Robert Bennetto, CTO, ICEPACK LIMITED, will present the Department of Statistical Science seminar with a talk entilted, "Combinatorics, cutting planes and vehicle routing". 

Robert is fanatical about computational complexity, optimisation and R as a tool for visualisation and data wrangling. Robert has headed up top analytics companies in South Africa with domain experience with some of the largest transport providers and in South Africa, assisting them with their optimisation strategies and guiding the development of optimisation tools to handle the specific requirements of the market. Robert is now leading the technology arm for an offshore-based startup (ICEPACK) providing AI centric optimisation services to a global market while concluding his PhD research at Stellenbosch University (part-time) in constraint programming and evolutionary algorithms.

Abstract: Combinatorics are, for many people, a field treated with disdain in first year statistics and rapidly forgotten about thereafter. The reality is that combinatorics form critical structures in which complex optimisation problems are framed and ultimately often solved to optimality. The concept of an optimal solution is in itself a staggering thought. The size of search spaces typically explode exponentially with respect to the number variables in optimisation problems – but yet, with the correct treatment of the problem, there are instances where optimality can be proved.

This talk will provide a rough guide to computational complexity, the mathematical framework of optimisation problems (focusing on the intuition of cutting planes and model relaxations) and finally the application area of vehicle routing and how this translates into a value proposition for businesses which simply can’t be ignored.