Weekly update 62

Post date: Sep 11, 2015 4:14:26 PM

Week 2 down, and things are starting to heat up. I've been reading umpteen papers and have now met with several of the core folks on the project, including Matt Diebel, Allison Moody, Michael Ferris, Tom Neeson, and Jesse O'Hanley. It looks like there's a few things for me to be working on, all of which involve updating and integrating cost regressions into optimization models. On one front, there's new data for barrier removal/upgrade cost models. On another front, there's refining and integrating a lampricide application cost into the optimization models. This will take some learning on my part, notably: what are all the input data and why these?; reading/writing GAMS code; doing some GIS; and other less interesting tasks.

Next week I hope to start pinning down some research questions so all this work I'm about to embark on has a concrete end-goal!