Le Bulletin du CRM

Since 2007 the CRM has been organizing Industrial Problem Solving Workshops (IPSW), also called study groups in England or “Semaines d’études mathématiques – entreprises et société » in France. During an industrial problem solving workshop (in general lasting one week), academic researchers, students, and representatives of private or public institutions are gathered to study and solve concrete problems through mathematical methods. Thus the IPSW organizers must find enterprises or institutions willing to submit problems to the workshop and also find researchers willing to coordinate the work of teams tackling these problems. The organizers must publicize the IPSW so that enough graduate students will take part in it. The workshop begins with a plenary session where each enterprise or institution describes its problem and ends with another plenary session where each team presents the work carried out during the week. Between the two plenary sessions the teams work independently from one another, but in some cases all participants gather at the end of the second day (for instance) to present the advances made by the teams. We refer the reader to the following page for the problem descriptions and proceedings of all the Montreal IPSWs.

The “IPSW model” was designed by mathematicians at the University of Oxford in the 1960s but was adopted by universities all over the world, including Europe (for instance the Netherlands, Portugal, and France), Canada, Mexico, Australia, and China, among others. The success of the Montreal IPSWs owes a lot to the location of research centres in the Montreal area: indeed, in the André-Aisenstadt pavilion of the Université de Montréal, one finds the CRM itself, the Department of mathematics and statistics, the Department of computer science and operations research, and GERAD and CIRRELT, two centres whose members apply methods from operations research to problems arising in transportation, energy planning, economics, and other fields. This concentration of academic researchers in the mathematical sciences enabled the IPSW organizers to recruit team coordinators and, in some cases, to find workshop problems thanks to previous links between professors and enterprises.

The team led by Mike Lindstrom (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley) working on a Radio-Canada project in August 2023.

The types of problems submitted to IPSWs have changed somewhat over the years, even though a workshop may include any problem that can be tackled by mathematical methods. The first IPSWs in the Montreal series included several problems related to operations research or differential equations or PDEs. In the recent IPSWs statistics and artificial intelligence (in a broad sense) have been used to examine and solve most of the problems submitted to the workshops. The number of problems in a given workshop has been comprised between 4 and 9: in our opinion the ideal number is 6! From 2007 to 2013 the workshops were organized thanks to grants from MITACS (a network of centres of excellence) and its successor Mprime. From 2015 to 2017 they were organized thanks to the Institutes Innovation Platform, an NSERC program. Since 2019 the main source of financing for the workshops has been the IVADO consortium, whose industrial members also provide many problems to the workshops. The CRM is grateful to all the institutions that have ensured the funding of the Montreal IPSW series.

We conclude this article by outlining the reasons why participants enjoy the IPSWs. The enterprise representatives are delighted to meet experts that examine their problems and propose solutions that they can assess. The researchers coordinating the work of their teams can use their expertise to solve concrete problems and initiate collaborations with public or private institutions. Graduate students can gain experience that will be very useful in their future jobs. Finally, as the Montreal IPSWs welcome participants from several countries and even several continents, researchers and students are able to meet (and work with) colleagues they would not have met otherwise.