Section: Overall Objectives

Highlights of the Year

Our scientific contributions have been recognized by prestigious journals such as Mathematical Programming, EURO Journal on Computational Optimization, INFORMS Journal on Computing, European Journal of Operational Research, Transportation Science, European Journal of Combinatorics, and Combinatorica, as well as by our participations to prime scientific meetings. In particular, François Vanderbeck was invited as a keynote speaker at the European/American Operations Research Conference in Rome (his presentation was "Extended formulations, Column Generation, and stabilization: synergies in the benefit of large scale applications" which is a subject central to our team work this year); Arnaud Pêcher was invited speaker at the International Conference in Discrete Mathematics, India.

Our methodology of combining an extended formulation approach with Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition has proved able to handle the very large scale instances of railway fret transportation applications (as shown by the very competitive results obtained by Ruslan Sadykov) as well as power production planning at EDF (Jinil Han has managed to solve the Roadef Challenge Instances in a few minutes, while Boris Detienne develops a robust approach on that basis). The Samba associated-team project with Brasil has been at the core of our methodological research effort with a one-month-visit of Professor Uchoa, and a one-year-stay of his PhD student, Hugo Kramer. New industrial collaborative project have started: working on the dimensioning of a logistic fleet with Exeo-Solution (Pierre Pesneau is leading this project), on planning operations in wineries with Ertus Consulting, and on packing and cutting problems with Renault and Saint-Gobain (Francois Clautiaux is an expert on those).

The team is very fortunate to have made very successful appointments: a university professor, Francois Clautiaux, an assistant professor, Boris Detienne and an expert engineer, Issam Tahiri, to be appointed by the center of excellence - labex CPU. Let us also mention that the team is organizing the annual conference of the French Operation Research society (ROADEF) taking place in Bordeaux in February 2014.