FICO is proud to have been a sponsor at the 2025 rendition of Les Journées de l'Optimisation, also known as JOPT, at HEC Montréal from May 12th-14th 2025. JOPT is a three-day annual conference organized alternately by the Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT) and the Groupe d'Études et de Recherche en Analyse des Décisions (GERAD) in Montréal, Canada. The meeting aims to survey current research trends in optimization methods and their applications and provide an opportunity for interaction between various research groups worldwide.
Over 400 participants attended this year’s JOPT, which consisted of five plenary talks, four tutorials, and 275 talks spread over 10 parallel sessions. The plenary and tutorial speakers included well-known researchers and professors, Claudia Archetti, Jack Brimberg, Ivana Ljubic, Jacques Renaud, Willem-Jan van Hoeve, Jean-François Côté, Raf Jans, and Marie-Eve Rancourt.
The conference also hosted an Industrial Track focused on presenting successful applications of optimization and machine learning with real-world impact. Among the companies presenting were Artelys, IVADO Labs, ALDO Group, InfinityQ, Siemens Energy, and FICO. The stream highlighted the broad applicability of Optimization and Machine Learning techniques in verticals like healthcare, retail, transportation, finance, and electricity grid management.
The presentations on healthcare applications consisted of optimization and machine learning used for radiation therapy personnel scheduling, managing hospital supplies, and assigning nurses to patients and rooms. More importantly, the results showed how leveraging optimization can lead to 15% of time savings for highly-trained and scarce specialists such as nurses and radiation therapists.
In retail, the ALDO group and IVADO Labs presented their approach to leveraging pricing optimization over time to maximize revenue growth while meeting inventory planning targets for fashion products, including highly seasonal and trendy articles. Their approach combines machine learning techniques to estimate price elasticity with mixed integer programming to select a pricing strategy that increases the likelihood of a target sell-through rate. Their application shows great promise and gave a 3% profit increase in a backtesting exercise, again highlighting how optimization can manage to improve the bottom line even in demanding industries like retail fashion.
The final session in the Industrial Track consisted of InfinityQ’s presentations focused on their novel approach to solving optimization problems based on probabilistic computing. Their presentations showed promise for practical applications such as index tracking for financial portfolios and tactical unit commitment, as well as more scientific applications such as the Low Autocorrelation Binary Sequencesproblem.
We greatly appreciate CIRRELT, the organizers of JOPT: Professors Maryam Darvish, Fausto Errico, and Jorge E. Mendoza, and the extended staff for their hard work behind this successful event, and look forward to next year’s rendition, organized by GERAD. These events are essential for our field as they bring forth both the theoretical and practical progress in the field of Optimization.
Over 400 participants attended this year’s JOPT, which consisted of five plenary talks, four tutorials, and 275 talks spread over 10 parallel sessions. The plenary and tutorial speakers included well-known researchers and professors, Claudia Archetti, Jack Brimberg, Ivana Ljubic, Jacques Renaud, Willem-Jan van Hoeve, Jean-François Côté, Raf Jans, and Marie-Eve Rancourt.
The conference also hosted an Industrial Track focused on presenting successful applications of optimization and machine learning with real-world impact. Among the companies presenting were Artelys, IVADO Labs, ALDO Group, InfinityQ, Siemens Energy, and FICO. The stream highlighted the broad applicability of Optimization and Machine Learning techniques in verticals like healthcare, retail, transportation, finance, and electricity grid management.
The presentations on healthcare applications consisted of optimization and machine learning used for radiation therapy personnel scheduling, managing hospital supplies, and assigning nurses to patients and rooms. More importantly, the results showed how leveraging optimization can lead to 15% of time savings for highly-trained and scarce specialists such as nurses and radiation therapists.
In retail, the ALDO group and IVADO Labs presented their approach to leveraging pricing optimization over time to maximize revenue growth while meeting inventory planning targets for fashion products, including highly seasonal and trendy articles. Their approach combines machine learning techniques to estimate price elasticity with mixed integer programming to select a pricing strategy that increases the likelihood of a target sell-through rate. Their application shows great promise and gave a 3% profit increase in a backtesting exercise, again highlighting how optimization can manage to improve the bottom line even in demanding industries like retail fashion.
FICO’s talk in the Industrial Track focused on presenting the current and GenAI-enabled enterprise optimization development workflow. Our presentation highlighted how FICO Xpress Optimization suite can be currently leveraged to address the common blocker in Optimization projects, getting user buy-in. We showed how combining Xpress Workbench, Solver, and Insight for rapid application development can help address this pain point, discussed in previous presentations as one of the main blockers to getting adoption. Our presentation then gave an overview of how GenAI could further facilitate both the development and adoption process in the already streamlined process embedded in FICO Xpress Optimization Suite.
The final session in the Industrial Track consisted of InfinityQ’s presentations focused on their novel approach to solving optimization problems based on probabilistic computing. Their presentations showed promise for practical applications such as index tracking for financial portfolios and tactical unit commitment, as well as more scientific applications such as the Low Autocorrelation Binary Sequencesproblem.
We greatly appreciate CIRRELT, the organizers of JOPT: Professors Maryam Darvish, Fausto Errico, and Jorge E. Mendoza, and the extended staff for their hard work behind this successful event, and look forward to next year’s rendition, organized by GERAD. These events are essential for our field as they bring forth both the theoretical and practical progress in the field of Optimization.
Updated 1 year ago
Version 3.0