Author: andrearaith

ORSNZ annual conference submission dates extended

Submission deadlines for the ORSNZ Annual Conference have been extended.

The conference will be held Thursday 20/11/2025 and Friday 21/11/2025 at the University of Auckland following JuMP-dev, which will take place earlier that week (November 17–20, 2025, also in Auckland, New Zealand).

The extended submission dates are:

Submission deadline for abstracts24 October 2025
Submission deadline for (optional) full papers3 November 2025
Submission deadline for YPP papers3 November 2025

The registration deadlines remain as follows:

Deadline for early bird registration31st October 2025
Deadline for final registrations10th November 2025

For details please refer to the conference website.

Andrea Raith (ORSNZ President and conference co-organiser).

GEEC Seminar at UoA: The Evolving Landscape of Rechargeable Batteries: Research and Industry Applications 

The following seminar may be of interest to the ORSNZ community, and in particular the Energy and Natural Resources Special Interest Group.

The next Green Energy Engineering Centre (GEEC) Seminar will be held at 4pm on October 22 in Room 1.401 on the fourth floor of the Engineering Building at University of Auckland.

The speaker is Dr Shanghai Wei (Faculty of Engineering and Design at UoA) who will give a lecture on 

The Evolving Landscape of Rechargeable Batteries: Research and Industry Applications 

Tickets and further details are available here. Please rsvp as soon as possible.

Posted by Andrea Raith on behalf of Prof Andy Philpott (GEEC Director).

Job Opportunity – Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Decision Sciences/Supply Chain Management at Victoria University of Wellington

An opening for a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Decision Sciences/Supply Chain Management at Victoria University of Wellington is now available on the university website: https://ejye.fa.ap1.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/CandidateExperience/en/sites/CX_1/jobs/preview/1007925

Closing date 28 June

Andrea Raith (ORSNZ President) on behalf of Vicky Mabin

Upcoming NZHS-3 Symposium

For everyone with an interest in energy – you may be interested in attending the upcoming New Zealand Hydrogen Symposium NZHS-3 held 3-5 February held at the University of Canterbury.

The symposium covers a wide range of hydrogen research, and I especially look forward to the modelling-focused sessions on Wednesday: Session 6 Energy Systems Modelling and Session 7 Risk, environmental and social dimensions as well as the keynotes on Wednesday afternoon.

It is not too late to register for NZHS-3!

Ngā mihi,
Andrea (ORSNZ President)

ORNSZ conference – prize winners

Kia ora koutou,

For those who were unable to attend the 2024 ORSNZ conference held 5/12/2024 – 6/12/2024 – please join me in congratulating the prize winners of the Young Practitioner Prize (YPP) and the JAG memorial prize for the best application of OR for improving lives.

YPP best paper award: Dominic Keehan – Estimation of Shifting Probability Distributions using the Wasserstein Distance

YPP best presentation award: Ahmed Abdelhadi – Simulation-optimization approach for charging setup for electric taxi adoption using dynamic charger swapping for optimal distribution and location

JAG memorial prize: Zainab Rizvi – Towards Multi Scale Analysis of Energy Systems with Microgrids

JAG memorial prize: Juliette Foley – Minimisation of Cost and Emissions for Supermarket Product Purchases Across Recipes

All our prize winners are also listed on the ORSNZ Prizes page (here)

We also thank our sponsors for support: Suez for support of the YPP prize, Gurobi Optimization for support of the JAG prize, and Supply Chain Company for support of student attendance at the conference.

Ngā mihi,
Andrea (ORSNZ President)

ORSNZ AGM 2024 and Agenda

The 2024 ORSNZ Annual General Meeting will be held at the upcoming 56th ORSNZ Conference on Thursday 5 December starting at 1pm.

The preliminary agenda for the meeting is:

  1. Apologies (to [email protected]);
  2. Minutes of the previous AGM;
  3. Matters arising from the minutes;
  4. President’s report;
  5. Honorary Treasurer’s report and financial statements;
  6. Updates from regional and special interest groups;
  7. Future Conferences;
  8. Website redevelopment;
  9. Election of officers and auditor;
  10. Other business.

You can assign a proxy to vote on your behalf using the 2nd page of this form; this should be sent to [email protected].

I look forward to seeing you all at the conference and AGM.

Andrea Raith
ORSNZ President

ORSNZ Annual Conference registrations open

The ORSNZ Annual Conference will be held Thursday 5/12/2024 and Friday 6/12/2024 at the University of Auckland.

Some of the key dates are (full list here):
– abstracts are due Friday 8/11/2024
– Paper deadline (optional) and YPP paper deadline Friday 15/11/2024
– early bird registrations are available until Friday 15/11/2024

Thanks to some very generous sponsorship the registration fees are low this year, so hopefully many of you can join us. Registration details and the Humanitix registration page are linked here.

There are two prizes available, the ORSNZ Young Practitioners’ Prize (YPP) and the John A. George Memorial Prize (JAG). Details can be found on the conference website.

Please note that there may be travel support for students out of Auckland, as well as some free registrations for students and recent graduates participating in the Young Practitioner Prize (YPP). Please get in touch by emailing [email protected] to find out more.

I would also like to draw everyone’s attention to the Optimization Community Event, connected by Gurobi, which will be held on Thursday 5/12/2024 from 3:30pm at Old Government House (University of Auckland). The event is free-of-charge but ORSNZ attendees need to register for this event in addition to ORSNZ conference registration (registrations are also available on the same Humanitix ticket page).

We look forward to many interesting talks and discussions. The abstract submission form is linked here.

Andrea Raith (ORSNZ President)
on behalf of the conference organising committee (Sarah Marshall, Lisa Hillas, Mike O’Sullivan).

Invitation to participate in 3rd New Zealand Hydrogen Symposium

Kia ora koutou,  

On behalf of the organising committee for the 3rd New Zealand Hydrogen Symposium, we are pleased to invite you to participate and submit abstracts for the conference. The symposium will be held from February 3-5, 2025, at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.

We are excited to invite you to participate in this conference. Topics of the conference range from production and storage to small-scale hydrogen systems and regulation.

For more information, please visit the symposium’s website: http://nzhs2025.co.nz/

Call for abstracts: Now Open

August 31, 2024: Early bird registration deadline.

September 30, 2024: Submissions close.

October 31, 2024: Registrations close.

Abstract Submission: We invite you to contribute to the symposium by submitting an abstract. This is a unique opportunity to share your research and ideas with the hydrogen community, highlighting the latest advancements in support of developing a global hydrogen ecosystem and potentially inspiring others with your work.

We encourage you to share this information with your networks to help promote the event. If you have any questions or need further information, please feel free to contact our organising committee at [email protected].

We look forward to seeing you at the symposium.

Of particular interest to ORSNZ members may be sessions on modelling issues in this context.

Ngā mihi / Best Regards

Andrea Raith (ORSNZ president)
on behalf of the local organising committee of the 3rd New Zealand Hydrogen Symposium

Congratulations to ORSNZ conference prize winners

Kia ora koutou,

For those who were unable to attend the 2023 ORSNZ conference – please join me in congratulating the prize winners of the Young Practitioner Prize (YPP) and the JAG memorial prize for the best application of OR for improving lives.

YPP best paper award: Dominic Keehan – Multistage production planning and price modelling
YPP best presentation award: Mostafa Papen – Towards the development of a Virtual Safety Officer – Few-Shot-Learning prototype
JAG memorial prize: Shirekha Layangani – An Analysis of Oncology Drug Prescription Patterns using Hidden Markov Models

Andrew Mason was awarded the Hans Daellenbach Prize in 2022, and presented with the award after his 2023 ORSNZ plenary titled “From MacSimplex to OpenSolver: A 35 year Journey Applying Operations Research”.

Andrew Mason with Hans Daellenbach certificate and ORSNZ president Mike O'Sullivan.

All our prize winners are also listed on the ORSNZ Prizes page (here).

Ngā mihi,
Andrea (ORSNZ President)

JuMP – recent developments

Oscar Dowson, industry representative on the ORSNZ council, presented a summary of recent JuMP developments at the 2023 ORSNZ conference. Some of the highlights are support for multiobjective optimisation, nonlinear complimentarity and many other additions and improvement. For an overview of new and improved features, have a look at Oscar’s blog post JuMP: the year in review (2023).

If you haven’t tried JuMP yet – it’s a modelling language for mathematical optimisation in the Julia programming language. I highly recommend it for your next optimisation project. There are lots of good examples and tutorials to get you started (see here).