We implemented an optimiser for the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA) in Den Haag to help them advise on the best combination of the available forces to use to provide the necessary level of military and logistic capability to cover a range of different scenarios. This was developed as a very large mathematical programming model; so large that it required splitting into a number of smaller sub-problems which were solved sequentially and the results combined to generate the final overall solution in each case. This model has since been through a number of revisions and updates, covering a span of more than ten years, and we are still supporting and enhancing the system as needed by the customer.
We have also carried out similar work in the UK for the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL). This project required us to take on an existing optimisation model that was too large and slow to achieve the client’s goals. We restructured the model to make better use of the sparse structures in the data, and the revised model can now handle problems more than twice as large and solve them as much as an order of magnitude faster than the previous model on the same hardware.
Please Note: While we are happy for you to contact us in regards to further details about any of the projects that we have carried out, we respect our customers’ confidentiality; therefore we will only ever pass on information for which we have already obtained permission to do so.