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 […]
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 […]
Irv was the first guest on The Decision Intelligence Lab, a podcast hosted by Professor Michael Watson (Northwestern University) and Professor Vijay Mehrotra (University of San Francisco) to “deliver real-world insights for data professionals, business leaders, and anyone seeking to leverage data for smarter decision-making.” Listen to the episode here. Following are lightly edited excerpts. […]
When discussing optimization solution development, I often refer to “the journey” from opportunity identification and business problem framing to deployment and solution lifecycle management, and the important steps in between. As a consulting firm, we are engaged by organizations whose in-house teams can be at varying stages of the journey with a given solution. This […]
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 […]
In a critical back-office operation, a broker-dealer firm must segregate a federally regulated amount of cash and securities in specially protected accounts on behalf of its clients to ensure that clients can withdraw the bulk of their holdings on demand, even if the firm becomes insolvent. The firm must calculate what it owes to clients […]
Institutional investors in sustainable land-based assets around the world rely on a management firm for superior stewardship and financial yields. Over decades, one independent firm has established an innovative, disciplined approach to become a global leader in conservation, real estate management, and acquisitions and sales. Its continually changing portfolio—comprised of millions of acres worth millions […]
Following are more transcript highlights from our January 29/30 webinar with Ugo Feunekes of Remsoft and Gurobi, which can be watched here. Ugo: Some of the suggestions were things we could do to change our modeling system itself, such as precision accuracies and rounding. Other things are tough for us sometimes to implement because many of the […]
On January 29 and 30, I conducted a webinar on model review and validation about a specific project that entailed challenges and solutions of great potential interest to the larger community of optimization practitioners. Anita Bowers and Gwyneth Butera of Gurobi were the hosts and moderators. My co-presenter was Ugo Feunekes, the co-founder and CTO […]
