Ramsey Medal, Modeling Competition winners announced

Hämäläinen receives 2019 Ramsey Medal

Raimo Hämäläinen, professor emeritus at Aalto University in Finland and an honorary visiting professor at Loughborough University in England, received the 2019 Frank P. Ramsey Medal for distinguished contributions in decision analysis. The medal was presented by the Decision Analysis Society (DAS), a subdivision of INFORMS.

Hämäläinen was a professor of applied mathematics (operations research) at Helsinki University of Technology, which became part of Aalto University in 2010. He was also a professor at the University of Vaasa and at Kuipio University in the 1970s.

A longtime contributor to DAS, Hämäläinen served as an editorial board member for the journal Decision Analysis, conference speaker and chairman of the European Assembly of DAS (1996–1998).

Hämäläinen studied engineering mathematics and systems theory and holds a master’s degree in engineering and doctorate degree from the Department of Technical Physics, Helsinki University of Technology.

Hämäläinen’s research focuses on multicriteria decision analysis and related behavioral issues. An academic leader of several groups in Finland and Europe, he established the Systems Analysis Laboratory at Helsinki University of Technology in 1984. He was also the founding director of the Doctoral Education Network on Systems Analysis, Decision Making and Risk Management across Finnish universities and a board member of the Finnish Operations Research Society. Hämäläinen chaired the Committee for Scientific Cooperation between the Academy of Finland and the International Research Institute for Management Science (IRIMS) in Moscow, and he served on the Finnish Committee for the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (1998–2008). More recently, he co-founded (with Alberto Franco) the Behavioral Operations Research Working Group of the European Society of Operational Research (EURO), serving as its first chairman.

AIMMS-MOPTA Optimization Modeling Competition

Team ZIB from the Zuse Institute Berlin won the 11th AIMMS-MOPTA Optimization Modeling Competition. Team ZIB’s solution, report and modeling effort in AIMMS was selected as the most comprehensive among the three finalists at the MOPTA conference banquet, which took place at Lehigh University in August.

This year’s problem statement, designed by Boris Defourny of Lehigh University, continued the tradition of an interesting problem with multiple ways to solve it. The participants were asked to solve a packing problem. They were tasked with finding the best solution and recommending alternative solutions that were comparable in packing efficiency. As expected, all the three finalists took very different approaches to arrive at their recommendations.

Team ZIB, consisting of Felix Prause and Kai Hoppman and advised by Thorsten Koch, presented an extensive literature review of different methods to solve the problem. They simulated numerous heuristic approaches and compared the results with a mixed integer program. They also provided a Tetris-like user interface in AIMMS where one can generate a random mix of objects and find an optimal arrangement.

The other finalists were Team RPI, consisting of three Ph.D. students – April Sagan, Dan Kosmas and Jesica Bauer – from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Team UCL, with Deemah Aljuhani representing University College London. Team RPI first presented two methods classified as “efficient packing but slow” and “fast but inefficient packing.” They then applied various techniques to find a middle ground, which gave them good solutions in reasonable time. Team UCL presented a mixed integer formulation which generates multiple solutions.