ORSSA 2020 Virtual Conference
With the pandemic still in full swing conference organisers have been rapidly moving to hosting their events virtually. The Joburg Chapter of the Operations Research Society of South Africa stepped in host the conference after the original physical conference at NWU was unfortunately no longer feasible.
Given both the short notice and challenge of arranging a virtual conference for the first time, the LOC did an amazing job at continuing the annual event in spite of the challenges faced by both speakers and participants.
While the format was shortened to three half days, it was packed with interesting speakers and events. The conference kicked off with a fantastic quiz evening on Sunday 18th October put together by Liesl Hendry and Rob Bennetto.
On Monday the first keynote was presented by Dr Berndt Linder on Tradeoffs between levelling the reserve margin and minimising production cost in generator maintenance scheduling for regulated power systems.
Prof Hatem Masri, president of AFROS, gave the second keynote on Tuesday, AFROS: Towards a sustainable development of operations research in Africa.
And the final day had two plenary sessions with UJ Vice-Chancellor, Prof Tshilidzi Marwala, speaking on The future of OR and data science. And Prof Pascal van Hentenryck, the A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, presenting: Future mobility systems. Mitali Ayyangar and Michel Dowd also presented the work DataKind is involved in around the world with it data science volunteer program.
The above talks, award presentations, and student competition talks rounded out a great three days of OR. The full program, speakers and sponsors can be found here
49th ORSSA Conference LOC
(1) David Clark, Chair (Chalcid) (2) Gemma Dawson (Data Analytics, PwC South Africa) (3) Bernie Lindner (Spatialedge) (4) Dave Evans (ORSSA Fellow) (5) Liesl Hendry (Chalcid) (6) Robert Bennetto (Chalcid) (7) Handre Williams ( Radixtrie) (8) Melusi Magele (University of South Africa) (9) Lieschen Venter (Department of Logistics, Stellenbosch University)