Blogs about optimization
There are many interesting and informative blogs about optimization modelling. We link to a selection of blogs, written by a wide range of academic and practitioner experts. Topics include: data science, operations management, logistics, and general modelling.
Activimetrics LLC offers consulting and custom software development related to transportation systems analysis, planning, policy development, and deployment.
Blog topics include:
- Another way to find and use the most expensive node.
- Converting a TSP to a multi-day TSP and using Slack in OR Tools.
- Mapping and animating OR-Tools routes.
- OR Tools AddBoolOr() constraints.
- Exploring disjunctions in OR Tools.
Blog: Activimetrics.
Blog written by Ryan O'Neil, co-founder of Nextmv.
From the About page:
By day, I am an operations research analyst, Go coder, and co-founder of Nextmv. I'm interested in hybrid optimization, decision diagrams, and mixed integer programming. My applications skew toward logistics for delivery platforms, with detours into cutting and packing.
For the past several years, I've worked in real-time optimization for on-demand delivery, scheduling, forecasting, and simulation. I did a MS in Operations Research by night at George Mason University, then a PhD in the same department under the advisement of Karla Hoffman.
By night, I am am amateur cellist, and a cat and early music enthusiast.
Blog: Adventures in optimization.
Associate Professor Tallys Yunes offers articles and videos about solving complex decision problems that arise from a variety of practical applications. The emphasis is on optimization, data analytics, and mathematical literacy.
Topics include:
- Optimization games for the young.
- How to optimally allocate "bribe" money.
- Buying Metrorail tickets in Miami.
- An easy way to visualize conditional probabilities and Bayes Rule.
- Mr. Lovr's adventure: A Valentine's Day optimization story.
Blog: OR by the beach.
YouTube: Dr. Y.
The objective of the Big Book of Julia is to be a set of resources for Julia programmers, data scientists and researchers.
It contains more than 1,000 links to:
- Language documentation.
- Videos.
- Julia Academy Courses.
- Blogs / Forums.
- Packages.
- Books.
- Miscellaneous.
- Tutorials.
Blog: Big Book of Julia.
Blog written by Brent Austgen, Ph.D. candidate researching power grid resilience; optimization enthusiast with software dev chops.
Brent's description of what readers can expect from the blog:
Well, I'm a nerd. So expect that at the very least. In today's world, there is no shortage of information; however, there is a deficiency in the way it is organized and presented. This is one of the strongest motivating factors pushing me to publish. In time, I hope to make complex ideas more approachable for you and to attune you to some of the mathematical principles at play in daily life.
Blog: Brent Austgen.
Ben Recht, live blogging a graduate course on convex optimization in Fall 2024. The course is based on the text Convex Optimization by Stephen Boyd and Lieven Vandenberghe.
Contents:
- Part I: Modeling.
- Part II: Applications.
- Part III: Algorithms.
Blog: Ben Recht's blog.
This unofficial primer for the OR-Tools CP-SAT solver is designed to help you understand this powerful tool. It may be especially useful if you are coming from the Mixed Integer Linear Programming community, as the CP-SAT solver can be successful in cases where Branch and Bound performs poorly.
Topics include:
- Installation. Quick installation guide.
- Examples. A short example, showing the usage of CP-SAT.
- Basic modeling. An overview of variables, objectives, and constraints.
- Advanced modeling. More complex constraints, such as circuit constraints and intervals.
- Parameters. How to specify CP-SATs behavior, if needed. Timelimits, hints, assumptions, parallelization, ...
- Coding patterns. Basic design patterns for creating maintainable algorithms.
- How does it work? After we know what we can do with CP-SAT, we look into how CP-SAT will do all these things.
- Alternatives. An overview of the different optimization techniques and tools available. Putting CP-SAT into context.
- Benchmarking your model. How to benchmark your model and how to interpret the results.
- Large neighborhood search. The use of CP-SAT to create more powerful heuristics.
Blog: CP-SAT primer.
Katie McConky is an Associate Professor in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department at Rochester Institute of Technology. She posts videos from an 'Introduction to Operations Research' classs, including tutorials on using Pyomo and GLPK to write and solve simple linear programs.
Topics include:
- Pyomo for MCNFP shortest path problem.
- Advanced Pyomo - OJ Juice running Abstract models.
- Beginner's guide to Pyomo for Abstract linear programs.
- Pyomo Concrete models - Error handling and data extraction.
- Intro to Pyomo and GLPK for Google Colab.
Blog: Dr. Katie.
Blog by Dustin Kenefake, whose primary research interests are at the intersection of optimization and process systems engineering, specifically in the space of model predictive control and real-time optimization.
This blog covers a wide array of topics, including: implementing algorithms, data driven methods, optimization, and much more.
Blog: Dustin Kenefake's blog.
Associate Professor Austin Buchanan blogs about his research on solving combinatorial optimization problems in networks. In particular, his research focusses on networks having connectivity or distance constraints, with applications in political redistricting.
Topics include:
- A brief tutorial on Benders decomposition.
- Can my state redistrict at the county level?
- Why is maximum clique often easy in practice?
- A brief tutorial on Lagrangian techniques for k-median.
- A brief tutorial on fixed-parameter tractability.
Blog: Farkas' dilemma.
The Feasible blog, written by Borja Menéndez, dives into the real-world applications of Operations Research, showing how it can help you solve complex problems and improve decision-making in your business.
Topics include:
- Operations Research reimagined.
- Latest news in Operations Research.
- Why software is the true driver behind faster solvers.
- How to identify optimization problems at your company.
- Unlock your Operations Research career path in 10 minutes (from 5 years of real job data).
Blog: Feasible blog.
Professors Jay Heizer, Barry Render, and Chuck Munson are the authors of the best selling textbook "Operations Management". Their blog is intended as a resource for Operations Management educators, providing a wide variety of ideas for the teaching of Operations Management courses.
Topics include:
- The robotic pharmacists.
- Seasonal employees.
- Ford’s latest supply-chain problem.
- European manufacturers shift to the U.S.
- Decoupling of supply chains.
Kevin Gue is Senior Director of Research and Development at Fortna, and formerly a professor of industrial engineering. His blog is focussed on logistics optimization.
Topics include:
- Finding warehouse space in unexpected places.
- A surprising solution to the warehouse labor crisis.
- Optimal block stacking.
- A new angle on container ports.
- Logistics automation and us.
Blog: Kevin Gue.
Nathan Brixius writes about machine learning, data science, software engineering, and sports.
Topics include:
- Character heatmaps in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
- A lazier way to solve Knuth’s skeleton multiplication puzzle.
- Creating equation haikus using Constraint Programming.
- Optimizing 19th century typewriters.
- Chaining machine learning and optimization models.
Blog: Nathan Brixius.
Optimisation in the real world is an initiative by Stephen J. Maher to raise awareness of how optimisation regularly influences our lives. Stephen is a research fellow at University of Exeter working on practical and theoretical aspects of optimisation.
Topics include:
- Ingredient utilisation for beer home brewing.
- Logistics of vaccine distribution.
- Carbon-neutral supply chains.
- Investigating 100% renewable electricity using optimisation.
- Music festival scheduling.
Optimization modelling newsletter on LinkedIn by Alireza Soroudi. Most of the posts use the Pyomo library in Python.
Topics include:
- Optimal flight leg assignment.
- Where to fit my container?
- US Election under the optimization lens.
- Shortest, independent, ALL paths between two nodes on a graph.
Blog: Optimization in open-source.
Paul A. Rubin is a Professor Emeritus of Management Science. His primary research interest is in the application of integer programming models and algorithms.
Topics include:
- With CPLEX, you're not in until you're in.
- "Block party" puzzle.
- Models for a social network problem.
- Partitioning an interval.
- Wolf, goat and cabbage.
Blog: OR in an OB World.
Thoughts and observations about Operational Research by David Smith.
Topics include:
- There will always be the need for Operational Research Scientists.
- Road layout problems.
- Lockdown supply chain problems.
- Should operational research be used to design a cruise liner's buffet?
- Expanding Exeter's E-Bike hire scheme.
Blog: OR in Devon.
Blog written by Philippe Olivier, who specializes in consulting and advising on operations research matters for startups.
Topics include:
- Optimizing Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) free hero rotations.
- Generating crossword grids using Constraint Programming.
- Land lot optimization.
Blog: Philippe Olivier's blog.
Princeton Consultants' Optimization write a blog for business executives and advanced analytics practitioners.
Topics include:
- Agile v. Waterfall in optimization solution development.
- Advanced optimization techniques for complex scheduling.
- Survey results summary: Solvers, programming and modeling languages and more.
Richard Oberdieck's blog about optimization, modeling, and Python.
Topics include:
- LLM-ify me – Optimization edition.
- Goodbye python-mip?
- It's too much for you, init. The create pattern.
Blog: Richard Oberdieck's blog.
The focus of Supply Chain Data Analytics (SCDA) is on applied operations research. The target audience are supply chain consultants, logistics and operations managers, production planners, industrial engineers, process engineers as well as data analysts and data scientists.
Topics include:
- Optimization via master production scheduling.
- Price and inventory optimization.
- Inventory simulation for optimized stock.
- Conveyor system optimization procedure.
- Support vector machine with Gekko in Python.
Blog: Supply chain data analytics.
The Operations Room is a forum for discussing current topics in operations management (OM). The focus is on identifying interesting strategic and tactical developments in the field.
Topics include:
- Paying for a place in line at Disney.
- Waiting on the water.
- What's that "EOQ solution" (prescription) for sourcing, batching and inventory management?
- What's that "Newsvendor solution" for inventory and capacity planning?
- Are supply chains and networks truly resilient.
Blog: The Operations Room.
Notes and models by consultant Erwin Kalvelagen who provides services related to the design, implementation and deployment of mathematical programming, optimization and data-science applications.
Topics include:
- Some matrix balancing experiments.
- Wordle: number of words from unique letters.
- Primal, dual and equilibrium format of the Transportation Model.
- k out of n with smallest bandwidth.
- Large sparse transportation model with CVXPY, CVXR.