Department of Management Science –seminar
At 2pm on 12th December
In C2, Management School, Lancaster University
How rationalising packaging led to allocating bandwidth.
by
Dr. Celia A. Glass
Department of Actuarial Sciences and Statistics
City University
LONDON EC1V 0HB
This is a story about two applications linked by a common graph theoretic
approach. The first application is in the food processing industry. Here
the company's success in getting into niche markets has become its problem.
The complexity of individualised packaging was too expensive, and
inefficient, for the company. I was called in to help them re-colour code
their products in a rational way. I will explain two alternative OR
approaches to this problem. One of these involves graph colouring. The
solution method turns out to be precisely what the Radio Communications
Agency requires when allocating bandwidth to users. The challenge of
colouring large graphs alone kept the research going in between
applications - but that is another story.
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