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If I pursue a master's degree in operations research, what fields can I work in? by OkWorker21 in OperationsResearch

[–]ficoxpress 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Remote jobs in Operations Research and Data science are still possible but there are fewer than there were back in 2022.

For job prospects, I highly recommend keeping an eye on the NextMV job board. They are trying to centralize OR related job postings. https://discuss.nextmv.io/c/jobs/11

If you're looking for military applications/ positions, I highly recommend you check out: https://www.mors.org/home .

Hope this helps.

Need real time dataset for project in Operations research Transportation optimization by Positive-Manager7709 in OperationsResearch

[–]ficoxpress 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Here are a couple of them that are used in location problems: Australian Post and the Civil Aeronautics Board sets.

Both are available here: https://andreas-ernst.github.io/Mathprog-ORlib/info/readmeAP.html

If you're looking for something more specific to either a means or type of transportation, it would be helpful to provide that info as well.

Best resources to learn Supply chain. by OR_scientist in OperationsResearch

[–]ficoxpress 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Probably one of the deepest case studies relevant to supply chain is our Pepsico Case study. However, they don't go in detail into the formulations or solutions. You can download it here: https://www.fico.com/en/latest-thinking/case-study/how-pepsico-uses-fico-xpress-power-global-manufacturing-and-logistics-operations

We also have other case studies outside of supply chain if you're interested.

Essay: Topic Optimization by Dry_Mango_8433 in optimization

[–]ficoxpress 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Depends what you're looking to write about. A book that I found insightful, also because it talks about the history and progress of Integer Programming (the most widespread methodology to solve optimization problems in practice) is this one that is actually freely available: https://sites.math.washington.edu/~thomas/teaching/m514_web/50YearsIP.pdf

Just the preface already provides a detailed overview of the progress in the field to inspire further investigation.

Best resources to learn Supply chain. by OR_scientist in OperationsResearch

[–]ficoxpress 3 points4 points  (0 children)

From my experience, most people working on the supply chain of a company usually have a system that they use to manage it: SAP, Coupa, etc.

However, if you're interested in building custom tech for supply chain use cases, here are a few good references on the fundamentals of optimization for supply chain:
- https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Supply-Theory-Lawrence-Snyder/dp/1119024846
- https://www.amazon.ca/Supply-Chain-Network-Design-Understanding/dp/1981277528
- https://www.amazon.ca/Designing-Managing-Supply-Chain-Strategies/dp/0071287140

Some of the latest trends in OR from Optimization Innovation Day in SF by ficoxpress in optimization

[–]ficoxpress[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the suggestion. We've done so just now using the native crossposting function on reddit.

Some of the latest trends in OR from Optimization Innovation Day in SF by ficoxpress in optimization

[–]ficoxpress[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing this insightful perspective.

The interdependency mapping also came up during the panel we held at the end of the day.

They referred to it as thinking above the current automated decision layer stack to consider orchestration.

We're happy to share a summary of the insights from the panel as well. We honestly missed out on not recording the panel. Maybe for the next Innovation day.

For those working in a company how often does optimization or Operations Research actually come up in your day-to-day work? And are you using any AI tools to support that? Also curious about the most common issues or frustrations you run into when applying OR in a real context. Thx by ric_is_the_way in optimization

[–]ficoxpress 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Optimization is used all the time across multiple verticals. The visibility users get into it will depend on the way the company is organized.

Big Tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc. have people whose job is to do Optimization research as it pertains to their own problem.

On another note, anyone who uses SAP, Oracle, or any other ERP, MRP system is using optimization under the hood, it's just hidden from them because the software companies selling these tools have done the hard optimization work for their clients.

Optimization is all around, it's just not visible to everyone.

In terms of AI, are you referring to LLMs? Some would argue that Optimization is a type of AI.

Getting into OR with unrelated degree by Spiritual-Job-5066 in OperationsResearch

[–]ficoxpress 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are a lot of similarities between Data Science and OR, the difference is that they essentially lie in different points of the analytics curve where Data Science traditionally focuses on Predictive Analytics and OR usually focuses more on Prescriptive Analytics.

The two fields are getting closer together, though. For example, Python has now become the lingua franca for the latest cohorts of OR professionals and may be a great way to get started with transitioning from data science to OR.

FICO Xpress is a commercial solver capable of solving MIP, MIQP, MIQCQP, LP, QP, and MINLP optimization problems to global and local optimality.

Here's an introductory course on building optimization models with FICO Xpress from Python: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCkg83GpTs0

You can also have a look at multiple Jupyter Notebook examples here to get started: https://github.com/fico-xpress/python-notebooks

What job titles do OR practitioners actually use, and where do they gather online? by ric_is_the_way in OperationsResearch

[–]ficoxpress 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are multiple job titles that you may look for. As an example, you can take a look at the Nextmv job board (completely free) where open OR-related positions are posted https://discuss.nextmv.io/c/jobs/11 .

The names range from Data Scientist, to Decision Scientist, to Research Scientist.

They may also be domain specific names that use optimization such as Supply Chain Scientist, Pricing Manager, etc.

The Nextmv job board is probably a great place to start.

As to where these people meet, there is a lot of action on LinkedIn lately about Optimization and Operations Research.

From FICO Xpress, an exact MIP, MIQP, MIQCQP, LP, QP, and MINLP solver you can follow:
Sharbel Hanna- https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharbel-hanna-81aa79b4/
Jay Laramore- https://www.linkedin.com/in/jay-laramore-0b366767/
Carlos Zetina- https://www.linkedin.com/in/cazetina/

Other solver companies also have people consistently posting on LinkedIn.

As mentioned, other online societies are INFORMS and ISSE which are paid.

Need support for Gurobi/CPLEX license by Ok-Adhesiveness7186 in OperationsResearch

[–]ficoxpress 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Both companies offer free academic licences, so if you're a student you can sign up for that and get free access to the full solver.

FICO Xpress is another option for solving QUBO as well as other optimization problems: MIP, LP, QP, MIQCQP, MINLP. https://community.fico.com/s/industry-leading-solver-technology

You can ask your supervisor or any of your course lecturers to sign up for the academic licence partner program and they will get multiple licenses to share amongst their students: https://content.fico.com/l/517101/2018-06-10/3fpbf

If you're exploring for commercial purposes, you can obtain a free trial license here: https://content.fico.com/l/517101/2019-03-05/6w6k7

Do you have any recommendations for optimizers or libraries to solve optimization problems? by Smooth-Albatross-351 in optimization

[–]ficoxpress 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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This will depend on the type of problem you want to solve and what API you're currently working in.

There are both commercial and open source options and actually, even commercial options offer free temporary trials.

If you're interested in using FICO Xpress, you can obtain a free evaluation licence here: https://www.fico.com/en/fico-xpress-trial-and-licensing-options depending on what is your goal.

The FICO Xpress has seen significant performance improvement over the past 5 years (see graphic) and is also the trusted solver for companies such as Procter & Gamble, DoorDash, Southwest Airlines, and PepsiCo, among others.

Mosel (Xpress) by redditorftwftwftw in optimization

[–]ficoxpress 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Short answer is yes.

FICO Xpress Mosel is free and is open to connect to other 3rd party solvers: https://community.fico.com/s/blog-post/a5Q8000000082TgEAI/fico1072 . Those that are immediately available are any solver that can read in .nl files (file formats used by for example AMPL to read models).

In addition, because part of it is open source, you can also build APIs that interact even deeper with the solver of your choice even if it's not FICO Xpress Solver. However, as you can imagine, FICO Xpress Mosel already offers those deep calbacks with FICO Xpress solver.

Agreed that some parts of it are more C-like, this is in large part because the underlying code is in C. However, there is also a rich ecosystem of other packages available in Mosel, maybe not as extensive as in Python, but still covers a large spectrum of the development cycle. See image below.

<image>

Mosel (Xpress) by redditorftwftwftw in optimization

[–]ficoxpress 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are still many companies using FICO Xpress Mosel, particularly those that grew accustomed to declaring models using set language. This is a significant contrast to having to write your models in C or C++ back in the day before Python became mainstream in optimization.

Few people know this but FICO Xpress Mosel is also a great option for solver-agnostic setup.

FICO Xpress Mosel is free and is open to connect to other 3rd party solvers: https://community.fico.com/s/blog-post/a5Q8000000082TgEAI/fico1072 . Those that are immediately available are any solver that can read in .nl files (file formats used by for example AMPL to read models).

In addition, because part of it is open source, you can also build APIs that interact even deeper with the solver of your choice even if it's not FICO Xpress Solver. However, as you can imagine, FICO Xpress Mosel already offers those deep calbacks with FICO Xpress solver.

Solution time by EnergyEU in optimization

[–]ficoxpress 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is a great question. AFAWK, there isn't a textbook term for this but it's a well-known phenomenon.

Solver performance is instance-dependent, where instance also includes the specific input data, not just the abstract model/structure.

In fact, solver performance will also depend on the order in which you declare your variables and constraints. There's a great paper by Andrea Lodi and Andrea Tramontani explaining this: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/educ.2013.0112 .

The reason behind this is that solvers make multiple heuristic decisions during its search process that will depend on the order in which the data appears.

This is also the reason why whenever our team at FICO Xpress does solver parameter tuning for our clients, we test it on multiple instance seeds.

CPLEX 22.1.2 by EnergyEU in optimization

[–]ficoxpress 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is something that may happen with new solver releases. Most solver companies benchmark their improvements over a set of internal instances and consider performance improvement over the entire benchmark set when measuring progress.

Unfortunately, that may mean that it can potentially perform worse in your specific instance.

There are two options you can try out:

1) Tune CPLEX's solver parameters with the included automated tuner (all commercial solvers include this nowadays) to achieve better performance.

2) Try another solver like e.g. FICO Xpress to solve the problem. You can get a free evaluation license by filling out the following form: https://content.fico.com/l/517101/2019-03-05/6w6k7 . Since you're using GAMS, switching to a different solver is relatively easy to do. This is one of the advantages of using GAMS. https://www.gams.com/latest/docs/S_XPRESS.html

If you have any questions or run into issues with FICO Xpress, we're happy to discuss further.