February 26 to March 2, 2018

The 2018 School on Column Generation is the fourth of its kind (after Paris, France, in 2014, 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, Roberto Wolfler-Calvo and Emiliano Traversi.

The practical session with SCIP is given by 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.