SWI2024, sponsored by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and Math4NL, was a dynamic event where academia and industry converged. About forty mathematicians, including PhD students and scientific staff from both the Netherlands and abroad, worked in groups to tackle complex problems presented by participating companies.
The event featured six diverse companies, each with a unique challenge:
- Doing the Math - for a Sustainable Future: Tasked with creating a model for planning and optimizing multi-commodity energy networks. The goal was to achieve grid independence, reduce carbon footprints, and formulate optimal investment strategies.
- The Driving Force: Their challenge was to develop a tool for an optimal food production plan that maximizes profit and considers product interdependencies and cross-selling opportunities.
- Groendus: Focused on optimizing charging locations for electric vehicles, aiming to maximize the use of self-generated solar energy and minimize costs while considering the behavior of EV users.
- IKEA: The renowned furniture company sought an order fulfillment strategy that anticipates future orders, optimizing the assignment of current orders to various picking sites.
- KLM Royal Dutch Airlines: Their goal was to enhance the algorithm for calculating booking curves to improve accuracy and efficiency, especially for flight legs with limited data availability.
- VSL National Metrology Institute: They required a method to accurately calculate average values of calorific value and volume flow in natural gas fiscal metering, given the challenges of varying measurement frequencies and non-uniform data distribution.
The week-long event kicked off with companies presenting their problems on Monday. The participants then studied these problems in smaller groups for the entire week. This format provided a unique opportunity for participants to delve deep into the issues, fostering an environment of intensive learning and creative problem-solving.
The event culminated on Friday, with participants presenting their findings and solutions. The success of SWI2024 was evident in the new insights each group brought to the table, addressing the complex challenges posed by the companies. This collaborative effort provided practical solutions to industry problems and highlighted mathematics’ pivotal role in diverse sectors.
SWI2024 at VU Amsterdam was a testament to the power of collaborative innovation, where the theoretical world of mathematics met the practical demands of industry. The event solved immediate problems and laid the groundwork for ongoing partnerships between academia and the corporate world, underlining the significance of mathematics in driving future advancements.