Category: News

Meet the ORSNZ 2023 Council members

Kia ora koutou.

Our new Communications member of Council, Karl Zhu, has been gathering some brief profiles of your Council members. Here are the first eight:

Mike O’Sullivan – President: Dr Mike O’Sullivan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Science and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Auckland. His main research interests are the application of Operations Research to complex systems, in particular the formulation of optimisation and simulation models and the development of advanced techniques for solving these models. His research portfolio includes: improving health delivery services; modelling to inform government policy; building intelligent (computing and storage) clouds; conceptual modelling for simulation; developing innovative optimisation software; and simulating construction projects. He co-founded the Operations Research Union Analytics (ORUA) research group. He works with industrial partners and have either collaborated with and/or consulted for: The Ministry of Health, NZ; The Ministry of Social Development, NZ; Auckland, Waitemata, Counties Manukau, Waikato and Mid-Central District Health Boards, NZ; Steel and Tube, NZ; Hewlett Packard Labs, Palo Alto, USA; ICS Consulting, UK; M & G Investments, London, UK; Intergen, NZ; OneNet, NZ; The Ministry of Education, NZ; and Hose Manufacturers Ltd, NZ. He is also a leader in the research sector as the Deputy Director of Te Pūnaha Matatini, the President of the Operations Research Society of New Zealand and the project lead for the Pandemic Resilience project within the Global Partnership for Artificial Intelligence.

Andrea Raith – Vice President: Dr Andrea Raith is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Engineering Science and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Auckland, which she joined in 2010. Her research areas include algorithms for biobjective and multiobjective optimisation problems, problem decomposition, and network optimisation. Andrea is particularly interested in applying Operations Research and multicriteria decision making in the context of transport modelling and optimisation, sustainable transport, airline optimisation, as well as applications in healthcare such as radiotherapy treatment planning. Andrea is a member of INFORMS, GOR, and the International Society on Multi-criteria Decision Making, and Vice-President of ORSNZ.

Tony Downward – Secretary: Dr Tony Downward is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Engineering Science and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Auckland, and also a member of the He is a member of the Electric Power Optimization Centre. His main research interests are electricity market modelling, stochastic optimization, decomposition methods and decision support systems.

Andy Philpott – APORS/IFORS Representative: Andy Philpott is Professor of Operations Research in the Department of Engineering Science, and Director of the Electric Power Optimization Centre (EPOC) at the University of Auckland. His research interests are in stochastic optimization and game theory and its application in electricity systems.  He is a past president of ORSNZ, and was awarded the Hans Daellenbach Award from ORSNZ in 2006. His other awards include Edelman laureate in 2009, INFORMS Fellow in 2017, and Simons Fellow in 2019. He has given plenary and keynote addresses to major international conferences including ICSP 2001, ICCOPT 2007, ICSP 2010, SIOPT 2014, CMS 2018, ISMP 2018, and the IFORS Distinguished Lecture in 2019. He was on the editorial board of Mathematical Programming from 2004-2017, and has been an Associate Editor of Operations Research since 2007.

Andrew Mason – Council: Andrew Mason is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Science, University of Auckland. Andrew has a BE with Honours from the University of Auckland and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. His research has a strong practical focus which includes developing and maintaining OpenSolver (http://opensolver.org) and SolverStudio (http://solverstudio.org), two packages that allow complex optimisation models to be built and solved within Excel. Andrew has held multiple roles in the ORSNZ, including Treasurer, Webmaster, Vice President and President. He co-founded The Optima Corporation which delivers ambulance simulation software to clients around the world. He is actively involved in the NZ Data Science + Analytics Forum (http://analytics.org.nz), and has acted as a consultant for organisations such as Stats NZ, Ecrotek, Scarlatti and NZ Customs. Andrew was awarded the ORSNZ Hans Daellenbach Prize in 2022.

Sarah Marshall – Council: Dr Sarah Marshall is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Auckland University of Technology (AUT). Sarah joined AUT in February 2014. Sarah completed her undergraduate studies in Economics, Psychology and Operations Research at Victoria University of Wellington. After graduating, she worked in the Australian stockbroking industry before returning to New Zealand to complete a Master of Science in Statistics and Operations Research at Victoria University of Wellington. Sarah completed her PhD in Management Science on the application of deterministic and stochastic models to product recovery systems at the University of Edinburgh in 2012. Her current research focuses on the use of geometric-like processes to warranty claims for repairable systems.

Karl Zhu – Council (Communications): Karl Zhu is a PhD student in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Auckland. Karl completed his Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) degree in Engineering Science from the same university in 2021. His PhD project is currently focusing on solving a large collective entity resolution problem with machine learning and optimisation models.

Paul Rouse – Auckland Region Contact: Dr Paul Rouse is a Professor of Management Accounting at The University of Auckland. His research areas include performance and productivity measurement (with a focus on Data Envelopment Analysis), revenue and cost management, cost-benefit and evaluation methods. Application areas include health, banking, and highway and aircraft maintenance. He is a member of CAANZ and the Operations Research Society of New Zealand.

Grant Read – Christchurch Region Contact: Dr Grant Read is a former ORSNZ president and Daellenbach award recipient, who has been closely involved with the electricity sector for over 40 years, both as a researcher and a consultant. He developed the operational and planning models used by both the Ministry of Energy and ECNZ, and was responsible for electricity sector planning in the Ministry’s Planning Division. He then joined the Operations Research/Management Science Department at Canterbury University. There, he founded the Energy Modelling Research Group, focused on the theory and practice of optimisation-based electricity markets, and played a major role in designing electricity and gas markets for several countries, introducing innovations that have since been widely adopted. For the last 20 years he has been a semi-retired Adjunct Professor with broader interests, including the application of similar concepts to improve management of water, and water related environmental impacts.

Noho ora mai, Mike (ORSNZ President)

Deadline approaching for abstract submissions for ORSNZ Conference

The final deadline for abstracts for the upcoming ORSNZ conference is Monday 7 November. We welcome presentations on any aspect of operations research, analytics or management science, especially practical applications.

You can find the details about how to submit, here.

Note that we have prizes for students, including prizes for papers and presentations. You can find the eligibility criteria and submission details, here.

This year the YPP will be jointly sponsored by Optimity and Supply Chain Company.

ORSNZ Conference 2019 Recap & Prize Winners

This year’s ORSNZ conference was the first time we haven’t partnered with NZSA since 2012. Across the two days we had 56 people who attended, and 28 presentations. You can see the abstracts for all the presentations here.

There was also an Analytics Forum event on Well-being Analytics aligned with the first-day on the conference, attended by about 150 people.

The OSHA and ENR SIGs each hosted sessions at the conference, which helped to attract people from industry to a day or session of the conference.

YPP Prize Winners

Sponsored by Suez Smart Solutions

Best Paper: Comparison of objective functions for scheduling surgeries. Thomas Adams, Michael O’Sullivan & Cameron Walker. Engineering Science, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Best Presentation: Universal locker systems for urban metros. Parameshwaran Iyer, Ronald Veldman & Yao Zhang.

Highly Commended: The optimisation of milk collection. Snigdha Saha & Olivier Graffeuille.

JAG Prize Winners

Sponsored by Optimity

Winner: Developing a decision making tool for Housing New Zealand. Hrishi Kodthuguli, Michael O’Sullivan & Cameron Walker.

Highly Commended: Who will be covered and who will be left behind? Advising the Norwegian Air Ambulance Foundation on fairness. Maaike Vollebergh, Caroline Jagtenberg & Jo Røislien.

In Memoriam: Shabbir Ahmed

ORSNZ is saddened to share that Shabbir Ahmed,  Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor of the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, passed away on June 19th, 2019.

A tribute by Alejandro Toriello has been published on the INFORMS Open Forum

Reflections from ORSNZ Members

I had the pleasure of visiting Shabbir at Georgia tech during a visit in the course of my PhD. Shabbir was very unassuming. He was easy to talk to about topics within our research, and also outside of research including his hobby of music. From just a short visit and several email exchanges, it was rather surprising to me to learn that someone with Shabbir’s standing could be so honest, approachable and easy-going. Our community has lost a great researcher but also a passionate teacher and mentor.
Regan Baucke

I was very sad to hear that Shabbir Ahmed died on June 19 after battling cancer for the past 10 months. Shabbir was not only a brilliant researcher but a colleague and good friend. He was the external examiner to our Engineering Science PhD student Oscar Dowson last year, and I examined Jikai Zou, one of his recent PhD students. I met Shabbir in 2004 and had stayed in touch with him through our work together in the Committee on Stochastic Programming (COSP). Shabbir was an active participant in this committee, writing a tutorial for the website on stochastic integer programming, and also designing and drawing COSP’s logo (see the home page of https://stoprog.org/).  It was quite clear from early on that Shabbir was going to be a star in the mathematical programming community. Last year he won the INFORMS Optimization Society Farkas Prize, awarded each year to the world’s top mid-career optimization researcher. It seemed as if this was another milestone on a career that would continue to reach even greater heights. Alas that was not to be. We received some heartening news in February that his cancer was responding to treatment, but then the shocking news in June that he had died. He will be missed by many.
Andy Philpott     

                    

PhD scholarship at UNSW

As part of strategic investments to tackle global grand challenges, a new PhD Scholarship opportunity at UNSW Sydney focuses on identifying transformative policies to improve societal well-being. A central component of this complex systems research project involves building a systems model of the evolution of social, economic and environmental capital stocks in response to business and public policies (e.g. land development, population growth, infrastructure spending, science and technology investment). 

The scholarship includes a stipend of $41,200 per year for 4 years, up to $10,000 per year to support the successful candidate’s career development, and covers all tuition fees. The supervisory team includes faculty members from both the social sciences and natural sciences.

Interested candidates should complete an expression of interest by July 12, 2019 using this link: http://bit.ly/ScientiaEOI

For a one-page overview of the research project click this link: http://bit.ly/UNSWSydneyPhD

ORSNZ Conference 2019 Survey

We hope you have all had a good break over the summer. As you know, the work never stops at ORSNZ, so we’ve been eagerly planning the 2019 ORSNZ Conference.

This year, NZSA will be holding their conference in Dunedin, which is not a particularly strong location for ORSNZ. For this reason, we wish to get some (non-binding) feedback from our members on where we should hold the conference.

The duration and fee structure of the conference will be tied to NZSA if we run the conference in Dunedin, so it would be at least 3 days.  If we run the conference separately, we anticipate that it will be 2 days, and we will have more control of the schedule. (We will endeavour to keep fees as low as possible.)

Note that the analytics forum will be running an event with NZSA in Dunedin, so will likely not run an event with ORSNZ, if we elect to run a separate conference.

Please complete the brief survey here; if you have any additional comments about the location / structure of ORSNZ conferences, please comment on this post.

Thanks.

Shane Henderson wins INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize

I am very pleased to announce that Auckland University graduate and ORSNZ member, Prof Shane Henderson, has been awarded the INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize  for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations Research. Shane and colleagues at Cornell, Uber and Lyft were awarded this prize for  their application of analytics and O.R. to improve the placement of bike docking stations and create an inventive approach to replenish and rebalance these docking stations. Read more….

Hans Daellenbach Prize Event for Prof Vicky Mabin

By Mike O’Sullivan, ORSNZ President:

It was my pleasure to fly to Wellington to present Prof Vicky Mabin with her Hans Daellenbach Prize. A/Prof Bob Cavana organised an excellent event at which Vicky’s colleagues and students, alongside the Victoria University of Wellington Provost Professor Wendy Larner and local ORSNZ members, honoured Vicky’s distinguished and pioneering career. Special thanks to Bob, Tony Downward (who was responsible for the framed prize in the photos), Andrea Raith, Rosie Read (the ORSNZ Wellington Region contact) and other members of the prize panel (Grant Read and Golbon Zakeri).

My initial impression of Vicky was of a (slightly intimidating) leader of OR in New Zealand. Any discussion of OR in New Zealand at Auckland would inevitably end with “we should talk to Grant (Read at Canterbury), Vicky (at VUW), and Les (Foulds at Waikato)”. I was fortunate at the ORSNZ conference in Christchurch in 2015 to get stuck looking for a taxi with Vicky and Sarah Marshall. In the ensuing conversation I got to know Vicky a little and gained an increased understanding and appreciation of her work. Since then I have enjoyed our discussions on OR and the Theory of Constraints and my experience in OR consultancy over the past 5+ years has convinced me that Vicky’s “soft OR” has a vital part to play if we, as OR practitioners, are successful in embedding best-practice decision making in organisations throughout NZ and worldwide.

Vicky’s colleagues and students were generous in their praise and admiration of Vicky, who responded with an engaging, illuminating acceptance speech (that only increased my interest in collecting stories about the history of the ORSNZ!). Congratulations and well done Prof Vicky Mabin, Hans Daellenbach Prize recipient for 2017!

The full citation for Vicky’s prize is here: http://orsnz.org.nz/Prizes/VickyMabin2017/Prof%20Vicky%20Mabin%20-%20Citation%20for%20Hans%20Daellenbach%20Award.pdf

The Victoria University of Wellington article on the event is here: https://www.victoria.ac.nz/vbs/about/news/1715544-professor-vicky-mabin-receives-orsnz-hans-daellenbach-prize