Beale Lecture

Beale Lecture 2024

The Beale Lecture 2024 was a hybrid event that was broadcast live between 14:00 - 16:00 from The OR Society. Attendees had the option of attending in-person in The OR Society offices or joining virtually over Zoom.

Chris Potts

Beale Lecture

Talk Title: Reflections on Half a Century of Research in OR

Chris Potts presented some of the research highlights of his OR career, which started in 1971 when he started a PhD at the University of Birmingham on branch-and-bound algorithms for production scheduling problems. His work on scheduling continued while working as a Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Keele from 1973 to 1985, and allowed him to adapt many of the advances in combinatorial optimisation to provide novel approaches for analysing and solving scheduling problems.,p>

In 1985, was appointed as a Lecturer in Operational Research at the University of Southampton and was promoted to Professor in 2000. His scheduling research continued, although the MSc in OR at Southampton with its company-based projects broadened his research interests. For example, he has worked on OR applied in sport (cricket, football, Formula One and golf), logistics, transport (air, rail and road) and healthcare.

Chris Potts obtained a first class BSc degree in Mathematics from the University of Manchester in 1970, an MSc in Operational Research from the University of Hull in 1972 and a PhD in Operational Research from the University of Birmingham in 1974. He was employed as a Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Keele during the period 1973-86. From 1986, he has worked at the University of Southampton, initially as a Lecturer in Operational Research from 1986-91, then as Senior Lecturer and Reader from 1991-2000, and lastly as a Professor from 2000-22. He is now an Emeritus Professor at the University of Southampton.

He is author or co-author of over 100 papers that have been published in high-quality journals. The topics covered in these papers include production scheduling, logistics, transport, healthcare and sport.

Chris has been active in the promotion of OR. He has served on various committees of the OR Society, and has been the Chair of the Southern OR Group.

Also, he was a Vice-President of EURO (the Association of European OR Societies) for the period 2003-6. He was part of the team that created NATCOR (National Taught Course Centre for Operational Research) that has provided training for doctoral students since 2008. He has run a NATCOR course in Combinatorial Optimisation at the University of Southampton on several occasions.

Spyridon Pougkakiotis

Doctoral Award Winner Presentation

Talk Title: A Regularised Interior Point Method for Convex Programming

Solving complex mathematical problems efficiently is crucial in various fields. Interior Point Methods (IPMs) are commonly used techniques known for providing accurate solutions relatively quickly. However, they face challenges such as dealing with inaccurate numbers and tricky mathematical scenarios.

To overcome these challenges, researchers have explored modified versions of IPMs that demonstrate improved stability in real-world situations. Despite the success of these modifications in practical applications, a comprehensive theoretical understanding has been lacking until recently.

This presentation introduces a combination of an infeasible IPM and the Proximal Method of Multipliers (PMM), forming a method referred to as IP-PMM. This combined approach acts as a more reliable version of IPMs, specifically suited for certain types of mathematical problems. The method involves applying a few rounds of the interior point method to smaller mathematical sub-problems within the Proximal Method of Multipliers. Once a satisfactory solution is found for the sub-problem, adjustments are made, a new set of problems is formulated, and the process is repeated.

A significant aspect of the work is demonstrating that this method is not excessively time-consuming for a broad range of problems, marking a notable advancement in mathematical research. By leveraging the speed of IPMs and the stability of PMMs, the IP-PMM approach shows promise as an efficient solution.

To broaden the applicability of our approach, general strategies for efficiently solving associated mathematical problems within the IP-PMM framework will be discussed. Additionally, numerical results across various mathematical problems, highlighting the advantages of the modifications in IPMs and confirming the reliability and efficiency of the proposed IP-PMM algorithm.

Spyridon Pougkakiotis is Lecturer in Mathematics at the School of Science and Engineering of the University of Dundee. He received his PhD degree in Optimisation and Operational Research from the School of Mathematics of the University of Edinburgh (2022), his MSc degree in Operational Research with Computational Optimisation from the same school (2017), and a BSc in Informatics from the University of Athens (2016). Before joining the University of Dundee, Spyridon was a postdoctoral research associate at the Electrical Engineering department of Yale University (2023). His research is focused in the areas of optimisation, computational mathematics and risk-aware decision making, and their applications in data science, operational research and engineering.