Alexander Rinnooy Kan was clear in his lecture at the OR2013 conference in Rotterdam. He stressed that although Operations Research practitioners have been successful in applying their knowledge, continued education remains of great importance. The obvious reason is keeping pace with new developments in research. Last year we organized a Back to School seminar together with the Dutch Network on the Mathematics of Operations Research (LNMB) with exactly that purpose. Given the positive feedback from our participants, we will organize a similar seminar in January 2014, Back to School 2014. Constraint Programming and Multi Objective Optimisation have been selected as topics for the upcoming seminar.

The last few years Constraint Programming (CP) has attracted much attention in our field because of its potential for solving hard real-life problems. CP has a strong theoretical foundation and has attracted widespread commercial interest as well, especially in modelling heterogeneous optimisation and satisfaction problems. Despite this widespread interest, CP is still one of the least known and understood technologies. Many curricula in Operations Research not even have an introductory course on it. Reason enough for us to select it as one of the subjects for Lunteren 2014.

The second subject we selected is Multi Objective Optimisation. Multi objective optimisation has many applications in fields like data mining, machine learning, finance, biomedicine, management science, game theory, engineering and medical decision making. A traditional optimisation problem has only one objective, however in practice most problems have several and possible conflicting objectives to be satisfied. These multiple objectives are frequently treated as single objective optimisation problems by transforming all but one objective into constraints. There is however a better way, during the seminar we will learn more about it.

Like last year the format of the seminar will be as follows. The first part (45 min) will focus on the background and theory. The second part (45 min) will consist on the practical use of the techniques. The last part will be on a practical application (30 min).

The conference language is English. Registration is possible via the Seminar On-line Registration Form. The conference fee is 90 Euro for LNMB and NGB members, and 150 Euro for others. The conference fee covers lunch, coffee, tea, and the drinks.

Thursday January 16, 2014 NGB/LNMB Seminar "Back to school, learn about the latest developments in Operations Research" More details on this seminar will follow soon
09.30 - 10.00	Registration and coffee
10.00 - 10.15	Welcome by the chairman Herman Monsuur (NLDA)
10.15 - 11.00	Introduction to Some Methods and Applications of Nonlinear Multiobjective Optimization - part 1 Speaker: Kaisa Miettinen (Professor of Industrial Optimization at the University of Jyväskylä) Abstract of the Presentation
11.00 - 11.15	Coffee/tea
11.15 - 12.00	Introduction to Some Methods and Applications of Nonlinear Multiobjective Optimization - part 2 Speaker: Kaisa Miettinen (Professor of Industrial Optimization at the University of Jyväskylä) Abstract of the Presentation
12.00 - 12.30	Peculiarities of the Radiation Treatment Planning Optimization Problem: multiple objectives, user/algorithm interaction and feasibility Speaker: Dr. Aswin Hoffmann (MAASTRO Clinic Maastricht) Abstract of the Presentation
12.30 - 14.00	Lunch
14.00 - 14.45	Background and Theory of Constraint Programming Speaker: Paul Shaw (Program Manager and Technical Lead, Constraint Programming Products, IBM Software Group) Abstract of the Presentation
14.45 - 15.00	Coffee/tea
15.00 - 15.45	Practical Application of Constraint Programming Techniques Speaker: Paul Shaw (Program Manager and Technical Lead, Constraint Programming Products, IBM Software Group) Abstract of the Presentation
15.45 - 16.15	Berth Allocation and Quay Crane Assignment using Constraint programming Speaker: Stephane Zampelli (PhD Ecole Polytechnique de Louvain) Abstract of the Presentation
16.15 - 16.30	Closing
16.30 - 17.30	Drinks

The seminar is the 16th annual seminar, following the previous successful seminars:
E-Commerce & Operations Research (2001)
Capacity Management - How Operations Research models support decision makers (2002)
New developments in Operations Research software (2003)
On-line methods: Challenges for OR in a real-time world (2004)
Mathematical Models for Financial Optimization (2005)
Operations Research and Health Care (2006)
Operations Research and Public Transportation (2007)
Operations Research and Energy (2008)
Operations Research and Traffic (2009)
Operations Research and Health Care (2010)
Operations Research in Supply Chain Management and Marketing (2011)
Operations Research in Supply Chain Management and Humanitarian Aid (2012)
Back to school: Robust Optimization and Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (2013)