41
votes
Accepted
What are the reasons OR industry projects fail?
In addition to what others have shared, in my experience, the following can cause industry OR projects to fail or can at least cause big issues and/or delays:
1) Quickly changing problem ...
29
votes
Recommended books/materials for practical applications of Operations Research in industry
Not solely dedicated to transportation, but Model Building in Mathematical Programming by Williams is a very good start for every beginner in modeling as it contains the theories on mathematical ...
- 2,438
28
votes
Are there any OR challenges that are similar to Kaggle's competitions?
The Helmut Schmidt Universitat contains a list of past, ongoing, and future contests in Operations Research.
https://www.hsu-hh.de/logistik/research/challenges
For example:
Active challenges: ITC ...
- 5,341
28
votes
Are programming languages necessary/useful for operations research practitioner?
To go beyond prototyping a model, you will need a programming language.
Here is a non-exhaustive list :
Sometimes simply modeling and calling the solver won't suffice to handle complex problems. To ...
- 2,907
26
votes
What are the reasons OR industry projects fail?
I can immediately think of two reasons, both of which occurred on a consulting project in which I participated.
Every project needs one or more "champions", people in the client organization with a ...
- 37.8k
23
votes
How to innovate in OR
Operations Research is still way underutilized in many industries. Even when there exist commercial tools you often find that few organizations have them, and out of the ones that have them, it might ...
- 1,639
20
votes
Are there any OR challenges that are similar to Kaggle's competitions?
I personally like Project Euler. This website has mathematical problems that usually require programming to solve them. If you solve a problem you get access to the corresponding problem forum, in ...
- 6,063
19
votes
Are programming languages necessary/useful for operations research practitioner?
In my opinion, programming languages are necessary as an OR practitioner. There are a number of reasons for this:
Data Input/Output often requires some programming language. Whether it’s reading in ...
- 3,459
18
votes
Accepted
Applications of pure mathematics in operations research
In the following paper Grothendieck inequalities are applied to OR (Grothendieck was one (if not THE) pioneer of algebraic geometry.)
Briët, Jop, and Frank Vallentin. "Grothendieck inequalities for ...
- 2,013
18
votes
How to innovate in OR
Over a decade ago, I also had the feeling that pretty much everything is already done.
Today, dealing with OR problems every day, I see more opportunities that can fit in a lifetime - or even our ...
- 4,707
18
votes
How to innovate in OR
Many times the problems people have are similar to, but not identical to, problems that have been solved. So previously employed techniques may still work, but either the model or the solution method ...
- 37.8k
18
votes
What are the most-used technical skills in OR?
Your examples of "technical skills" are centered on optimization. An understanding of at least some aspects of probability models (especially Markov chains and queues) may be important, depending on ...
- 37.8k
17
votes
Recommended books/materials for practical applications of Operations Research in industry
Surprised that no one has yet mentioned
"Applications of optimization with Xpress-mp".
Of course it is focused on their Mosel language, but it contains many good applications.
Also, a free PDF is ...
- 1,024
17
votes
What are Operations Research applications for 'good causes'?
A great cause would be supply chain in countries/regions with poor infrastructure and/or uncertain supply and high price fluctuations.
This is particularly important in many developing countries, ...
- 11.9k
16
votes
Are there any OR challenges that are similar to Kaggle's competitions?
The French OR society has some interesting OR challenges
http://www.roadef.org/challenge/2018/en/index.php
- 161
16
votes
Are there any OR challenges that are similar to Kaggle's competitions?
Google Hashcode had some optimization challenges in the past. Problem definitions and data from previous years can be found here.
- 2,856
15
votes
Recommended books/materials for practical applications of Operations Research in industry
Joe Geunes's book Operations Planning does a nice job of teaching MIP modeling in an operations context (production, distribution, facility location, etc.).
- 13.1k
15
votes
Recommended books/materials for practical applications of Operations Research in industry
Since the OP asked for Transportation domain, I recommend the following:
Vehicle Routing: Problems, Methods, and Applications by Toth & Vigo: here
In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: ...
- 5,864
15
votes
Application of complex numbers in Linear Programming?
Complex numbers are commonly used in power systems optimization problems, in particular, AC optimal power flow (OPF) problems. We have constraints of the form
$$p_{ij} + iq_{ij} = f(v_i,v_j),$$
where $...
- 13.1k
15
votes
Applications of pure mathematics in operations research
There's a pretty active research area on incorporating group theory into integer programming (since symmetry can cause a lot of headaches during branch-and-bound). See The Group-Theoretic Approach in ...
- 739
15
votes
Are there any OR challenges that are similar to Kaggle's competitions?
There is a competition section held during MOPTA (Modeling and Optimization: Theory and Applications), which is organized annually by Lehigh University. The competition is for students only and ...
- 2,438
15
votes
Are there any OR challenges that are similar to Kaggle's competitions?
And we also have the DIMACS implementation challenges #ofcourse
- 1,656
15
votes
What are the reasons OR industry projects fail?
Last year I attended a presentation by Maria Antónia Carravilla where she gave several case studies of optimisation projects, examining the factors affecting their success or failure.
Her main point ...
14
votes
Usages of logarithmic mean in optimization
But I wonder if anyone else has come across the logarithmic mean elsewhere in optimization?
Optimization is simply the selection of a best element (with regard to some criterion) from some set of ...
- 2,098
14
votes
Are there any OR challenges that are similar to Kaggle's competitions?
For constraint programming, there's the Minizinc Challenge.
14
votes
Case Studies and Real Problems for Teaching Optimization and Modelling
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.
- 1,058
14
votes
What are the reasons OR industry projects fail?
Adding to the other good answers here...
Failing to employ an iterative process
The idea that a few meetings to communicate and understand the problem, scope the OR solution, desired outputs, etc., ...
- 1,885
14
votes
How to read open-source code of a solver (Or-tools, OptaPlanner, Minotaur, etc.)?
I read through the code of several solvers before developing Tulip.jl.
To be honest, unless you are yourself developing a solver/interface, or need to reproduce an author's implementation, there is ...
- 4,068
13
votes
Application of complex numbers in Linear Programming?
Not quite Linear Programming, but if you are willing to generalize to Convex Programming, I have stumbled over some modeling systems (for disciplined convex programming) that support optimization with ...
- 2,316
13
votes
Recommended books/materials for practical applications of Operations Research in industry
The AIMMS Optimization Modeling book is freely available and very accessible. There are lots of worked examples going from problem description to example data and model formulation.
- 2,316
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible