mbuetzler

This year, Lleny, Franz, Lutz, Michael, and Steve traveled to Seattle for the INFORMS Annual Meeting 2019. Lutz and Steve held a Pre-Conference Workshop on Saturday, talking about GAMS and our interactive web application framework GAMS MIRO, which was well received. On Tuesday, Michael gave a Conference Talk about Solving Energy System Models with GAMS on HPC platforms.

Three very exciting and well-organized workshops on advanced GAMS features as well as CGE modeling took place this May. For this adventure, Michael, Steve and Freddy from GAMS teamed up with Agapi Somwaru who recently retired from USDA and Xinshen Diao from IFPRI, two experts in CGE modeling. Yumei Zhang from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) was our main local contact for the entire trip. After arriving in Beijing and having the opportunity to visit some incredible places like the Summer Palace and the Great Wall, we started our first two-day workshop in Beijing. CGE modeling in GAMS turned out to be a hot topic! Yumei had to reschedule our room twice, since more than a hundred people had registered for the course.

In April this year, Franz, Lleny, Freddy, and Marius traveled to Austin for the INFORMS Business Analytics Conference. Franz and Freddy held a Pre-Conference Workshop on Sunday morning, talking about GAMS and our interactive web application framework GAMS MIRO, which was well received. Then in the evening, the conference started.

As usual, CAPD was a well-organized 2-day conference. It is small enough that there are no parallel sessions. So the group was together from breakfast through dinner, which allows for and fosters lots of interaction on professional and social levels. The venue - CMU’s campus and the conference dinner at Monterey Bay - was very pleasant and conducive to good discussion. We enjoyed the opportunity to connect with some GAMS users from industry there to hear about their projects and to answer some of their questions along the way.