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The ORSNZ Annual Conference will be held Thursday, 19/11/2026 and Friday, 20/11/2026 at the University of Auckland.

You can find all the details on the conference webpage.

Thanks to some very generous sponsorship the registration fees are low this year, so hopefully many of you can join us. Early bird registration is available until October 31st. There may be travel support for students out of Auckland. Please get in touch by emailing [email protected] to find out more.

There are two prizes available: the ORSNZ Young Practitioners’ Prize (YPP) and the John A. George Memorial Prize (JAG). This year, there will be two YPP prize categories: paper and presentation. Further details can be found on the conference website.

On Thursday 19 November, we are co-locating with the Gurobi Optimisation Community Event. The final session of the day will be a set of talks by Gurobi and their customers, and we will have a joint networking dinner. Further details about this event will be released over the coming weeks.

We look forward to many interesting talks and discussions. The abstract submission form is linked here. Abstract submissions close on October 17.

See you all in Auckland,

Oscar Dowson, Lisa Hillas, Rebecca Peer, and Andrea Raith.

Where I am now
I am currently working as a Senior Optimisation Engineer at Beca, where I apply data-driven analysis to a diverse range of operational and strategic problems. My work spans optimising production schedules for manufacturing clients such as bottling companies, evaluating trade-offs in flavour changeovers and cleaning schedules, and determining optimal warehouse sizing and inventory policies under uncertainty. Across these projects, I use optimisation and modelling techniques to support decision-making, balancing cost, efficiency, and risk in complex, real-world systems.

Where I was 
Previously, I was a climate change consultant and recently completed a Masters focused on a bi-objective optimisation model that reduces both cost and emissions in meal planning. I developed an end-to-end pipeline that transforms recipes, emissions data, and supermarket prices into Pareto-optimal meal plans, achieving up to 62% cost and 68% emissions reductions. The work also highlighted key structural insights, including the high emissions intensity of protein constraints and efficiency limits in ingredient-sharing across recipes, demonstrating practical pathways for more sustainable and affordable food systems.

Link to my Masters thesis https://hdl.handle.net/2292/76046

Screenshot that follows shows results from the proof of concept developed as part of my Masters thesis

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)

Call for Abstracts in the Special Session “Optimisation”

Dear friends and colleagues,

The Joint Meeting of the New Zealand, Australian and American Mathematical Societies will take place from the 9th to the 13th of December 2024 at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. A website for the conference is available at:

Home

It is our great pleasure to invite you to participate in the special session “Optimisation” and hope that you will agree to present a 25-minute talk.

This special session will focus on new mathematical and computational developments and their applications in all areas of continuous and discrete optimisation. Submissions related to applications of optimisation in data science, as well as data science applications in optimisation, are also welcome. We are delighted to have Defeng Sun (Hong Kong Polytechnic University) and Christiane Tammer (Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg) as our keynote speakers.

As the session will have a maximum of 25 speakers, please let us know your interest to present by October 18, 2024.

We welcome participation of Early Career Researchers and doctoral students in our special session. Speakers can submit abstracts for each session, and also register for the conference, through the registration link:

Registration

Please be advised that the cheaper Early Bird fees close on October 25, 2024.

We look forward to meeting you at the conference.

Best wishes,

Minh Dao, RMIT University

James Foster, CSIRO

Andrea Raith, University of Auckland

Matthew Tam, University of Melbourne

Golbon Zakeri, University of Massachusetts Amherst

(Session Organisers)

Fully funded PhD studentships at the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Statistics and Operational Research in Partnership with Industry (STOR-i), Lancaster University

Have you just finished your degree, or are coming to the end of your masters?

Would you like to solve real-life problems using statistics and operational research to have positive impact on business, the economy or society? Then why not consider applying to the STOR-i Centre for Doctoral Training to start in October 2024?

Joining STOR-i will enable you to:

– Make significant scientific and industrial impact with your research

STOR-i has an internationally leading reputation, training skilled graduates through research projects that use industrial challenges as the catalyst for methodological advance.

– Work directly with leading industry partners

Many of our PhD projects are developed and involve collaboration with our industrial partners. Projects provide a unique research and training experience and an exciting opportunity for you to develop mathematical innovation inspired by contemporary real-world challenges. Partners include BT, Morgan Stanley and Tesco.

– Engage with our network of charitable partners

Students have the opportunity to engage with our charitable partners, British Red Cross, Cancer Research UK, Fareshare, Home Start UK and Nesta. Mechanisms include extended data dives, charity focussed career talks and collaborative research opportunities.

– Be mentored by internationally recognised research leaders

Our cohort-based, 4-year scheme offers a distinctive PhD training experience. During this structured PhD programme, you will complete several modules to develop your research skills and will be mentored by internationally recognised academics. We also have successful collaborative partnerships with leading international universities.

– Be part of an exciting community of like-minded peers

The programme builds on our experience of training over 100 PhD students in partnership with industry since 2010.  Graduates from STOR-i have embarked on exciting careers in academia and industry, working with numerous partner companies and other organisations including British Airways, EDF Energy and the Williams Formula 1 Team.

Applications open for October 2024

We have funding available for UK eligible (including Republic of Ireland) applicants. Studentships include a generous tax-free stipend (£21,237 in year 1), fees and an allowance to support training and research related activities. Stipends increase up to £24,237 per year on successful progression to PhD at the end of the first year of the programme for students undertaking industry-funded PhD projects.

Please visit our website to find out more: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/stor-i/apply/. Dr. Anna-Lena Sachs | Senior Lecturer in Predictive Analytics
Lancaster University Management School
Contact me on Teams
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/people-profiles/anna-lena-sachs

At 2 pm on Wednesday 27^th of March there will be a seminar from visiting academic Prof. Michael C. Ferris from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The seminar will be held in 439-G10 (70 Symonds St) and followed by refreshments in the Level 2 common room.

Speaker: Michael C. Ferris, Jacques-Louis Lions Professor of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Title:  Modeling for design and impact

Time: 2 pm, Wednesday 27^th of March

Location: 439-G10

Abstract:

Many of us build (computer/mathematical) models that capture physics, dynamics, stochastics, discrete choices, and to some extent behavior: collaboration, competition. Such models can be complex and difficult to explain, often ignored by decision makers, yet their solution can lead to fundamentally new insights.

How can we use models in practice to determine good actions/designs?

What needs to change in the model (and its complexity), and what skills does a user need to acquire?

We will centre this discussion using data science, energy planning, and dairy decision making examples.

About Michael:

Michael Ferris is John P. Morgridge Chair in Computer Sciences & Jacques-Louis Lions Professor of Computer Sciences, and (by courtesy) Mathematics and Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

As Director of Hub Central in the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, he leads the 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. 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 INFORMS Journal on Computing and Optimization Methods and Software.

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.

Registration for the ORSNZ 2023 Annual Conference is still open, you can register here.

The full conference programme is now on the conference website and is also available as a pdf here.

Gurobi is hosting an Optimization Community Event in Auckland on Thursday the 23rd of November from 3-6pm at the Sofitel Auckland Viaduct Harbour.

You can register for the event at the link below. Please note that if you are attending the ORSNZ conference you need to register separately for this event. In addition you do not need to attend the ORSNZ conference to attend the Gurobi event.

https://www.gurobi.com/events/optimization-community-auckland-23112023/