple vehicles. The aim is to deliver (or pickup, or pickup and deliver) the goods as efficiently as possible.

In the real world, the routes are always constrained. In the OR literature, some of these constraints have been examined (capacity, time windows, etc). However, the diversity of constraints seen in the real world is truly staggering - vehicles can't fit under eaves, complex 2D and 3D loading constraints, complex work/rest rules, connections to ferry timetables, and (my favourite) the "affairs" constraint that limits which customers a driver can visit depending on whether he is currently having, or has had in the past, an affair with staff at the customer (apparently updated weekly).

In this paper we outline an architecture for solving instances of the Vehicle Routing Problem that have arbitrary constraints that must be observed by solutions. The system uses a Constraint Programming (CP) system to model, propagate and check constraints. The use of the CP system allows the approach to be very flexible -- producing solutions for essentially arbitrary constraints that model the business practices of the companies that will use the the system. However, this flexibility comes at the price of increased execution time, and may affect solution quality. The aim of the paper is to look at some facets of the trade-off between flexibility, solution quality and execution cost.

Bio: Philip Kilby is Principal Researcher with NICTA, and an Adjunct at ANU. He has worked with transport-related problems in academia and with industry for more than 20 years.

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Venue: RMIT Access Grid Room. 8.9.66

Time: 6:00PM, Wed, June 16, 2010

Program: Lecture by Simon Dunstall - CSIRO

Topic:: Developing a Transport Infrastructure Planning System

Reporting on joint work with Kim Levy, Andreas Ernst, Gaurav Singh, Stuart Woodman, Andrew Higgins, Leorey Marquez, Olena Gavriliouk and Dhananjay Thiruvady.

Abstract
Mineral freight volume increases are driving transport infrastructure investments on Australia's east and west coasts. New and upgraded railways, roads and ports are planned or are under construction -- to serve new mines, processing facilities and international markets. One of the fastest growing regions is Northern Queensland, central to which is the so-called Northern Economic Triangle that has Rockhampton, Mt Isa and Townsville at its vertices. CSIRO has been working with Queensland Government to construct a new GIS-based infrastructure planning optimisation system that is known as the Infrastructure Futures Analysis Platform (IFAP). IFAP can be used to build long-term (eg. 25 year) plans for infrastructure development in regions such as the Northern Economic Triangle. IFAP consists of a commercial Geographic Information System (MapInfo), a database and a network optimisation solver that has been constructed by CSIRO and will ultimately by open-sourced. The prototype IFAP is nearing completion and in this presentation I will discuss the development process and the underlying network optimisation problem.

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Venue: RMIT Access Grid Room. 8.9.66

Time: 6:00PM, Wed, May 19, 2010

Program: Lecture by Geoff Prince, AMSI

Topic:: New Directions at AMSI

Abstract
Professor Geoff Prince will give a brief overview of AMSI's philosophy and operations followed by an in depth presentation on our new internship scheme and the recent changes to our scientific program. Questions and discussion are welcome.

Bio:
Professor Geoff Prince is director of the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute. He has spent most of his research and teaching career at La Trobe University but he has been involved with AMSI since 2004. His mathematical interests lie in differential geometry and differential equations.

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Venue: Room 213, Richard Berry Bldg. University of Melbourne

Time: 1:00PM, Friday, May 7, 2010

Program: Lecture by Boaz Golany, Technion, Israel

Topic:: Resource Allocation in a Tactical Arms Race with Temporary Advantages

Abstract
We consider an arms race between two opponents (e.g., government forces vs. insurgents) where each advantage that is achieved by one of the opponents is limited in time and expires when the other opponent develops a new weapon or counter-measure (in contrast with the "winner-takes-all" situation that characterizes much of the literature on investments in competitive business environments). We first consider a variety of models that apply to a one-sided situation, where the defender has to determine how much to invest in developing counter-measures to a weapon employed by the attacker. The decision problems are expressed as (convex) nonlinear optimization problems. We present an example that provides some operational insights regarding optimal resource allocation. We also consider a two-sided situation and develop a Nash equilibrium solution that sets investment values so that both parties have no incentive to change.

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Venue: RMIT Access Grid Room. 8.9.66

Time: 6:00PM, Wed, April 21, 2010

Program: Lecture by Domenico Salvagnin, University of Padova

Topic:: Fast Approaches to Robust Railway Timetabling

Abstract
The Train Timetabling Problem (TTP) consists in finding a train schedule on a railway network that satisfies some operational constraints and maximizes some profit function which counts for the efficiency of the infrastructure usage. In practical cases, however, the maximization of the objective function is not enough and one calls for a robust solution that is capable of absorbing as much as possible delays/disturbances on the network. In this paper we propose and analyze computationally four different methods to find robust TTP solutions for the aperiodic (non cyclic) case, that combine Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) and ad-hoc Stochastic Programming/Robust Optimization techniques. We compare computationally the effectiveness and practical applicability of the four techniques under investigation on real-world test cases from the Italian railway company (Trenitalia). The outcome is that two of the proposed techniques are very fast and provide robust solutions of comparable quality with respect to the standard (but very time consuming) Stochastic Programming approach.

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Venue: RMIT Access Grid Room. 8.9.66

Time: 5:30PM, Wed, March 17, 2010

Program: 5:30PM: Annual General Meeting; 6:00PM: Lecture by Tracey Giles:

Hunter Valley Coal Chain Coordinator - Overview

• Brief history and overview of HVCCC


• HVCCC Strategic Capacity Planning Group and what we are are trying to achieve


• HVCC Simulation model overview


• HVCC Optimisation model overview


• Kooragang Island Rail Terminal simulation Model


• Newcastle Port simulation model


• Rail Scheduling Optimisation tool


• Proposed future model development through Australian Research Council grant and CSIRO strategic Alliance