Events

The Operations Research Challenge (TORCH) is a free, one-day contest designed to introduce high school students to Operations Research, a field that tackles many of today's complex decision-making problems through the use of engineering, computer science, and mathematics.

TORCH 2018 will be held on March 17, 2018 at the University of Waterloo with over $1000 in prizes.

Register before March 5, 2018!

Accounting for the adverse impact of "non-average" events has become essential in many applications involving decision making under uncertainty. Its implementation through decision models, namely stochastic programs, requires careful measurement of risk that reflects one's concern about uncertain outcomes. Important theories such as convex risk measures outline conditions required for risk measurement but provide little guidance for cases not meeting the conditions. Unfortunately, such cases are more than common in real-life situations.

Abstract

Production planning problems and its variants are widely studied in operations management and optimization literature. One variation that has not garnered much attention is the presence of multiple production families in a coordinated and capacitated lot-sizing setting. While its single-family counterpart has been the subject of many advances in formulations and solution techniques, the latest published research on multiple family problems was over 25 years ago (Erenguc and Mercan, 1990; Mercan and Erenguc, 1993).

Area of Research

Management of Technology

Committee Chair

Mark Aagaard - Electrical and Computer Engineering

Examining Committee

Bonwoo Koo (Supervisor) - Management Sciences

Brian Cozzarin - Management Sciences

Selcuk Onay - Management Sciences

Margaret Dalziel - CBET

Supervisors:

Samir Elhedhli

Fatma Gzara

Cutting and Packing problems are hard combinatorial optimization problems that arise in the context of several manufacturing and process industries or in their supply chains. These problems occur whenever a bigger object or space has to be divided into smaller objects or spaces, so that waste is minimized.

Supervisors:

Samir Elhedhli

Fatma Gzara

ExpecTAtions is a two-day workshop that prepares Waterloo Engineering students to undertake a teaching assistantship. To serve as a TA, you are required to complete the ExpecTAtions workshop. After full attendance and successful completion of all required activities you will receive a certificate noting your achievement.

International airfreight forwarders are faced with the problem of consolidating shipments for effcient transportation by airline carriers. The use of standard unit loading devices (ULDs) is a solution adopted by the airfreight industry to speed up cargo loading, increase safety, and protect cargo. We study the airfreight consolidation problem from the forwarders perspective where a decision on the number of ULDs used and the assignment of shipments to ULDs is optimized. The cost of using a ULD consists of a fixed charge and depends on the weight of the cargo it contains.

It is generally well accepted that your position in the social network affects your ability to get information.  But how do the network positions of those with whom you interact, influence you?  This issue is explored using high dimensional network data. Drawing on theories of social influence and the generalized other, social network analytic and text analytic methods, and data science techniques for big data a series of complex socio-technical situation are assessed.