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).

Energy futures: Hydrogen for New Zealand workshop 29/1/2024

We would like to draw your attention to the upcoming workshop Energy futures: Hydrogen for New Zealand to be held at the University of Canterbury on Monday 29/1/2024.

The ORSNZ Special Interest Group Energy and Natural Resources is supporting this event, with two members participating.

The workshop is free of charge, but please do register here. For those unable to attend in person, there is an option to participate in two of the sessions remotely.

Funded PhD at UoA: Problem Shaping for Mathematical Models of Scheduling Problems

Associate Professor Andrew Mason and Associate Professor Andrea Raith have a funded PhD project in Operations Research available. To apply, please get in touch with us as soon as possible by email.

Title: Problem Shaping for Mathematical Models of Scheduling Problems

Summary: Many organisations have complex scheduling problems that they model as generalised set partitioning models and then solve using integer programming optimisation techniques. These problems arise, for instance, in the airline operations, rostering of medical personnel, forestry management, or collection and processing of goods (such as milk) and many other contexts.

This doctoral research project will consider scheduling problems and other similarly complex problems. These problems have mathematical formulations with a special structure (generalised set partitioning models). Due to their prohibitively large size, the problems are commonly solved using decomposition algorithms. Decomposition approaches initially solve a simplified optimisation problem, and then repeatedly augment this problem with new schedules (e.g. sequences of work tasks) that improve the solution. Our recent observations hint at the impact of the augmentation approach itself, where, by carefully shaping the formulation, we can create favourable model properties that speed up the solution process. This allows us to obtain high quality solutions faster. We will systematically propose and analyse problem shaping approaches to develop a theoretical understanding of this new approach thereby addressing the following three research aims:

  1. Identify properties of different mathematical representations of generalised set partitioning problems and their connection to solution fractionality of the linear programming formulation.
  2. Propose novel problem shaping approaches and integrate them in decomposition algorithms for scheduling problems.
  3. Conduct a systematic analysis of our current and proposed problem shaping approaches to develop an understanding of their operation and maximise the impact they make when solving challenging scheduling problems.