| The work by Nicolás Cabrera and Jorge Huertas titled “A column generation approach for pedestrian evacuation planning” made it to the finals of the IISE Undergraduate Student Technical Paper Competition. On his way to the finals, Nicolás won locally at Uniandes and at the regionals held in Costa Rica. Congratulations to the Nicolás and Jorge! | 
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The May 2018 edition of the Simio Student Simulation Competition was won by our students Sebastián Arenas, Kevin Herrera and Paola Rincón, advised by professor Ivan Mura. This win follows a series of near-optimal performances by COPA students that started back in 2015 with Mariana Escallón, Juan-José Díaz, and Daniel-Felipe Daza (advised by Raha Akhavan) and followed by the 2nd place in 2017 with Juan-José Díaz and Laura Herrera (advised by Sergio Cabrales). Congratulations to the Simunation team and Ivan! |
| La última edición del Boletín de Ingeniería Industrial reseña el trabajo, premios y logros alcanzados por varios coperos. Los invitamos a visitarla y ver las noticias en el Boletín. | 
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The recent edition of IFORS News contains a brief tutorial on the pulse algorithm. It shows a brief description of the algorithm (originally developed in COPA), its variants, and some applications where the pulse has been used as a building block. |
El próximo 8 de Octubre los profesores e investigadores de COPA estarán presentes en el Research Day 2018. Si estás interesado en vincularte con el grupo, marca tu agenda y allá nos vemos.
¿Quiéres saber más de COPA? (video en Español).
The work led by Pillac et al. titled “A review of dynamic vehicle routing problems” appeared in the 13th position of the top downloaded articles of EJOR in 2014. This is a great achievement of Victor, our former COPA’s PhD student, and of course of our group!
In March, COPA was honored to receive the visit of Professor Michel Gendreau (École Polytechnique de Montreal) who taught a module on Stochastic Vehicle Routing Problem. The Office of Communications of the School of Engineering took the opportunity to interview Professor Gendreau. He spoke about his experience in Transportation and Logistics and left his opinion about the university and COPA research group.
The full interview (in Spanish) on the School’s website is available here
Co-organized by former Copa member Jorge Mendoza, VRP2013: European Spring School on Vehicle Routing is a one-week, full-immersion institute gathering Ph.D. students and young researchers working on the field of vehicle routing.
The academic program is made up of 4 academic modules and 2 workshops. In addition to the academic program, the spring school includes an active social program conceived to help participants developing personal links that may foster future academic collaborations.
The spring school will be hosted by the Institute of Applied Mathematics (IMA) of Université Catholique de l’Ouest in Angers (France) from May 20 to May 24, 2013. The spring school is open to all Ph.D. students completing a dissertation on vehicle routing and young researchers working on the field. Participants are invited to present their research in poster sessions during the coffee breaks. Presenting a poster is not mandatory.
Participants should apply for a place at the spring school before January 30, 2013. The number of participants is limited. Places will be assigned according to a FIFO discipline giving priority to Ph.D. students and participants presenting a poster. Participants from outside Europe are welcome to apply.
For further information visit the spring school website: http://www.ima.uco.fr/vrp2013/
Ecole des Mines de Nantes (France) and Universidad de los Andes have an funded Ph.D. studentship leading to a dual degree.
In a world where petroleum becomes a scarce resource and environmental issues become a day to day concern of both companies and the general population, electric vehicles emerge as one of the most exciting new technologies in the world’s effort to reshape the way transportation systems operate. Indeed, the Environment Round Table initiative of the French government gives to the development of electric and hybrid vehicles a central role, and makes it a top priority, in France’s strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve its energy efficiency.
The use of electric vehicles raises new and challenging engineering problems. For instance, battery lifespan is highly sensitive to factors such as: travel speed, route profile (e.g., steep vs. flat terrain), driving mode (e.g., aggressive vs. calm driving), utilization context (e.g., load, cold compartments, headlights, AC. Etc.). As a result, battery autonomy may be very limited. To overcome these limitations, batteries may be recharged at some intermediary point of a journey (e.g. at lunch time), if one is willing to make some detours to reach a charging station. This new context generates a set of novel constraints that should be taken into account when planning transportation routes that are to be performed by electric vehicles.
A source in Charlotte has just informed us that the koppa team (Andrés L. Medaglia, Jaime González and Leonardo Lozano), won first prize in the RAS 2011 competition at the Annual INFORMS Meeting.
Stay tuned because details will follow, in the meantime congratulations to Andrés, Jaime and Leonardo!
COPA supports the decision making process at organizations via the analysis, design and application of operations research (OR) and statistical computer-based techniques. Our purpose is to contribute to the scientific and technological development of Colombia, becoming a leading group in R&D.