Programme

The conference will cover all practical and theoretical aspects of statistics and operations research (OR). Papers at the intersection of these areas, including those in analytics, are particularly welcome.

Schedule overview

Sunday 10 December – informal evening welcome
Monday 11 December – ORSNZ & NZSA / IASC-ARS Streams
Tuesday 12 December – ORSNZ & NZSA / IASC-ARS Streams
Wednesday 13 December – Industry Mini-Conference: Infrastructure Planning
Includes the ORSNZ Plenary (morning) and Analytics Forum (afternoon)
& NZSA / IASC-ARS Streams.
Thursday 14 December – ORSNZ & NZSA / IASC-ARS Streams

You can find an overview of the ORSNZ schedule here, or view the final ORSNZ Handbook.

Social Events

Sunday 10 December – Welcome Reception, 5-7pm, OGGB Level 0
Tuesday 12 December – Conference Dinner, sponsored by Suez, 6:30pm, Number 5

 

Industry Mini-Conference: Infrastructure Planning

On Wednesday 13 December ORSNZ is hosting its first Industry Mini-Conference on Infrastructure Planning. This mini-conference is a day targeted towards people in the Infrastructure industry, e.g., water utilities, energy companies, facilities management, and consists of talks about infrastructure planning. It starts with the ORSNZ Plenary and finishes with an Analytics Forum event.

You can find a schedule of the day here.

You can register here or click below. Be sure to select the Wednesday Half-Day Registration option.

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Conference Handbook

You can find the conference handbook, including the schedule and abstracts here.

Plenary Speakers

Wednesday 13 December – 9:10am

Integrated Modeling for Optimization of Energy Systems

Prof. Michael Ferris, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Stephen C. Kleene Professor in Computer Science, and (by courtesy) Mathematics and Industrial and Systems Engineering

Director of Data Sciences Hub, Wisconsin Institute for Discovery

Abstract:
We present an integrated model framework for the economic impact assessment of policy reforms where electricity markets play a central role. A prime example of such policy reforms is the promotion of electricity production from renewable energy which is at the core of transition strategies towards a low-carbon economy. The massive advancement of carbon-free renewable energy technologies has major implications on the generation, distribution and use patterns of electricity. An adequate simulation of electricity system responses to regulatory changes essentially calls for the accounting of real power flows. Real power flows depend on complex interactions between the spatial injection and withdrawal of power and the inability to store electricity within a network at any point in time. As electricity based on renewable energy sources is becoming the dominant energy carrier of the overall economy, the interactions of the electricity system with the rest of the economy play a critical role for the assessment of larger electricity system changes. Apart from issues of energy security, key questions of economic adjustment relate to the competitiveness impacts for energy-intensive industries and the incidence of electricity market reforms across generators, system operators, and consumers. Answers to these questions require an economy-wide framework which captures complex substitution, output, and income effects across various markets of the economy.

We consider models built up from a collection of optimizations within an interacting physical, economic or virtual system.  We show how optimization and equilibrium concepts can be deployed and resulting models solved within an extended mathematical programming framework. We propose a hybrid bottom-up top-down framework which combines the technological explicitness of real power flow electricity networks with the economic comprehensiveness of computable general equilibrium models.

Bio:
Michael C. Ferris is Professor of Computer Sciences and leads the Optimization Group within the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA.  He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, England in 1989.

Prof. Ferris’ research is concerned with algorithmic and interface development for large scale problems in mathematical programming, including links to the GAMS and AMPL modeling languages, and general purpose software such as PATH, NLPEC and EMP.  He has worked on many applications of both optimization and complementarity, including cancer treatment planning, energy modeling, economic policy, traffic and environmental engineering, video-on-demand data delivery, structural and mechanical engineering.

Prof. Ferris is a SIAM fellow, an INFORMS fellow, received the Beale-Orchard-Hays prize from the Mathematical Programming Society and is a past recipient of a NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  He serves on the editorial boards of Mathematical Programming, Transactions of Mathematical Software, and Optimization Methods and Software.

 

See the NZSA / IASC-ARS website for details on other plenary speakers.