Case Studies and Real Problems for Teaching Optimization and Modelling

Question

It is that dreadful time of the year when I am prepping classes and over the last few terms I came to the realization that I need to significantly beef up the practice-oriented content of my lectures. Consequently, I have started looking for case studies / problems with (ideally sufficiently large) data that can be modeled, solved and interpreted by the students.

I am aware of synthetic test instances for Knapsack / TSP but I fear that they are a little too abstract for regular business students. Therefore, I would highly appreciate combinations of paper and data (e.g., https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs40685-014-0008-6.pdf, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxuwSmNrxiTySWxJV3pQZ2I1YTg/edit) or free case studies (again ideally with data).

I have no requirements concerning the problem types - so anything that leverages OR tools and methods and can be replicated would work nicely. Ideally, the problem types should be close to what a student can handle equipped with a MIP solver plus general data preparation skills.

Answer 1

I think for business students looking at papers (for example from Interfaces) might be asking too much.

If this is about getting business students to use OR tools, specifically MIP solvers, I would recommend the book "Model Building in Mathematical Programming" by H. Paul Williams. It mostly consists of case studies from various fields and is easy enough to understand.

There is also a free PDF that has the data and code for the SAS OPTMODEL modeling language (called the Mathematical Programming Examples Book):

https://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/or/151/ormpex.pdf

Other MIP solver vendors have similar collections of example problems that might be worthwhile looking into.

Answer 2

The INFORMS Transactions on Education is devoted to works about education in OR. There you can find many cases already used by teachers in their courses, along with material for instructors.

Answer 3

There are lots of resources that contain optimization models and whose codes. Some of them are as follows:

1) Supply chain:

• Operations and supply management: The core
• A deep dive into strategic network design

2) Scheduling and manufacturing:

• Introduction to Computational Optimization Models for Production Planning in a Supply Chain
• Scheduling in Supply Chains Using Mixed Integer Programming
• Operations Scheduling
• The shift scheduling problem using a branch-and-price approach
• Introduction to CP Optimizer for Scheduling
• Comparison of MIP, CP and Hybrid Approaches

3) Facility location and VRP:

• Facility Location Concepts, Models, Algorithms and Case Studies
• Facilities design

4) Softwares (CPLEX, GAMS, MIPCL)

• GAMS Modelling
• CPLEX Examples
• MIPCL

5) Some websites and blogs that contain so nice examples, codes and tricks

• OR in an OB World by @prubin
• Yet Another Math Programming Consultant by Erwin Kalvelagen
• Amsterdam optimization
• Bruce A. McCarl
• Location-routing problem with simultaneous pickup and delivery
• Two-stage DEA with Fuzzy Data

6) Some excel-based modelling

• Implementation of the VRP problem
• Excel Models for Business and Operations Management
• ORMM Excel

Indeed, there are many other related resources. I hope they would be helpful to you.

Answer 4

The Concorde TSP solver comes with a nice GUI which visualizes the optimal TSP tour. Moreover, it also has several TSP-heuristics such as Greedy, Nearest Neighbor or Random-generation implemented. This makes it easy to visually compare heuristics and optimal solutions. According to their website the solver "has been used to obtain the optimal solutions to the full set of 110 TSPLIB instances, the largest having 85,900 cities."