By Gavin le Roux
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to attend the 33rd European Conference on Operational Research (EURO) in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was organised by the Danish Operations Research Society (DORS) and held on the beautiful campus of the Technical University of Denmark, referred to in Danish as the Danmarks Tekniske Universitet (DTU). Thank you to the Programme and Organising Committees, chaired by Marta Szachniuk and Dario Pacino, along with Jesper Larsen, for an unforgettable experience.
The conference kicked off with an opening session on Sunday, the 30th of June in the university’s sportshallen. Here, details regarding the conference’s programme were shared followed by the awarding of the prestigious EURO Gold Medal (EGM 2024) and the EURO Distinguished Service Award (EDSA 2024). Upon completion of the ceremony, we were welcomed by the Danish Youth Guards who led us to the welcoming party a few buildings away from where the opening session was held. This evening, we got to know fellow delegates from around the world, obviously mostly from Europe, in an informal exterior setting with drinks in hand and small bites of food.
The sessions started on Monday morning. About 50 sessions ran in parallel at any given time in various venues in 7 buildings spread across campus. Each session was given a code, e.g. TC-43. The first letter indicates the day of the week, that is M for Monday, T for Tuesday and W for Wednesday. The second letter says the time of the session, i.e. A for 08:30-10:00, B for 10:30-12:00, C for 12:30-14:00 and D for 14:30-16:00. The number in the code is simply to distinguish between different sessions. An online mobile application was used by delegates to see the venue of each session as well as the abstracts of the talks within a session. It was advised to attend a single session usually consisting of 3 or 4 talks for the full hour and a half, since talks within a session do not start and finish at a given time and the distance between venues may be long. Therefore, when deciding which session to attend, you had to take into consideration all talks within the session.
I attended my first session that morning, focusing on new features that are available for the FICO Xpress Solver, Gurobi 11, SCIP Optimizer Solver and the Cardinal Optimizer. This was followed by a session on crime analytics. I especially found the talk on using crime report app data to predict burglary via machine learning as well as the talk around optimisation within social networks to identify related crimes, interesting. The following session I attended (after having lunch in one of the 5 designated buildings on campus) was on mobility and transportation in healthcare. At the start of the session, Hannah Callaghan, a Master’s student at Stellenbosch University’s Department of Logistics, presented her work on mobile clinic deployment in the Witzenberg region of South Africa with the guidance of Prof Linke Potgieter. Another interesting talk within this session dealt with the assessment of equity impacts of different transportation modes using access to health facilities for asthma patients. The last session I attended for the day was centred around vehicle routing problems under uncertainty. I was highly impressed by the presented work on vehicle routing with stochastic demand service and waiting times in addition to the talk on deep controlled learning for the delayed time window assignment and vehicle routing problem.
The following morning, it was my turn to present first in the first session for the day. You had to arrive at the session at least 15 minutes before it starts to allow for the setting up of the presentation on your own laptop which included ensuring that your screen presents correctly on the overhead projector with the correct cable. I lived in a hotel in Copenhagen city centre, about an hour commute on public transport to DTU. This was chosen to allow myself to explore Copenhagen in the evenings as a tourist after the conference (the sun set only after 10pm at the time allowing for ample time in the evenings). This choice unfortunately backfired when I had to miss a bus in the morning of my presentation due to it being too full. When I eventually caught a bus, unexpected traffic due to a serious car accident on the highway, caused my commute to be further delayed. Long story short, I made it to the venue with no minutes to spare, quickly connected my laptop to the projector and successfully presented my work. I was determined to not miss my speech as I had flown halfway around the world to speak for 20 minutes. I shared newly developed heuristics specifically for the fixed charge transportation problem, research originating from my PhD, which were well-received by the audience.
The remainder of the Tuesday, I attended sessions on machine learning in applied optimisation, simulation in transportation and logistics as well as applications of machine learning in optimisation. In the first of the three sessions, I was intrigued by the study related to learning optimal courier assignments in on-demand delivery platforms and the research on decision-focused learning for energy storage system optimisation in energy markets. The one talk that grabbed my attention in the second session was on spatio-temporal pricing of battery-swapping tasks on mobility-sharing platforms using proximal policy optimisation. The speaker used reinforcement learning to handle the high dimensionality of the problem. Their simulation environment mimics dynamic worker participation and task reservation in response to price updates. The last session of the day included fellow South Africans, Prof Tiny du Toit from the School of Computer Science and Information Systems from the North-West University and Stephan Nel from the Department of Industrial Engineering at Stellenbosch University, chaired by Prof Jan van Vuuren from the same department as Stephan Nel. The two speakers respectively presented their work on enhancing Wi-Fi fingerprinting through the use of an automated supervised autoencoder, and neural style transfer inspired optimisation techniques to capture and transfer salient features of high-quality solutions to other solutions.
The last day’s sessions I attended included topics on last-mile delivery, large scale optimisation in air transportation, timetabling as well as OR in energy. The sessions that piqued my interest were the last two sessions. The presentation on electric bus timetabling and scheduling for sustainable urban mobility in the timetabling session was refreshing due to the speaker integrating both timetabling and scheduling techniques within a single method to solve the problem. In this same session, an adaptive large neighbourhood search was presented to solve public transport timetables. The methods that the speaker utilised fall within the same category of heuristics which I have developed for the problem considered in my PhD. I found this compelling as it is the same class of heuristics applied to timetabling problems as opposed to transportation problems (optimisation problems where a network is presented as a complete directed bipartite graph). Regarding the last session, the two talks which stood out were the ones on optimal integration of microgrids in smart grids during cold-load pick-up, and geometric programming for optimal hosting capacity allocation in distribution grids.
The conference ended that same day with a closing session during which the EURO Doctoral Dissertation Award (EDDA 2024), EURO Excellence in Practice Award (EEPA 2024), EURO Prize for OR for the Common Good (EPOCG 2024) and EURO Award for the Best EJOR Paper (EABEP 2024) were presented to the winners. This was followed by a farewell party at the same location as the welcoming party.
I would like to give a special thanks to the Early Career Academic Development programme, the Division for Research Development and the Department of Logistics (all three at Stellenbosch University) for making this possible. The EURO conference offered me a unique opportunity to present my research findings to a diverse and knowledgeable audience. It also allowed me to network with peers and established researchers which may open doors to future collaborations. EURO 2025 will be hosted by the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. This should be a memorable conference as it marks the 50th anniversary of EURO in the country where OR was developed to address complex military logistics and strategy problems during World War II.
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