Programme

During the first part of the week, the participants will follow classes where they will learn from the senior researchers. The second part of the week will let the participants become actors of the program and they will be asked to contribute to a large development project dedicated to the EPS topic. During this phase, they will apply what they have learned previously directly on concrete problems and examples.

The organization is balanced between some "learning" time and some social activities. Every day will be separated in 2 half day sessions with a lunch break in the middle and a nice dinner. The dinner will be the occasion of discovering the French cuisine and some specialties from Brittany.

Main lectures

The students will follow several main lectures on metaheuristics, on matheuristics, on routing problems and on web-services. During the main lectures on matheuristics, the students will learn some important information about mathematical programming (CPLEX/GUROBI/FICO-XPress), about a new mathematical optimization solver (LocalSolver), and how to embed these tools in a C++ programming code. Two practical sessions will be given by practitioners from Artelys (FICO Xpress Optimization Suite) and Innovation24 (LocalSolver).

Team work

For the interactive workshop, the students will be divided in small teams that will be coached by an experienced researcher. Each team will develop an optimization method for a given optimization problem, using a different approach: e.g., one team may use LocalSolver in combination with other metaheuristics techniques, other teams will integrate Gurobi or CPLEX or FICO-XPress together in a matheuristic framework. All these strategies will be proposed by the teams and supervised by the experienced researcher. All these techniques will be implemented in a web-service platform that is ready for use at a large scale. The web-service platform is able to provide real-life instances of routing problems.

Social activities

    • Wed. 20 April: Welcome party
    • Sat. 23 April: Beach party (or free time to visit the region depending on the weather)
    • Sun. 24 April: Excursion to Groix island (boat trip + picnic)
    • Wed. 27 April: Gala dinner