Oliver Bastert

Santa Claus is facing a challenge in this pandemic year. Kids worldwide can’t sit on Santa’s lap. Elves are in lockdown and he needs to find new toy sources. Plus with Dancer and Prancer self-isolating, he needs a new way to make his worldwide rounds. This calls for advanced AI and decision management technology – enter FICO! The race is on to keep Santa on schedule.…

Recently, a performance announcement from a FICO competitor caused a big shakeup in the mathematical optimization community. My colleague Timo Berthold and I wrote a detailed post about MIP benchmarking on the FICO Community blog, but I thought it was worth sharing the gist of it here. At issue is how developers benchmark the performance of mathematical optimization…

It seems like just yesterday Santa got back from his sunny post-Christmas vacation, and now we’re talking about how Santa’s operation can be optimized mathematically. But, even though the Holidays last a few months, Santa’s operation is a year round affair. In early December, in partnership with Kaggle, a platform for predictive modeling competitions, we asked is it…

Each year, Santa (the jolly old elf) has a grueling toy-production schedule to keep. Toy orders arrive all year long, and production must be completed by noon North Pole Time on December 24 in order to make an on-time Christmas delivery. Santa’s workshop also must comply with strict rules of the Elfin Workers Union. This year, in partnership with Kaggle, a platform f…

The NBA recently fined the San Antonio Spurs $250,000 for resting four of their marquee players in a game against the Miami Heat. The Spurs coach stood by his decision stating this was the sixth game of a road trip and it was also was the Spurs’ fourth game in five nights. The NBA commissioner argues that he needs to protect the league and the fans by having teams…

This year marks the 40th birthday of the Forrest-Tomlin Method, which was implemented to speed up the simplex algorithm for early computer architectures. As many Operations Researchers know, this method is still applicable as one of the fundamental technologies in optimization software.  One of the cornerstones of linear programming is an efficient update of…

We recently worked with a leading auto lending company to set up FICO Xpress Optimization Suite for their collections needs. Historically, collections has been a very subjective business left in the hands of the individual collector. We’ve seen more analytics being used to pick the right action based on customer behavior and degree of delinquency. This latest tren…