News – Operations Research Society of New Zealand

ORNSZ Special General Meeting to approve new constitution

Special General Meeting
when? Wednesday 11 March 2026 at 12pm (noon)
where? Remotely on Teams.

To all ORSNZ Members,

As you may be aware the Incorporated Societies Act has changed in 2022 and, being an Incorporated Society, ORSNZ needs to update our constitution to be compliant with the Act. Otherwise ORSNZ will cease to be a Society.

In its meeting on 24/2/2026, ORSNZ Council voted to recommend adoption of a new proposed constitution to our members. This new proposed constitution is available here for your review.
Update 2/3/2026: Please note that, based on review feedback some small changes were made to the proposed constitution as tracked and highlighted in yellow (mainly numbering and bullet points; definition of members in 2.2 and follow-up changes in 2.5, 2.6; addition of 6.6).

ORSNZ can only adopt a new constitution in a Special General Meeting attended by a sufficient number of its current Members.

We therefore call a Special General Meeting to be held on Wednesday 11 March 2026 at 12pm (noon) remotely on Teams.

Please join us for this meeting at the provided link. When joining the meeting, please ensure your display name matches the name you would have registered your membership to ORSNZ with.

We ask as many ORSNZ members as possible to join this meeting as we will need to vote to adopt the proposed new ORSNZ constitution. We have to ensure the meeting meets quorum and therefore I ask that you attend the meeting if at all possible.

I expect the meeting to be short, unless there are any major concerns with the proposed constitution. If you have any concerns, can you please share those with me in advance.

Regards,
Andrea Raith (ORSNZ President) on behalf of ORSNZ Council

ORSNZ AGM 2025 and Agenda

The 2025 ORSNZ Annual General Meeting will be held at the upcoming 57th ORSNZ Conference on Friday 21 November starting at 1pm.

The preliminary agenda for the meeting is:

Apologies (to [email protected]);
Minutes of the previous AGM (here);
Matters arising from the minutes;
President’s report (here);
Honorary Treasurer’s report and financial statements (here);
Updates from regional and special interest groups (please send agenda items to [email protected]);
Updates regarding the ORSNZ status as an Incorporated Society under the new Incorporated Societies Act 2022;
Future Conferences;
If time permits: Communications, Social Media and Website redevelopment;
Election of officers and auditor;
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.

Please note that conference registrations close today (10/11/2025) – please get in touch with me if you would like to register after this date.

Andrea Raith
ORSNZ President

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

Job Opportunity – Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Operations and Supply Chain Management at the University of Auckland

Kia ora koutou,

Please see link below for a call for applicants for three Lecturer/Senior Lecturer positions in Operations and Supply Chain Management in the Department of Information Systems and Operations Management at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Link – https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/TheUniversityOfAuckland/744000063647030-lecturer-senior-lecturer-in-operations-and-supply-chain-management

Applications must be submitted online, by the closing date of 27 June 2025 to be considered.

Noho ora mai, Sarah (ORSNZ Vice 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:

Apologies (to [email protected]);
Minutes of the previous AGM;
Matters arising from the minutes;
President’s report;
Honorary Treasurer’s report and financial statements;
Updates from regional and special interest groups;
Future Conferences;
Website redevelopment;
Election of officers and auditor;
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).

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.