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40 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 ...
Andrea Rendl-Pitrey's user avatar
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 ...
Ehsan's user avatar
  • 2,418
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 ...
TheSimpliFire's user avatar
  • 5,312
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 ...
Antarctica's user avatar
  • 2,887
25 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 ...
prubin's user avatar
  • 36.4k
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 ...
Michael Lindahl's user avatar
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 ...
Kevin Dalmeijer's user avatar
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 ...
Richard's user avatar
  • 3,429
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 ...
YukiJ's user avatar
  • 1,983
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 ...
Geoffrey De Smet's user avatar
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 ...
prubin's user avatar
  • 36.4k
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 ...
prubin's user avatar
  • 36.4k
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 ...
Jeff Linderoth's user avatar
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, ...
Nikos Kazazakis's user avatar
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
Amal de Silva's user avatar
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.
Michael Feldmeier's user avatar
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.).
LarrySnyder610's user avatar
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: ...
EhsanK's user avatar
  • 5,796
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 $...
LarrySnyder610's user avatar
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 ...
baudolino's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Ehsan's user avatar
  • 2,418
15 votes

Are there any OR challenges that are similar to Kaggle's competitions?

And we also have the DIMACS implementation challenges #ofcourse
Matteo Fischetti's user avatar
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 ...
Rob's user avatar
  • 2,078
14 votes

Are there any OR challenges that are similar to Kaggle's competitions?

For constraint programming, there's the Minizinc Challenge.
Geoffrey Brent's user avatar
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.
Alberto Franzin's user avatar
14 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 ...
Geoffrey Brent's user avatar
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 ...
mtanneau's user avatar
  • 3,998
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 ...
Robert Schwarz's user avatar
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.
Robert Schwarz's user avatar
13 votes

Are there any OR challenges that are similar to Kaggle's competitions?

Here is a link to INFORMS OR and analytics students team competition. You can also find the challenges for previous years and the presentations of the winner team. I believe you need to be registered ...
Oguz Toragay's user avatar
  • 8,483

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