Section: Overall Objectives

Highlights

In the follow-up of our participation to the 2010 ROADEF/EURO challenge on a production planning application at EDF, our team has embarqued this year on a research contract with EDF in collaboration with DOLPHIN. The project is quite ambitious. It requires producing a maintenance schedule for nuclear central that is robust to perturbation in maintenance duration, account for the stochastic electricity demand, and can be stably re-optimized dynamically as problem input are reviewed. In parallel we have develop a close colaboration with PUC-Rio and UFF in Brasil throught the associated team SAMBA: the project is focused on methodological developments for Branch-and-Price-and-Cut algrotihms, that shall translate into a state-of-the-art generic solver for decomposition based approaches in integer programming.

We keep up the momentum of strong papers being published in the best journals of the field (Mathematical Programming, Operations Research, Operations Research Letters, Optima, Discrete Applied Mathematics, INFORMS Journal on Computing, Computers and Operations Research, International Journal of Mathematics in Operational Research, Journal of Mathematical Modelling and Algorithms) and the most competitive conferences (such as ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA)). We also contribute state-of-the-art review papers in in a reference book “Progress in Combinatorial Optimization” and received invitations as plenary speakers at international workshops.

On the team side, Cédric Joncour who completed his PhD with us in December 2010, was recruited as an assistant professor at the University of Le Havre. Gautier Stauffer obtained his HDR (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches) for his work entitled “At Play With Combinatorial Optimization, Integer Programming and Polyhedra” in November [11] .