Get to know the members of ORSSA: Kit Searle

In this edition of Get to Know the Members of ORSSA, we introduce Kit, who is also based at the University of Edinburgh. As an active member of the Operations Research community, Kit shares his experience and enthusiasm for the field in this post.

Kit, what is your academic and professional background?

"I started off studying Industrial Engineering at Stellenbosch University where I was introduced to OR in my third year. I then went on to complete my PhD under the supervision of Prof Jan van Vuuren on a mostly applied maths problem studying the long term asymptotics of a class of partial differential equations modelling harvesting of a biological population. I then started working as a University Teacher, and now Lecturer, at the University of Edinburgh."

What type of OR-related work are you currently involved in?

"My work mostly relates to combinatorial optimisation. I am interested in both exact and heuristic solution approaches for solving practical and theoretical problems in the realm of  network design, scheduling facility location.  I like to have a balance of solving problems which can have real-world impact and completely impractical problems which are just simply just difficult to solve."

How (and when) did you first get involved with ORSSA?

"I first joined ORSSA in 2017 when I attended the annual conference Champagne Sports Resort, Drakensberg. I really enjoyed the community and so I remained a member and attended most of the conferences until we left to Edinburgh."

Have you had positions on the Exec of ORSSA (and if so, when and what position)?

"I was the chair of the Western Cape chapter from 2018-2020 (I think)."

What do you enjoy most about being part of ORSSA or the OR community?

"Definitely the community and the support many of the members gave me at the start of my career. I have often approached members for projects and datasets that I could use for students and even for help with some programming tips."

What excites you about the field of OR?

"Strangely enough I think the thing that excites me about OR is perhaps its biggest downfall."

Was there a specific project or moment that made you realise, “This is why I love OR”?

"This is probably when I realised how beautiful the mathematics underlying most OR algorithms is. As a student I learnt most algorithms very "algorithmically" in the sense that I learnt its steps. After my PhD, I was involved in teaching a course on the simplex algorithm where we built the algorithm from first principles and it was just beautiful."

What OR method, tool, or concept do you find yourself using most often and why?

"This would have to depend on the project but it would either be the branch-and-cut algorithm or some metaheuristic. I think you need to pick your battles wisely and for many problems where we can find strong integer programming formulations and reinforce it with some custom cuts then it is a very powerful tool. For some problems this is not always possible (or it requires a lot of effort) using a metaheuristic is often the best path of action."

What skills do you think are most important for students or early-career OR practitioners to develop today?

"The simple answer here would be programming skills but assuming you already have this I think learning which is the correct tool to solve your problem will save you a lot of time. I have learnt this the hard way…. As I gained more it became easier to identify which algorithms would work well for a given problem."

 If you had to describe Operations Research using only a movie title, what would it be?

"Mission impossible. This is because I am (almost) certain P != NP but yet so many people (including myself) still chase exact optimisation algorithms for notoriously challenging NP-hard problems."

What’s one small thing in your daily life that you now instinctively “optimise”?

"Probably any kind of packing problem like packing the car or dishwasher. I cant explain the heuristic I use but it seems to be pretty effective…"