MORe:
Associate Professor Natashia Boland
Short Biography
Natashia is the Director of Melbourne Operations Research, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and a member of the Department's Operations Research Group. She received her BSc (Hons) in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Western Australia in 1988, and her PhD in Mathematics from the same institution in 1992. Subsequently, she held postdoctoral research fellowships in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimisation at the University of Waterloo, in 1993, and in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, in 1994. Prior to these academic appointments, she spent 6 months in 1992 working with a Melbourne software company, The Preston Group, on airline applications of operations research.
Natashia teaches third-year and Honours classes in operations research, and is actively involved in a number of research projects in both theoretical and applied operations research. Natashia brings industry into the classroom, running industry-sponsored team projects in her 3rd-year class, and supervising individual student projects on industrial problems at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Her achievements as a teacher have been recognised at the national level: she has been one of only two finalists in the Australian University Teaching Awards in the Best Teacher in the Physical Sciences and Engineering category, and has won the Dean's Award for Best Teacher in the Science Faculty in Small Group Teaching. Her excellence as a researcher has been recognised internationally, with financial support for her research provided by Denmark, Germany and the USA. Recognising her qualities as a researcher, the Australian Academy of Science recorded a video interview with Natashia for their Video Histories of Australian Scientists - Outstanding Young Researchers series. She is currently supervising five PhD candidates.
Natashia's consulting work has assisted many business and government organisations to more effectively manage their resources, at both the operational and strategic levels. She has particular experience in the areas of transport logistics, supply chain management, inventory and production scheduling, across industries such as defence, mining, air transport and manufacturing. She has used her skills as a teacher in the development of workshops and in-house training seminars for companies, to bring them up to date with the latest tools and techniques in operations research. Some of the organisations who have turned to Natashia over the last eight years to help them parlay operations research techniques into better results for their company and their customers were
- KPMG,
- Bain International,
- Ansett Airlines,
- The Operations Research Group (now the Applied Decision Analysis group at PriceWaterhouseCoopers),
- Merrill Lynch Mercury Asset Management, and the
- CSIRO Division of Building and Construction Engineering.
While knowledgeable across the spectrum of operations research, Natashia is acknowledged as the Australian expert in the field of integer programming. An extension of the more well-known linear programming, integer programming uses decision variables which are whole numbers, or integers. Decision variables which are binary, i.e. either zero or one, are particularly useful. They are perfect for modelling many of the either/or decisions facing managers. Do we maintain this manufacturing capability at this plant, or not? Should the new warehouse be located here, or not? Should this stock be in our portfolio, or not?
Capitalising on the tremendous advances in commercial software for solving integer programs, Natashia has solved problems of this type involving many hundreds and even thousands of integer variables, exploring all the trade-offs to determine the best solution for the company involved. In doing so, she has gathered extensive experience in commercial optimisation software, such the ILOG suite of products, including AMPL, OPL and Cplex.
A versatile mathematician, Natashia is also experienced in techniques such as discrete event simulation. She has developed her own simulators and employed commercial software such as Taylor (now FlexSim) to enable companies to simulate complex systems and evaluate new strategies for their operation.
Natashia's Publications
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