Building a high school or middle school schedule is a deceptively difficult problem. A school assigns hundreds or thousands of students to course sections while simultaneously scheduling teachers and classrooms over periods, days and terms. Students have individual course requests. Teachers and rooms have limited availability. Sections have capacity limits. Courses may meet on different […]
Following are lightly edited excerpts from Rob’s recent webinar (watch the recording here). An optimization model can perform beautifully in development but struggle or fail when it reaches production. The reason is straightforward: production changes the rules. A prototype often operates against a controlled dataset and can be given considerable time to find an answer. […]
Electric power executives are navigating one of the most complex operating environments the industry has ever faced. Demand patterns are shifting, renewables are accelerating, and energy storage is scaling rapidly, all of it managed within operational windows measured in minutes. At the center of that challenge sits a set of optimization models that most consumers […]
Leaders of a software platform for structured finance sought assistance in significantly upgrading its optimization features. An important component of the technology portfolio of a global financial analytics provider, the platform is used by issuers, investors, underwriters and other entities to administer, monitor and value collections of securities. Improving the Proof of Concept Initially, the […]
At an e-commerce giant, customer orders are assigned throughout the day to fulfillment centers and third parties across the United States while minimizing shipment costs, observing limits on inventory, reducing split orders, and balancing workload across the fulfillment centers. The company’s data science team created an order fulfillment optimization proof of concept in Python that […]
In the electric utility industry, an Independent System Operator (ISO) coordinates and directs the flow of electricity over a region’s high-voltage transmission system. Like an air traffic controller, an ISO oversees the daily operation of the power grid. For several decades, mathematical optimization models have assisted critical decision-making about key assets that increase the efficiency […]
We recently presented our work with Birchbox, the premier beauty subscription service, to a panel of judges for the INFORMS Wagner Prize for excellence in the practice of operations research and innovation in mathematics and advanced analytics. One judge asked how customer preferences and behavior are incorporated into the optimization model for product assortment. We […]
As COVID-19 impacted the United States in the summer of 2020, universities struggled to plan for the return of live sports events at their stadiums and arenas. Ticketing and analytics groups at many major universities manually prepared seating plans for the fall football season based on assumptions of limited capacity in a safe environment, without knowing whether fans […]
Gurobi hosted a webinar by Irv and Rob to discuss innovative optimization work with Birchbox, the trailblazing e-commerce business. They were joined by Birchbox VP of Global Business Technology David Bendes, who leads subscription technology and operations, data and business intelligence, and platform product management, focusing on creating data‑driven experiences and the technologies that power […]
Soon there will be sports and entertainment returning to arenas and stadiums, hopefully with fans in attendance. As regulations are established and subsequently altered and as social distancing standards at large public events evolve, the managers of these venues will face understandably difficult challenges. The main short-term problem is to determine where people can be […]
