MORe: Associate Professor Natashia Boland

Short Biography

Natashia founded Melbourne Operations Research in 2003 and is currently a Professor in Mathematics at the University of Newcastle.

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.

Consulting Activities

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.

Technical Expertise

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.

Research Activities

• Optimal Army stationing policies
• Airline planning and optimisation
• Telecommunications Network Design
• Delivery Logistics and Inventory Routing
• Timetabling in Education
• Cancer Treatment
• Mining
• Robotics

Publications

FULLY REFEREED PAPERS

1. N. Boland and R. Owens. "On the behaviour of robots through singularities." Proc. of the International Symposium and Exposition on Robots, November 6-10 1988: pp. 1122-1134.

2. N. Boland and A.I. Mees. "New methods for multicommodity flows. Computers and Mathematics with Applications, 20: 29-38, 1990.

3. N. Boland, C.J. Goh and A.I. Mees. "An algorithm for solving quadratic network flow problems." Applied Mathematics Letters, 4: 61-64, 1991.

4. A. Loerch, N. Boland, E.L. Johnson and G.L. Nemhauser. "Finding an optimal stationing policy for the US Army in Europe after the force drawdown." Military Operations Research, 2:39-51, 1996.

5. N. Boland. "A dual-active-set algorithm for positive semi-definite quadratic programming." Mathematical Programming, 78:1-27, 1997.

6. C. Barnhart, N. Boland, L. Clarke, E.L. Johnson, G.L. Nemhauser and R.G. Shenoi. "Flight string models for aircraft fleeting and routing." Transportation Science, 32: 208-220, 1998.

7. P. Neame, N. Boland and D. Ralph. "An outer approximate subdifferential method for piecewise affine optimization." Mathematical Programming, 87: 57-86, 2000.

8. N. Boland, L.W. Clarke and G.L. Nemhauser. "The asymmetric traveling salesman problem with replenishment arcs." European Journal of Operational Research, 123:408-427, 2000.

9. J. Ebery, A. Ernst, M. Krishnamoorthy and N. Boland. "The capacitated multiple allocation hub location problem: formulations and algorithms." European Journal of Operational Research, 120: 614-631, 2000.

10. V. Mak and N. Boland. "Heuristic approaches to the asymmetric travelling salesman problem with replenishment arcs." International Transactions in Operations Research, 7:431-447, 2000.

11. N. Boland and T. Surendonk. "A column generation approach to delivery planning over time with inhomogeneous service providers and service interval constraints." Annals of Operations Research, N. Boland, M. Krishnamoorthy and P. Stuckey (eds.), 108:143-156, 2001.

12. I. Dumitrescu and N. Boland, "Algorithms for the weight constrained shortest path Problem." International Transactions of Operations Research, 8:15-29, 2001.

13. A.V. Tran, R.S. Tucker, W.D. Zhong and N.L. Boland . "Efficient design of WDM ring networks with optical amplifiers." Proceedings of the Optoelectronic Communication Conference, 1-5 July 2001, Sydney, Australia, 58-59.

14. B. Davey, N. Boland and P. Stuckey. "Efficient intelligent backtracking using linear programming." INFORMS Journal on Computing, Special Issue on the Merging of Mathematical Programming and Constraint Programming, J.W. Chinneck (ed.), 14:373-386, 2002.

15. N. Boland, M. Krishnamoorthy, A. Ernst and J. Ebery. "Preprocessing and cutting for multiple allocation hub location problems." European Journal of Operational Research [In Press], accepted 3rd September 2002.

16. N. Boland and I. Dumitrescu. "Improved preprocessing, labelling and scaling algorithms for the weight constrained shortest path problem", Networks [In Press], accepted 8th February 2003.

17. L.T.G. Merlot, N. Boland, B.D. Hughes and P. Stuckey, "A hybrid algorithm for the examination timetabling problem" (2002) Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling IV, Lecture Notes in Computer Science [In Press], accepted 18th February 2003.

SELECTED UNREFEREED PAPERS

1. P. Neame, N. Boland and D. Ralph. "Nonsmooth optimization in integer programming", Proceedings of the 13th National Conference of the Australian Society for Operations Research, Canberra, September 25-27, 1995: pp. 7-14.

2. B. Davey and N. Boland. "Cost modification heuristics for set partitioning problems and air crew scheduling, Proceedings of the 13th National Conference of the Australian Society for Operations Research, Canberra, September 25-27, 1995: pp. 99-111.

3. N. Boland and D. Panton. "Production planning and scheduling of evaporative air-conditioners", Proceedings of the 1995 Mathematics-In-Industry Study Group, J. Hewitt, (ed.), Mathematics-in-Industry-Study-Group, Australia, 1996: pp. 109-123.

4. N. Boland, M. Krishnamoorthy, A. Ernst and J. Ebery. "Preprocessing and cutting for multiple allocation hub location problems", Proceedings of the 15th National Conference of the Australian Society for Operations Research, Gold Coast, Australia, July 4-7 (1999): pp. 205-220.

5. N. Boland, J. Horton and E. Jago. "Delivery planning over time with inhomogeneous service providers and service spread constraints", Proceedings of the 15th National Conference of the Australian Society for Operations Research, Gold Coast, Australia, July 4-7 (1999): pp. 194-204.

6. B. Davey, N. Boland and P. Stuckey. "Efficient intelligent backtracking using linear programming", Proceedings of the 15th National Conference of the Australian Society for Operations Research, Gold Coast, Australia, July 4-7 (1999): pp. 389-404.

7. S. Taylor, N. Boland and A. Philpott. "Optimal spanning trees with attenuation and amplification", Proceedings of the 15th National Conference of the Australian Society for Operations Research, Gold Coast, Australia, July 4-7 (1999): pp. 1225-1244.

8. L.T.G. Merlot, N. Boland, B.D. Hughes and P. Stuckey. "A hybrid algorithm for the examination timetabling problem", Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling, 21-23 August 2002, Gent, Belgium, E. Burke and P. de Causemaecker (eds.), pp. 348-371.

9. N. Boland, P. Dominguez-Marin, S. Nickel & J. Puerto. "Exact procedures for solving the discrete ordered median problem". Fraunhofer Institut fur Techno- und Wirtschaftsmathematik ITWM Report No. 47, 2003.