Hybrid: An Introduction to Operational Research with Google OR-Tools

Nicholas Stylianou

Modern Operations Research provides a scientific framework for today's complex decision-making landscape. Google OR-Tools supports this by providing a high-performance, open-source software suite that gives access to powerful optimisation techniques that can be applied to real-world industrial applications.

In this presentation, I will introduce the field of Operations Research and Google OR-Tools.

I'll then demonstrate the use of OR-Tools in practice by outlining the key elements that define an Operations Research problem and showing how these key elements provide a context for the different types of problems, and the "solvers" that OR-Tools provides access to for solving them.

I'll describe the generic process for working with solvers and illustrate this process in action through various examples using the OR-Tools Python wrapper.

I'll finish by reflecting on some of the interesting design features of OR-Tools and outlining some of the current challenges for Operations Research.

Nicholas Stylianou – Senior Software Engineer at Reach Computing

Since graduating from the Department of Computing at Imperial College London in the mid-1990s, Nicholas has worked in the IT industry as a CAD/CAM Software Engineer, UNIX Systems Administrator, Enterprise Architect and Text/Data Mining Analyst.

He is now an Independent Researcher and Software Engineer specialising in Computational Musicology. He has presented at the "Mathematics and Computation in Music" biennial international conference, and also successfully authored and published his first book "Heptatonics" (2019), with a second volume currently in preparation.

Alongside this he also continues to work more broadly on IT projects in industry, having established Reach Computing Ltd in 2017, and has been an active member of the BCS since 2011.

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