I recently presented my final year project at 45th Operations Research Society of South Africa (ORSSA) Annual Conference, which was hosted at the stunning Lanzerac Wine Estate in Stellenbosch (see programme here). As someone who's fascinated by seeing Operations Research solve real-world problems, it was amazing to be surrounded by innovative research spanning everything from malaria disease modeling to portfolio analysis.

My presentation tackled a challenge that keeps retail giants up at night: how to efficiently organize products in their distribution centers. Specifically, I looked at slotting – figuring out the optimal placement of different products (SKUs) in a warehouse. It might sound straightforward, but with thousands of products and countless possible arrangements, it quickly becomes mind-bendingly complex. I focused on two main goals: helping stock pickers move around the warehouse more efficiently and preventing bottlenecks in the aisles.

To solve this problem, I developed a multi-objective simulated annealing approach that finds balanced solutions, and wrapped it all in a user-friendly system. Basically, you feed in your data, and it spits out an optimized storage layout. I tested it on a small mock scenario and compared the results with actual layouts used in retail distribution centers to show it could work in the real world.

The conference wasn't all about presentations though. Between sessions on risk modeling and decision analysis, we had this brilliant "Operations Research Wine Hunt" where we solved math problems for prizes. There was also a fantastic conference dinner where they handed out the Society's awards. It was my first ORSSA conference, but it definitely won't be my last!