March 10-14, 2014
Paris, France

The 2014 School on Column Generation is the third of its kind (after Darmstadt, Germany, in 2010 and Montréal, Canada in 2006) and aims at teaching the state-of-the-art in column generation and branch-and-price to advanced students and PhD students but also to practitioners and researchers interested. The lectures will be given by renowned scientists in the field, complemented by hands-on experience in a computer lab. The participants will have the opportunity to present their own research or application problems in order to foster discussions and create a "real workshop atmosphere".

Topics to be covered include: Basic theory (decompositions, reformulations, convexification, discretization, etc.), vehicle routing and crew scheduling applications, shortest path subproblems, column generation heuristics, master problem issues (stabilization, aggregation), branching and cutting, and hints on implementation issues.  In particular, on Thursday, we will spend a whole day with the SCIP framework and learn about implementing branch-price-and-cut.

Lectures are given by Guy Desaulniers, Jacques Desrosiers, Marco Lübbecke and Roberto Wolfler-Calvo.

The practical session with SCIP is given by Christian Puchert and Jonas Witt from RWTH Aachen University.

The program starts on Monday at 9.00 and ends on Friday around 17.00, so we will have five full days of school.

Thanks to all participants for this beautiful week in Paris. To see the pictures taken by Marco, click here.