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August 2025

The IHTC 2024 (1)

Last year I decided to participate in an Optimization contest about scheduling patients to operation rooms called Integrated Healthcare Timetabling Competition 2024. I didn't do extremely well. This was not a surprise to me: I am aware of how competitive these competitions can be.

That doesn't mean that I did not try hard, though! And since I took it as an opportunity to try engines that I'm not very comfortable using, I actually learn lots.

In this post I will try to go back to the competition and convince myself that I did not do that bad summarize what I did. Hopefully it will be useful for others in the future. I put a (1) in the name because I could not fit everything I did in a single post, I will potentially revisit this topic in the future with my other approaches (see the end of the post for the other approaches / topics).

Decision science & standards

(Here I use the terms engine and solver interchangeably).

What helps a standard become a standard is a mix of luck, popularity and actual usefulness. The optimization community hasn't agreed on many standards, languages or libraries in the past. As a result, there are many ways to code, run and deploy optimization engines. And often people re-invent the wheel.

First post

About me

Academically I'm an Industrial Engineer with a PhD in Operations Research.

Geographically, I'm a Peruvian living in Europe.

Personally, I like bicycles, programming, solving riddles, reading science fiction, and disagreeing / complaining amicably with friends.

Professionally, I've mostly been involved in software development, quantitative consulting and supply chain.