Melbourne Chapter

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2004 Program

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Note: AMSI = Australian Mathematical Sciences institute,The University of Melbourne (111 Barry Street, Carlton Victoria)

Lecture TITLE The Optical Internet: An Operations Research Perspective SPEAKER Moshe Zukerman, The University of melbourne WHEN 6PM, Wednesday, Feb 18, 2004 WHERE AMSI Seminar Room, Ground floor of the ICT Building (111 Barry Street, Carlton) ABSTRACT This talk will provide an overview of issues and challenges, as we develop and design the infrastructure of the future Optical Internet. The theme is Operations Research (OR) applications to Network design. In other words, how OR can be used to minimize costs subject to meeting quality of service requirements. Following backgound information on networking design principles, the following research challenges will be discussed:,/p> How to meet Quality of Service requirements of various services using optical switching techniques such as optical wavelength switching and optical burst switching efficiently? What are the questions in ongoing cost effective design of the Optical Internet that can meet highly variable traffic demands? What are the best tools, methods and techniques we can use to contribute to this important research area? The presenter will describe in general terms the projects he is working on. Some new results will be presented. However, the main aim of the talk is to focus on big picture directions and not to elaborate on solutions details of specific problems. No prior OR/teletraffic/networking knowledge is assumed. Biography Moshe Zukerman received his B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and Management and his M.Sc. in Operation Research from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from The University of California Los Angeles in 1985. Dr. Zukerman was an independent consultant with IRI Corporation and a post-doctoral fellow at UCLA during 1985-1986. During 1986-1997 he served in Telstra Research Laboratories (TRL), first as a research engineer and between 1988-1997 as a project leader managing a team of researchers providing expert advice to Telstra on network design and traffic engineering, and on traffic aspects of evolving telecommunications standards. He is the recipient of the Telstra Research Laboratories Outstanding Achievement Award in 1990. In 1997 he joined The University of Melbourne where he is a professor responsible for promoting and expanding telecommunications research and teaching in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department! Between 1990-2001, he has also taught and supervised graduate students at Monash University. Moshe Zukerman visited the EE Department City University of Hong Kong, between November 2002 and July 2003. He has served as a session chair and member of technical and organizing committees of numerous national and international conferences. He gave tutorials in several major international conferences such as IEEE ICC and IEEE GLOBECOM. He has served on the editorial boards of various journals such as IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and IEEE Communications Magazine. He also served as a Guest Editor of IEEE JSAC for two issues. Prof. Zukerman authored and coauthored over 200 publications in scientific journals and conference proceedings. CONTACT Paul Lockert, E-mail: paul.lochert@sci.monash.edu.au

Lecture TITLE Dynamic Programming Revisited: opportunities and challenges SPEAKER Moshe Sniedovich, The University of melbourne WHEN 6PM, Wednesday, April 21, 2004 WHERE AMSI Seminar Room, Ground floor of the ICT Building (111 Barry Street, Carlton) ABSTRACT Dynamic programming has been on the scene for more than fifty years and is now one of the major problem-solving tools in such disciplines as operations research, management science, and computer science. Yet, for various reasons, it is not as "popular" as it should be. This is a pity because dynamic programming is a very powerful and practical tool of thought. In this presentation we revisit dynamic programming with a view to identify opportunities and challenges associated with dynamic programming in a variety of areas such as education, research, software development, large scale applications and recreation. CONTACT Paul Lockert, E-mail: paul.lochert@sci.monash.edu.au

Lecture TITLE Production scheduling rather than trim scheduling in the web processing industries SPEAKER Bob Jhonston, , Monash University WHEN 6PM, Wednesday, May 19, 2004 WHERE AMSI Seminar Room, Ground floor of the ICT Building (111 Barry Street, Carlton) ABSTRACT The web processing industries, such as steel, paper, plastic film, corrugator processing etc always face the problem of minimising the amount of Ñside-runæ, or trim waste generated in the slitting of wide parent reels into narrower customer reels or webs. It has been a favourite amongst OR proponents because for over 60 years we have had here a practical problem which could be tackled by the application of a true combinatorial optimisation algorithm. Treating the problem as a 1-dimensional cutting stock problem, under the banner Ñtrim schedulingæ, practitioners have had some limited success in convincing industry to adopt the computerised algorithmic approach. Explaining this reluctance is rather straightforward because there has been several fundamental deficiencies with available algorithms, not the least being the lack of a sequenced solution. Typically, commercial software generates an Ñoptimalæ set of cuttings or slitting patterns, and then it is up to the user to sequence these cuttings (if they can) to meet the required operational and delivery constraints. In a sense the OR practitioner has only ever Ñhalf doneæ the job, but the prospect of having to solve a Ñtravelling salesmanæ type problem simultaneously with a cutting stock problem has always deterred researchers. The presentation reviews the existing algorithms and then introduces a new approach to this problem which, using mixed integer programming, permits the generation of an optimal sequenced solution to the 1-D cutting stock problem. With this new approach we carry out true Ñproduction schedulingæ, rather than trim scheduling. While the approach is general the presentation will use paper industry examples.. CONTACT Paul Lockert, E-mail: paul.lochert@sci.monash.edu.au

Lecture TITLE Open Pit Mining Schedule SPEAKER Gary Froyland, BHP-Billiton WHEN 6PM, Wednesday, June 16, 2004 WHERE AMSI Seminar Room, Ground floor of the ICT Building (111 Barry Street, Carlton) ABSTRACT In today's competitive environment, resource companies are looking to use the latest technology to run their mining operations ever more efficiently. One area that will potentially deliver additional profit "for free" is the scheduling of the removal and treatment of material from the mine. By simply excavating and processing material in a different order, the operation may save or delay costs and bring forward revenues. I will describe the problem of maximising the Net Present Value of an open pit mining project and solution approaches using integer programming. CONTACT Paul Lockert, E-mail: paul.lochert@sci.monash.edu.au

Lecture TITLE Advances in, and Further Applications of, the Duckworth/Lewis Methodology of One-Day Cricket SPEAKER Tony Lewis, The Business School, Oxford Brookes University, UK WHEN 6PM, Thursday, August 26, 2004 WHERE AMSI Seminar Room, Ground floor of the ICT Building (111 Barry Street, Carlton) ABSTRACT The Duckworth/Lewis (D/L) method of target resetting in one-day cricket has been in general use now for several years. This talk will first discuss recent advances in the underlining methodology that has led to the introduction of the åProfessional Edition¼ of D/L that better handles the well-above-average totals that are becoming more frequent in the higher levels of the game. Secondly, the talk will look at how the D/L methodology can be used to provide improved measures of player performance that better reflect the context in which runs are scored and wickets taken. The methodology can also produce measures that enable the major cricketing disciplines of batting and bowling to be compared on a common scale. CONTACT Paul Lockert, E-mail: paul.lochert@sci.monash.edu.au

Lecture TITLE Constraint Programming - Helping People Build Clever Optimisation Models SPEAKER Mark Wallace, Monash University WHEN 6PM, Wednesday, September 22, 2004 WHERE AMSI Seminar Room, Ground floor of the ICT Building (111 Barry Street, Carlton) ABSTRACT Mathematical programmers are very good at designing fast scalable algorithms for canonical problems - different problems require different techniques. Industrial applications often combine different canonical problems as well as awkward side constraints. We will discuss how Constraint Programming (CP) enables us to solve industrial problems by reusing and combining the best techniques available for the subproblems, and to handle side-constraints as well. About the speaker: Mark Wallace holds an MA in Mathematics and Philosophy from Oxford University, an MSc Artificial Intelligence from the University of London, and a PhD from Southampton University which was published in 1983 as the book, "Communicating with Databases in Natural Language". Hoping to master a second language, he moved to the European Computer-Industry Research Centre in Munich, where he discovered Constraint Logic Programming (CLP). Returning to the UK after ten years, he spent another decade at Imperial College London, leading the ECLiPSe CLP team. Besides its use for research and teaching in some 500 organisations worldwide, ECLiPSe is exploited for building commercial software. In particular ECLiPSe is embedded in Cisco's MPLS Tunnel Builder Pro. Mark has always been interested in applied research. He spent 21 years at the UK computer manufacturer ICL, moving from worldwide marketing, to development, and finally to research. At Imperial College he led major collaborations with British Airways and the Royal Automobile Club. His current research interest is in the hybridisation of different techniques and algorithms tailored to large scale industrial combinatorial problems. The aim is to simplify the task of decomposing an optimisation problem into subproblems that can be efficiently solved with different techniques, and to combine those techniques into a tailored algorithm that solves the whole problem. CONTACT Paul Lockert, E-mail: paul.lochert@sci.monash.edu.au

Lecture TITLE Evaluation and comparison of organisational performance SPEAKER S.P. Mukherjee, Calcutta University, India WHEN Cancelled WHERE AMSI Seminar Room, Ground floor of the ICT Building (111 Barry Street, Carlton) ABSTRACT Among different measures of performance of different units within the same broad organization mention may be made of the following : Productivity (based on both input and output) , Effectiveness (based only on output) and Efficiency (based entirely on input). While the former does not take into account planning of input and targeting of output, the latter two recognize the role of planning. In fact, it is possible to define two hybrid measures that combine the merits of all these three measures viz. actual output/ planned input and planned output/ actual input. In most cases, we deal with several inputs and several outputs, often expressed in different units and having different ranges of variation. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) provides a very useful method to determine weights for the different inputs and outputs endogenously, based on the use of linear programming. Traditional DEA has considered (weighted aggregate of outputs/ weighted total of inputs) as the measure of efficiency. In the present work, a comprehensive DEA methodology taking care of different performance measures discussed earlier and recognizing some genuine problems in comparing performances has been attempted. In particular, ranking of different units using cross-efficiency matrices, considering all the three measures performance measures viz. productivity, efficiency and effectiveness poses some problems which has been examined in terms of Kendallís coefficient of concordance. An application of this extended DEA has been carried out on relative performance of several tea gardens in North Bengal area belonging to a corporate business house. It is argued that performances of different agencies within the national government engaged in collection, analysis and interpretation of official statistics and inviting criticisms from users to different extents can be assessed in terms of an imaginative DEA exercise. This will enable the government to initiate steps necessary to boost the over-all performance of the statistical system. CONTACT Paul Lockert, E-mail: paul.lochert@sci.monash.edu.au

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EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE 2004/05

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Chairperson:	Kaye E. Marion (Ms) Department of Statistics & OR RMIT 360 Swanston Street MELBOURNE 3000	E-mail: K.Marion@rmit.edu.au Phone: (w) +613 9925 3162 Fax: +613 9925 2454
Vice Chairperson:	Baikunth Nath (Assoc Prof) Department of Computer Science and Software Enginnering The University of Melbourne Parkville VIC 3010	E-mail: baikunth@unimelb.edu.au Phone: (w) +(+61 3 8344 1400
Secretary:	Patrick Tobin (Mr) School of Mathematical Sciences Swinburne University of Technology P O Box 218 HAWTHORN 3121	E-mail: ptobin@swin.edu.au Phone: (w) +613 9214 8013 Fax: +613 9819 0821
Treasurer:	Paul Lochert (Assoc Prof) Department of Mathematics Monash University P.O. Box 197 CAULFIELD EAST 3145	E-mail: P.Lochert@sci.monash.edu.au Phone: (w) +613 9903 2647 Fax: +613 9903 2227
Committee:	Dudley Foster (Mr) 23 Wolseley Crescent BLACKBURN 3130	E-mail: dudley@ozemail.com.au Phone: (w) +613 9894 0355 Fax: +613 9894 0244 Mobile: 0417 342 272
	Leonid Churilov (Dr) School of Business Systems Monash University CLAYTON 3168	E-mail: Leonid.Churilov@fcit.monash.edu.au Phone: (w) +613 9905 5802 Fax: +613 9905 5159
	Harry Gielewski	E-mail: harrygie@ozemail.com.au
	Vicky Mak Deakin University	E-mail: vickymak@mac.com
Student Representative:	Amando Rodado	Email: a.rodado@ms.unimelb.edu.au
Editor:	Harry Gielewski	E-mail: harrygie@ozemail.com.au
Office Manager:	Kaye E. Marion (Ms) Department of Statistics & OR RMIT 360 Swanston Street MELBOURNE 3000	E-mail: K.Marion@rmit.edu.au Phone: (w) +613 9925 3162 Fax: +613 9925 2454
Ex-Officio::	Moshe Sniedovich (Dr) Department of Mathematics and Statistics University of Melbourne Parkville 3052	E-mail: m.sniedovich@ms.unimelb.edu.au Phone: (w) +613 9344 5559 Fax: +613 9344 4599