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News - Dash reports on user meeting in London
The recent User Meeting held on HMS Belfast,
moored in the River Thames in
London, was well received by all attendees. Attendance was approximately
50%
higher than last year with a wide cross section of customers and
other
organizations associated with Dash Optimization.
The presentation by Simon Bragg of ARC, who discussed
the development and
role of optimization in overall enterprise profitability brought
an
independent, external perspective which reinforced the belief of
most
participants that optimization is a key technology that promises
to deliver
further benefits in the future.
Customer presentations dealt with interesting application
areas, technically
difficult optimization problems and novel applications. There was
a wide
variety ranging from cutting stock optimization, enterprise profit
optimization, portfolio optimization and supply chain. For example
Charles
Polk from Net Exchange described a very unusual application of optimization
to decision making in government and Michael Thess talked about
how
Xpress-MP is used within data mining. John Lucas from EDS explained
how,
with the help of Xpress-MP, EDS has been optimizing enterprises
for many
years before it became common place. Andrew Dalziel described how,
by
working closely with Dash, Intentia had brought a supply chain optimization
product to commercial success within 16 months.
We were very pleased to have speakers from Imperial
College, London and
Purdue University to give their particular insight into optimization
research. Mark Wallace discussed optimization and constraint programming
and
Jacob Asmundson described some research on the effect of capacity
constraints on optimized supply chains. This was particularly relevant
to
the current developments in stochastic optimization.
Presentations from Dash covered progress last year,
the improvements in optimizer performance, current developments
in MIP and the development of
Xpress-SLP. For example, James Tebboth from Dash described how the
speed of
the barrier optimizer and MIP had both increased by over 30% in
the last
year.
There was widespread praise for the presentations,
particularly those made
Dash customers, Academic partners and ARC. It was evident that the
contributors had spent a lot of time and effort in preparing the
presentations, and we were delighted to host a speakers dinner at
the Blue
Print Cafe overlooking Tower Bridge.
The parallel product presentations were attended by
about 40% of the
participants. Horia Tipi demonstrated the new features of Mosel/IVE
which
includes visualization tools for matrices and the branch and bound
tree and
tools to build optimization applications. Alkis Vazacopoulos showed
the
stochastic programming prototype, which included all the essential
elements
of the final product, and Roger Main demonstrated Xpress-SLP which
is
already a commercial success. Robert Ashford showed new developments
in the
Xpress-Optimizer, with heuristics and constraint branching. We received
valuable customer feedback from the presentations, and as a result
development plans have been revised to reflect the existing and
future
customer requirements. In particular the development program for
stochastic
optimization has been modified and accelerated.
We are planning our next User Meeting for San
Francisco in October/November 2003. Further details will be available
shortly.
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