MC-30 and MD-30
Monday, 12:30-14:00 and 14.30-16.00- Building BM, 1st floor, Room 110
System Dynamics Business Modelling Workshop for Managers, Consultants and Students: a two-part workshop
Kim Warren
System dynamics offers powerful tools for understanding how businesses work and perform over time. This workshop focuses on the practices of system dynamics business modeling, providing a methodology that can be applied to companies and public organizations of any kind. In this hands-on workshop, participants experience the essential principles of system-dynamics-based modeling, and are enabled to apply them, through work on a real business case. They can work on the case individually or in small groups using their own laptops. The participants will go away with the working models of that real case and plenty of other free models and methods.
MD-56
Monday, 14:30-16:00 - Building CW, 1st floor, Room 122
Turning Research into Collaborative Cloud Applications
Susanne Heipcke, Sebastien Lannez
Optimization models are more and more frequently deployed as distributed, multi-user solutions within company networks or in cloudbased environments. We discuss the impact of these trends on modelling tools, including aspects such as data handling, support of concurrent and distributed computing, or internationalization as well as requirements on solver technology and integration with analytic tools like R. Making research models available to other users, raises a number of challenges and pitfalls. We cover strategies to overcome these and present how optimization or analytic models and solutions combining both can be rapidly deployed as collaborative, web-based applications.
TA-08
Tuesday, 8:30-10:00 - Building CW, 1st floor, Room 9
Workshop on Spatial-Multi Criteria Evaluation Decision Support System
Luc Boerboom, Valentina Ferretti
The ILWIS geographic information system (GIS) is the only rasterbased and free and open source GIS, which offers spatial multi-criteria evaluation (SMCE) inspired by decision science software. Rather than using a simple GIS notion of overlays to perform SMCE, it uses a value tree, has value functions and weighting options. Decision alternatives can be pixels within a map and spatial plans. Criteria can be spatial, spatial metrics, or non-spatial. A new client-server architecture allows web-based SMCE for a vast range of developments and applications.
The workshop addresses (junior) researchers and software developers/practitioners in decision sciences. No experience with GIS is required, but basic understanding of Multi-Attribute Decision Making is. Participants will gain: 1) Hands-on experience and theoretical grounding of SMCE to identify problem locations, design solutions and evaluate alternative plans. 2) Application opportunities by seeing examples of national parks delineation, regional reconstruction after war, implementation of national urban policies, or transition to biogas. 3) R&D opportunities in the new ILWIS client-server architecture, through connectors to Python, R, and Java. Participants can freely take software, tutorial, and example data but will be required to bring their own laptop.
Content 15 minutes: Introduction to ILWIS-SMCE and looking ahead into client-server based ILWIS-SMCE 10 minutes: Download, installation of software and data. 30 minutes: Tutorial of ILWIS – SMCE with a case of national park design and choice, based on accompanying peer reviewed journal publication. 30 minutes: Explore complex example cases of regional reconstruction after war, implementation of national urban policies 5 minutes: Closing remarks
Practical requirements. BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop) and BYOB (beer). This Windows software also runs under Wine on Linux or Parallels on Mac
TC-56
Tuesday, 12:30-14:00 - Building CW, 1st floor, Room 122
Optimization of Execution of Large Scale Simulation Experiments in the Cloud
Przemyslaw Szufel, Bogumił Kamiński
Do you have a simulation experiment that takes many days to compute on your laptop? Why not reduce that time to minutes or hours? This can be achieved through utilization of cloud computing. During the workshop we will show how to transfer computational jobs from your desktop to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. We will give special focus to optimization of computing costs by showing how to utilize spot market for computing power. The workshop will present two example scenarios. In the first we show how standard simulation experiment designs (eg. used to collect data for metamodeling) can be distributed in the cloud. In the second a parallelization of sequential knowledge gradient algorithm used for simulation optimization will be presented.
No previous experience with cloud computing is required from the participants. It is recommended that they have basic knowledge of Linux.
WB-56
Wednesday, 10:30-12:00 - Building CW, 1st floor, Room 122
Doing Theory and Practice: own reflection
Joaquim Gromicho
I have spent all my conscious life learning, teaching and applying my learnings which - in turn - teaches me a lot. The last 30 years mostly in Operations Research. In a brief lecture I explain why I believe that the gap between theory and practice can be very narrow. Afterwards, I will ask your participation to advocate and to oppose a small list of propositions and help ignite a vivid discussion. Do you envision yourself developing both the theoretical and practical sides of the profession? Then this workshop is the place to be.
WC-56
Wednesday, 12:30-14:00 - Building CW, 1st floor, Room 122
O.R. for the Public Good: A Workshop on Volunteering and O.R.
Ruth Kaufman, Howard Turner
For the last 3-4 years, the UK’s OR Society has run a ’Pro Bono OR’ scheme, identifying potential OR projects in charities and similar organisations, and putting the organisations in touch with suitably skilled volunteers to undertake the project. The aim of this workshop is to share experience of Pro Bono, to help spread and improve outcomes, both at an individual level and a community/national level.
We will describe the Pro Bono O.R. scheme, and discuss: at the individual level, volunteer benefits, barriers to volunteering, what is different about doing Pro Bono OR for a charity, and practical ways of being more effective; and at the community level, community benefits, practical challenges, potential cultural differences between communities and how they may affect what is done. This workshop is for you if you are: an existing or past volunteer, in the UK or elsewhere, willing to share/exchange experiences; a practitioner or academic who might be interested personally in undertaking voluntary work; or a practitioner or academic who is interested in starting or developing a pro bono scheme locally.