Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

Olivier Beaumont was the Track Chair of the Algorithm Track of Super Computing 2017 (November, Denver, USA); “The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis” https://sc17.supercomputing.org. SuperComputing is the major international conference on High Performance Computing.

We have contributed to the JULIA mathematical programming ecosystem by providing tools to decompose a mixed integer programming model into blocks. This makes it very convenient to model Benders or Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition using JUMP and to compare different decomposition for a given problem formulation.

Our generic software platform BaPCod is now giving rise to specific branches for classes of applications. The first such release concerns the classic benchmark Vehicle Routing Problem variants that arise in logistics. The methods that are build in the platform emerge from our collaboration with our Brazilian partners of the SAMBA associated team. For their anterior work, our partners have received the 2017 best paper award from the prestigious journal “Mathematical Programming Computation”. With the new version that is built under BaPCod, we have managed to solve to optimality many more open instances of classic and very competitive Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows [37]. This study has been an opportunity to improve significantly the performance on the generic Branch-Cut-and-Price platform and to highlight the interests of such generic methodologies.