<commit_before>---
title: Success Story 3
shorttitle: Breadth
category: success
---

# Success Story - Breadth of Projects

The 2015 PIMS Industrial Problem Solving Workshop was at the University of Saskatchewan, hosting five problems from a wide variety of disciplines. A brief description of each gives an idea of the breadth of problems that can be approached with advanced mathematical and statistical techniques.

**Design of a Quantum Gate - IQST group.**
The heart of a quantum computer is a simple quantum gate that has several inputs and outputs controlling a certain number of basic quanta of information known as qubits. A four qubit design leads to a hard optimization problem in $$4^4 = 256$$  dimensions. A mathematical re-formulation of the design problem led to an algorithmically simpler *feasible region* problem. The result is a computational efficient algorithm that solves the design in a matter of hours of compute time, rather than weeks or months. 

**Distributed Acoustic Sensing for Microseimsic - Fotech Inc.**
In current oil recovery technologies, fluid flow and fracturing processes can be monitored with novel distributed acoustic sensing devices built on fibre optic cables that are embedding in a bore hole and interrogated with a sophisitcated laser emitter and detector system. The problem under study is to determine how single-component sensor data can be used to provide information about fracture hypocentres. Travel time, Eikonal equations, and least square modelling of the data are all used to improve the resolution of the sensing equipment. 

**Price to Value for Agricultural Exchanges - Ag Exchange Group.**
Farmers grow grain and sell their inventory for delivery to local terminals. From there, the grain is shipped to destination markets. Grain Buyers typically purchase grain from a given region for delivery to a given terminal, and the price offered to a Farmer is a function of many factors, including a role for a Broker. Ag Exchange offers a data service that reduces cost and risks to the users of their system. The challenge at this workshop is to produce a means to maximize the revenue to the service provider, while presenting users with evidence that the service is a cost-effective approach for them.

**Making a Successful Advertising Campaign - Insightrix.**
Advertising and marketing are a considerable expense for most companies. To show the return on investment, companies often seek some kind of measurement to assess their performance. Such measurements are notoriously difficult and present a complex optimization problem that has not yet been solved. With an increasingly fractured market, it is more and more difficult to provide a valid and reliable benchmark for advertising performance. The challenge for this workshop is to create an accurate and statistically valid measurement for data gathered from several tracking surveys, for use in benchmarking and evaluating return on investment. 

**Optimal scheduling for mining production - Potash Corp.**
Managing a network of mines is a complex operation, each mine with its own unique character, producing a range of products at various capacities, with varying amounts of space for
on-site inventory storage, often with processing facilities to refine products, and with unique transportation access and costs. Scheduling of shut-downs and starts-up of each mine, and a variety of labour and fiscal constraints, can be a key step in determining the network operations. Ultimately the goal of a commercial mining operation is to maximize profits over a sustained period of time, taking into considerations the constraints of operation while responding to opportunities in the marketplace. The challege at this workshop is to develop a general methodology to reliably optimize operations of a network of mines over a
sustained period. 
<commit_msg>Update 2016-01-01-Breadth.md<commit_after>---
title: Success Story 3
shorttitle: IPSW
category: success
---

# Industrial Problem Solving Workshop (IPSW)

The 2015 PIMS Industrial Problem Solving Workshop was hosted at the University of Saskatchewan, where company researchers and university academics collaborated on five industrial problems from a variety of economic sectors. In one week, a great deal of progress is made in focusing on the mathematical or statistical challenges of each problem, and develop solution methods for each. The brief descriptions below give an idea of the breadth of problems that can tackled.

**Design of a Quantum Gate - IQST group.**
The heart of a quantum computer is a simple quantum gate that has several inputs and outputs controlling a certain number of basic quanta of information known as qubits. A four qubit design leads to a hard optimization problem in $$4^4 = 256$$  dimensions. A mathematical re-formulation of the design problem led to an algorithmically simpler *feasible region* problem. The result is a computational efficient algorithm that solves the design in a matter of hours of compute time, rather than weeks or months. 

**Distributed Acoustic Sensing for Microseimsic - Fotech Inc.**
In current oil recovery technologies, fluid flow and fracturing processes can be monitored with novel distributed acoustic sensing devices built on fibre optic cables that are embedding in a bore hole and interrogated with a sophisitcated laser emitter and detector system. The problem under study is to determine how single-component sensor data can be used to provide information about fracture hypocentres. Travel time, Eikonal equations, and least square modelling of the data are all used to improve the resolution of the sensing equipment. 

**Price to Value for Agricultural Exchanges - Ag Exchange Group.**
Farmers grow grain and sell their inventory for delivery to local terminals. From there, the grain is shipped to destination markets. Grain Buyers typically purchase grain from a given region for delivery to a given terminal, and the price offered to a Farmer is a function of many factors, including a role for a Broker. Ag Exchange offers a data service that reduces cost and risks to the users of their system. The challenge at this workshop is to produce a means to maximize the revenue to the service provider, while presenting users with evidence that the service is a cost-effective approach for them.

**Making a Successful Advertising Campaign - Insightrix.**
Advertising and marketing are a considerable expense for most companies. To show the return on investment, companies often seek some kind of measurement to assess their performance. Such measurements are notoriously difficult and present a complex optimization problem that has not yet been solved. With an increasingly fractured market, it is more and more difficult to provide a valid and reliable benchmark for advertising performance. The challenge for this workshop is to create an accurate and statistically valid measurement for data gathered from several tracking surveys, for use in benchmarking and evaluating return on investment. 

**Optimal scheduling for mining production - Potash Corp.**
Managing a network of mines is a complex operation, each mine with its own unique character, producing a range of products at various capacities, with varying amounts of space for
on-site inventory storage, often with processing facilities to refine products, and with unique transportation access and costs. Scheduling of shut-downs and starts-up of each mine, and a variety of labour and fiscal constraints, can be a key step in determining the network operations. Ultimately the goal of a commercial mining operation is to maximize profits over a sustained period of time, taking into considerations the constraints of operation while responding to opportunities in the marketplace. The challege at this workshop is to develop a general methodology to reliably optimize operations of a network of mines over a
sustained period. 

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