Monash Prato Centre, Italy
The conference was held at the beautiful Monash Centre at Prato, Italy from September 17-19th 2009.
The conference was run as five sessions with invited talks and submitted presentations. A proceedings was prepared in time for the conference, and presentations were also made available to participants afterwards.
There is now a call for a special issue of Computers and Operations Research on Transport Scheduling, to which presenters are encouraged to submit their papers:
Conference Reception - |
At work |
Conference dinner: Jakob, |
Conference dinner: The long table |
Transport is now a major constraint on the future welfare of every city and country.
We depend more and more on trade and transportation for everything that we need, and consequently transport volumes are increasing rapidly. In Melbourne, for example, it is forecast that freight transport will double in the next 10 years. Our research impacts not only the economic cost of congestion, but the welfare of people and our environment itself.
The conference was organised in five sessions covering different algorithmic approaches and different areas of application. I am excited by the interaction between the different approaches – mathematical programming, constraint programming, and repair-based techniques – and what we can learn from one another in the context of the concrete application of these techniques in the area of transport scheduling and disruption handling. Our session chairs – Kerem Akartunali, Ian Evans, Anita Schoebel, Heng Soon Gan and Mark Wallace - put together an exciting programme and we not only had some interesting presentations but also some animated discussion! Many thanks to them for their work.
We welcomed four invited speakers Laurence Wolsey, Martin Savelsbergh, Edmund Burke, and Louis Martin Rousseau, and we thank them also for joining us.
There was plenty of time between sessions to get to know each other and to explore the lovely town of Prato where Monash University is fortunate to have a Centre. We plan to come again before too long!
I am grateful to Kerem Akartunali for his work on conference publicity, to Ranga Muhandiramge who set up the website and managed all the submissions, and to Kerry McManus who handled a substantial administration load in addition to her usual work at Monash, and without whom half the people would not have managed to be here – she’s the real expert in transport scheduling!
In conclusion I would like to thank our conference sponsor Constraint Technologies who are also, together with the Australian Research Council, co-funding the research at Monash, Melbourne and Newcastle Universities in Australia. CTI proposed this conference and their CEO and R&D head, Alan Dormer and Ian Evans, put a great deal of time and effort into making it a success.
Mark Wallace