Rob Pratt has worked at SAS since 2000 and is a Senior Manager in the Scientific Computing department in the Analytics R&D division. He manages a team of developers responsible for the optimization modeling language and solvers for linear, mixed integer linear, quadratic, and conic optimization. He earned a B.S. in Mathematics (with a second major in English) from the University of Dayton and both an M.S. in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Linear programming (LP) and mixed integer linear programming (MILP) solvers are powerful tools. Many real-world business problems, including facility location, production planning, job scheduling, and vehicle routing, naturally lead to linear optimization models. Sometimes a model that is not quite linear can be transformed to an equivalent linear model to reduce
Note from Udo Sglavo on mathematical optimization: When data scientists look at the essence of analytics and wonder about their daily endeavor, it often comes down to supporting better decisions. Peter F. Drucker, the founder of modern management, stated: "Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision."
A note from Udo Sglavo: This post offers an introduction to complex optimization problems and the sophisticated algorithms SAS provides to solve them. In previous posts of this series, we learned that data availability, combined with more and cheaper computing power, creates an essential opportunity for decision-makers. After looking at network analytics
Tomorrow is Independence Day, a federal holiday in the United States. Flags are displayed everywhere, especially in Washington, D.C., where I live. So let's have a little Fun with Flags! The current U.S. flag has 50 stars, one per state, with five rows of six stars interleaved with four rows
SAS will be well represented at the 2017 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research, which takes place April 2-4 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, NV. Two dozen SAS staff will participate in this conference. SAS/OR, the SAS Global Academic Program, and JMP will have adjacent and coordinated
Erwin Kalvelagen recently posted about a logic puzzle called Kakuro, also known as Cross Sums. As in traditional crossword puzzles, there are horizontal and vertical clues. As in Sudoku, each white cell is to be filled in with a digit from 1 to 9, with no digit repeated within the
At the most recent SAS Global Forum in Las Vegas, I gave a demo on using SAS/OR to compute an optimal strategy for the casino game blackjack. For anyone who wasn't able to attend, I'd like to show some of the code and results here.
This year's SAS Global Forum conference will take place April 18-21 at The Venetian in Las Vegas. For SAS/OR, SAS staff will present two Super Demos and three papers:
Here's a golf puzzle from Sam Loyd: Everybody is playing golf now, and even the lazy ones who a few weeks ago declared how much pleasanter it was to swing in a shady hammock, have caught the golf fever and are chasing the ball around the golf links. I am
Super Bowl 50 (L?) is this Sunday, so it's time for another (American) football-related post. Steven Miller, a mathematics professor at Rutgers University, recently noted that the 2015 NFL schedule allowed a competitive advantage for some teams (including the Carolina Panthers). This figure he generated displays the 2015 regular season
The British spy agency GCHQ recently posted a grid-shading puzzle that the director sent out in his Christmas cards this year. The puzzle, shown here, is known as a nonogram and by various other names, including Paint by Numbers and FigurePic: Each cell is to be colored black or white,
The INFORMS 2015 Annual Meeting will be held in Philadelphia November 1-4. More than two dozen SAS staff will participate, and SAS will have three adjacent booths representing SAS/OR (and all of Advanced Analytics), JMP, and the SAS Global Academic Program. SAS is well-represented among the presentations at this meeting,
In the traveling salesman problem (TSP), a salesman must minimize travel distance while visiting each of a given set of cities exactly once. Recently, the TSP has generated some buzz in the popular media, after a blog post by Randy Olson. The tour shown was not quite optimal, and Bill