Section: Overall Objectives

Highlights of the Year

Our scientific output is marked by strong publications in prestigious journals such as Discrete Mathematics, Mathematical Programming, EURO Journal on Computational Optimization, INFORMS Journal on Computing, and Operations Research, for instance, with contributions ranging from theoretical and methodological to numerical and applied industrial problem solving. This is completed by conference invitations in China, Chili and Canada and proceedings in selective conferences.

Our methodology of combining an extended formulation approach with Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition and column generation, that is now published [21] , is a great illustration of our team's threefold objective: it is a theoretically proved method, playing the complementary between exact optimization techniques, and leading to an computational edge in application solving. This methodology is a key tool for currently ongoing collaboration with EDF and Russian partners on railway applications.

The Samba project with our associated team in Brasil is picking up a new pace, with good progress on primal heuristics [27] [30] and stabilization techniques [23] [25] [29] [32] . In the coming year, short term visits will be completed by a one-month stay of Professor Uchoa, and a one-year-stay of his PhD student.

The composition of the team is going through rapid evolution: Gautier Stauffer, our Inria Chair, has been promoted as a Professor in Grenoble; Andrew Miller has returned to the US. Both positions have been re-published in our thematic. We are currently building tighter links with CEPAGE by building closer work relations with Olivier Beaumont, Lionel Eyraud-Dubois, and Paul Renaud-Goud who share our methodologies, while emphasizing our expertise in the application domain of cloud computing.

The team has been integrated in the LaBEX CPU. The complete team participates in the WP5 “Network and Service Optimization”. At the same time, there is a participation in the WP6 “Codes, Cryptologie, Algorithmique Arithmétique” with the proper methodology of the team.