Busy, Busy, Busy

I put three "Busys" because I'm busy in several ways...

The War Damn IEagle flag football team won our first game last night, 31-0.  It was really fun and we had a beer (or two) to celebrate at Quixote's afterwards.  College is such fun!

Our project for the warehousing class is finally coming together.  We worked feverishly on Monday and Tuesday trying to learn a new animated simulation program called Simio.  On Wednesday afternoon we decided to minimize our use of Simio.  We'll use existing (free) software from the website where our textbook is posted (also free) to solve our SKU slotting into the correct locations problem and to optimize our pick paths and only use Simio to deal with congestion--pickers getting stuck behind each other in the aisles.  And our outreach group members will be working on the cut-off time problem.  I feel so much better about this project now.  We'll be able to write up a methodology that the client can implement using available software and I think that is our ultimate goal.

My research on using Ant Colony Optimization to solve the Double Row Layout Problem has gotten complicated...again.  We now have two different versions of our program in Matlab--Ant System is very basic, Any Colony System is more complicated with additional parameters to tweak so it is more likely to work as we add more machines.  Now we need to add some continuous processing to both programs and we'll try using the Linear Programming functionality of Matlab to do that.  Our benchmarking program (used in the paper that got this research started) is an exact process using CPLEX and we've been running it through AMPL.  On my old, slow office computer for 6 machines it reaches optimum in about 3 minutes; for 10 machines it took about 45 minutes and when I tried 15 machines it crashed with a memory error after about 4 hours.  So, naturally, I'm now learning a new programming language, OPL (Optimization Programming Language) to run CPLEX on a Linux server.

I'm still trying to understand EndNote.  It is one of several workable solutions for bibliography management, but since I've already paid for it I should probably stick with it.  At my meeting last Friday with my research professor I just brought the printed PDFs with me to show him what I had found.  I'm on the right track and we're expecting to narrow down to a dissertation topic before I leave here in December.

Tonight I'm going to Tiger Talk at the conference center downtown for dinner and to hear Coach Chizik talk.  I'll be with COSAM (College of Science and Math) people and I think it will be really fun.  And, finally Allan and Brandon are coming up this weekend for the LSU game and I'm still looking for tickets.