Conference – Operations Research Society of New Zealand

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).

ORSNZ 2023 Annual Conference – Abstract Deadline Extended

The deadline for you to submit an abstract for the ORSNZ 2023 Annual Conference (23-24 November 2023) has been extended until Friday 10 November 2023. For those eligible for the Young Practitioners’ Prize (YPP), you also need to submit a short paper (at most 12 pages) by Monday 13 November 2023.

You also need to register. Registrations are being managed via Eventbrite. Note that there is Student Financial Assistance available.

Please let Mike know if you have any issues: president AT THE orsnz.org.nz.

Ngā mihi nui, Tom & Mike (Conference Organisers)

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.

Deadlines extended for ORSNZ conference

The deadlines have been extended for the upcoming ORSNZ conference, with abstracts and early-bird registration now due by Monday 7 November.

Monday 28 November will have a cluster of healthcare-related talks, including a plenary address by:

Dr. Melanie Reuter Oppermann, Technical University of Darmstadt.

There will also be a panel discussion to conclude the cluster.

The Energy and Natural Resources SIG will host a cluster of presentations on hydrogen and other technologies that will enable increased renewable energy production. This will also have an associated plenary address on hydrogen integration, and close with a panel discussion.

ORSNZ Conference 2022

This is a reminder that the ORSNZ conference 2022 is being held at the University of Auckland on the 28th and 29th of November, and the deadline for abstracts (October 24) is fast approaching.

In addition to the standard sessions, the conference will have two clusters of talks run by our interest groups:
– OSHA will run a cluster on health modelling.
– ENR will run a cluster on the integration of hydrogen into energy systems.

Both of these clusters will have a keynote presentation and panel discussion.

If you wish to present within one of these clusters, indicate this at the end of your abstract submission.

Note the deadline for early-bird registrations is Monday, October 31.

Call for Abstracts: ORSNZ Conference 2022

ORSNZ is holding its usually-annual conference for 2022 at the University of Auckland on the 28th and 29th of November 2022.

More details about this conference will be made available at the beginning of September. However, the conference website is online, and registrations and abstract submissions are now open.

We welcome presentations on any aspect of operations research, analytics, management science or data science, especially practical applications. We are planning to run specific sessions on digital twin systems, energy & emissions policy as well as healthcare modelling.

If you wish to be a session chair and can organise 4 presentations along a common theme, please email [email protected], and we can ensure the presentations are scheduled appropriately.