Key speakers

Prof. Antonio Martinez-Sykora

University of Southampton

Short bio

Antonio Martinez-Sykora, current director of CORMSIS (Centre of Operations Research, Management Science and Information Systems), is an Associate Professor in Business Analytics. He finished his PhD in June 2013 at the University of Valencia (Spain) and joined the Southampton Business School in September 2013 as a research assistant. In 2007, he received his BSc in Mathematics and BSc in Statistics and in 2009 he received the M.A.S in Operations Research.
His research focuses in a wide range of combinatorial optimisation problems, especially on cutting and packing problems and logistic planning problems such as vehicle routing, scheduling, cutting and packing and revenue management. He is a coordinator of the Euro Working Group on Cutting and Packing (ESICUP) and he has participated in various externally funded projects.

Plenary talk: Irregular Packing (Cutting) Problems: Models, Algorithms and Challenges

Cutting and Packing problems with irregular shapes or objects (2D or 3D) is an area that has been developed at a slower pace than other packing areas in the last 20 years, such as packing boxes within a container (container loading problem). Problems with irregular shapes generally have an extra layer of difficulty on top of the combinatorial optimisation problem, derived on how the shapes are modelled and, more generally, how the actual layout/solution is represented. The computational challenges and the complex geometry of the shapes/objects have split researchers in three main areas to address these problems: (1) polygonal/triangular mesh approximation, (2) pixel/raster/voxel-based approximations or (3) phi-objects/parametric functions.
During this talk we will discuss the relevance and the importance of solving these problems efficiently and the state of the art of 2D irregular (strip) packing problems using the polygon representation. Then, some new advances on 3D irregular (strip) packing problems using the voxel-based solution representation. Also we will discuss some future directions and challenges. I hope, the talk will enthuse researchers to engage with irregular packing problems and its challenges.

Prof. Michael Schneider

RWTH Aachen University

Short bio

Michael studied business administration and computer science at the University of Mannheim and received his doctoral degree from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern in 2012. From 2013 to 2016, he worked as assistant professor in Logistics Planning and Information Systems at TU Darmstadt. Since June 2016, Michael is a full professor at RWTH Aachen University and holder of the Deutsche Post Chair – Optimization of Distribution Networks (DPO).
Michael's research concentrates on the development of heuristic and sometimes exact methods for logistics optimization problems, especially in the fields of transportation, location planning, warehouse management, and vertical farming. He has published several articles on these topics in renowned international journals such as Operations Research, Transportation Science, INFORMS Journal on Computing, and European Journal of Operational Research. Michael is a board member of VeRoLog (EURO working group on Vehicle Routing and Logistics Optimization) and founder of the Global Challenges Lab at RTWH Aachen University.

Plenary talk: Location routing problems: state-of-the-art heuristics and recent developments

The capacitated LRP (CLRP) jointly takes decisions on the location of capacitated depots and the routing of capacitated vehicles to serve a set of customers with known demands from the opened depots. A large number of heuristic approaches has been proposed for the CLRP, often decomposing the problem into a location stage to determine a promising depot configuration and a routing stage, where a vehicle routing problem is solved to assess the quality of the previously determined depot configuration.
In this talk, we give an overview of the current state-of-the-art heuristics for the CLRP, and we try to shed some light on the question which components are most relevant for the success of these heuristics. In addition, we discuss recent developments with regard to the problem variants studied and the solution methods proposed in the literature. Finally, we outline interesting topics for future research.