The 34th IPP Symposium
Combinatorial Optimization - State of the Art and Future Trends
Optimization methods represent a cultural technique that influences decisions at the very core of our society. While efficiency is no value in and by itself, optimization can still provide the means to reach our higher goals. With its inherently quantitative perspective, optimization is especially suited for decision support in industry. Today, combinatorial optimization plays a decisive role in the airline and transportation industry, in manufacturing, and supply-chain management to name only a few.
Although the research area is as old as computer science itself, especially during the past twenty years tremendous improvements in combinatorial optimization have been achieved that were thought to be totally out of reach before. Naturally, the steady acceleration of processors as well as the availability of ever larger storage devices has played an important role in this development. However, an equally substantial part of the computational gains that were accomplished must be attributed to the development of new algorithms (like interior point algorithms), hybrid approaches (like branch-and-bound augmented with cutting plane algorithms that were once considered impractical), and radically new methods such as constraint programming.
Despite these great achievements and the fact that extremely efficient standard solvers were developed that could give wider access to optimization technology, we still find that the broader impact of combinatorial optimization has been surprisingly limited. Our spring IPP symposium on Combinatorial Optimization shall cast a flash light on where the area currently stands, in what contexts the technology is curently being applied successfully, what is needed to increase its impact on society, and what the most significant future challenges are with respect to fundamental research as well as applicability.
We are delighted that these six distinguished optimization experts from industry and academia are coming to speak on this topic. The diversity of our speakers' backgrounds will provide insight into this subject from many different perspectives. Combinatorial optimization can provide significant competitive advantages by improving operational efficiency in terms of scheduling and utilizing resources. Our symposium provides a unique opportunity to learn more about this powerful technology, its outstanding challenges, and the future trends in combinatorial optimization.
Our invited speakers are:
Stefan Karisch - Carmen Systems
Heinrich Braun - SAP
George Nemhauser - Georgia Tech
Andrew Davenport - IBM
Irv Lustig - ILOG
Bernard Gendron - CRT
