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Our previous work in the
Millennium Nucleus had a clear impact in several industries and
government agencies, and one of the objectives of the Institute is to
expand our capacity to develop and implement novel solutions to complex
real life problems. This is a list of projects already implemented or
under implementation:
Private Institutions
- Forestry Logistics Optimization in the largest companies in South
America and South
Africa. In forestry, the
Operations Management Group models and systems are in the frontier
for supporting operational decisions in harvesting and
transportation. Systems developed are used by forest firms in Chile, Brazil,
Colombia, Uruguay, Argentine,
South Africa, and
Venezuela
. The impact in the industry, together with a prolific series of
scientific publications, has established the group to be a global
reference in forest management, and this academic leadership has
been reflected in important awards.
In
Chile
, the national companies are completely integrated to international
markets in which competitive prices are one of the most important
variables. Since logistics costs comprise almost a half of the total
costs faced by the companies, it is clear the importance of an
adequate management of the forestry logistics.
In recent years, we have begun the internationalization of
our activities. We started selling our logistics solutions to
regional leader companies, and then developing a solid platform to
extend our products and services. Since 2000 projects have been
carried out with Aracruz Cellulose (Brazilian company owner of the
world biggest cellulose plant); VCP, Votorantim Celulose e Papel
(the most important paper company in Latin America and part of the
second biggest economic group in Brazil); FOSA (Uruguayan company
founded by Shell now part of the Finnish group Botnia; AltoParana
(the biggest company in the Argentine forestry sector); Carton de
Colombia (the biggest forestry company of Colombia); and we also
have had a minor experience with Terranova in Venezuela.
- CODELCO. Members of the
Nucleus, directed by Rafael Epstein, have been working with CODELCO,
owner of the world biggest copper mines, in problems related to plan
long range mine extraction and investment in infrastructure for
underground and open pit mines. They have developed systems which
could optimize operational and investment plans in the long term,
usually more than 20 years, resulting in complex mixed integer
linear programming models with several hundred of thousands
variables and constraints. In the last year the main development was
in Northern Chile, to integrate the
operation of several mines which share processing plants and
consider that one mine could go from open pit to underground.
- Arauco Panels. This
project, directed by Andrés Weintraub consisted of developing a
tool, based in a linear programming model and heuristic algorithms,
to support the scheduling of the productive process of the company.
This tool, being tested now, aims to coordinate the production and
orders, obtaining a better accomplishment of deadlines and reducing
the waste of raw materials. Implementation of the system, and
modifications, and evaluation in a limited production environment
was done in 2004.
- BCI Bank. Our group has been
working with the Chilean bank Bci (Banco de Crédito e Inversiones)
for more than 5 years applying advanced systems for customer
retention and CRM (customer relationship management). The bank uses
in its daily operation a neural network based solution for churn
detection and has developed together with our group pilots for
customer segmentation, cross-selling, and web usage mining. Most of
this work has been published in national and international journals.
- Chilean Professional Soccer Association (ANFP). In 2004, a
team leaded by the Nucleus member Guillermo Durán developed and
implemented a mathematical model to schedule the Chilean soccer
tournaments. The model considers more conditions than those can be
analyzed by traditional methods, and has successfully been applied
to schedule the two tournaments of 2005.
- Supply Chain and Logistics. In 2004, members of the group started
significant work in this area with a supermarket chain BRYC (Bravo y
Cia.) and Unilever, a main supplier. We
consider problems in inventory, transportation and distribution.
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Public Institutions
- JUNAEB. We developed a combinatorial auction procedure to optimize contract
assignments of meal supplies for low income schools. The yearly
savings reached were of about US$ 40 million (15% of budget). This
work won the Developing Countries Prize for best work of the
International Federation of Operational Research Societies (Edinburgh ,
2002)
- Urban Development. In
October 2002, Francisco Martínez, Project Director and member of our
group, presented to the public the licensed software package called
MUSSA. This land use software combines data bases and Geographic
Information Systems (GIS) to make data management and calculations
accessible to a variety of professionals in the urban planning
context. It allows planners to predict the expected development of
the city (buildings, location distributions, land rents, etc.) for a
given scenario defined by: transport system, regulations,
incentives, economic development, etc. Thus, it is a tool to assess
urban policies. MUSSA is based in urban localization equilibrium
model which considers the stochastic behavior of the agents (homes,
firms, etc.).
- Chilean Government Treasury Department. This institution has over 2 million uncollected tax debts
every year and several procedures to collect them. Members of the
group directed by Rafael Epstein have been involved in developing a
system to support decisions in relation to which debtors should be
pursued by legal means in order to maximize expected returns, given
Department's resources. The system uses statistical tools,
information technology and a mathematical model to support these
decisions, and is already in its initial using stage.
- SUNAT. Members
from our group have participated in the development of a system for
fraud detection based on data mining techniques for SUNAT, the
Peruvian government tax collections authority, a pioneering
experience in Latin America. For
its business and technology accomplishments, SUNAT received an award
in 2004 from the Peruvian IT community.
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