My name, as you probably could have guessed from the blog name, is Guido Diepen. Currently I am living together with my wife in Utrecht, which is in the center of Holland, but soon we are to move towards the city of Haarlem, which will be a huge decrease in the commuting time for both my wife and myself.
I finished my master Computer Science at Utrecht University in 2003 with the masters’ research being about solving the gate planning problem at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. During the diploma ceremony, I was invited with the option of doing a PhD by my masters’ research supervisor Han Hoogeveen, which I accepted.
During the beginning of the PhD years, I was looking at scheduling problems in a mathematical setting. Somewhere at about half of the 4 years, my supervisors Han Hoogeveen and Marjan van den Akker had the great idea of looking at the practical scheduling/planning problems occurring at Schiphol airport and see what we could do about those. I was really happy with this thought, since I really like the idea of trying to find solutions for real-life problem and applying OR. On the 10th of September 2008 I defended my thesis, entitled “Column Generation Algorithms for Machine Scheduling and Integrated Airport Planning”, successfully! Some more information about this day can be found in the following blogpost.
Right now I am working for the company Paragon Decision Technology, which is the creator of the modeling software AIMMS.
When I was a student, I joined the local AIESEC committee. During the year I was part of AIESEC, we went with a large group of the team for an international AIESEC conference in Gdansk, Poland. It is here where I met Justyna. After some years of me travelling to Gdansk, and she travelling to Utrecht once every 6 to 8 weeks, she came to live in Holland a couple of years ago. Finally, in September 2006 on the beach in the Dominican Republic I asked her to marry me.
Due to the fact we have two home countries, we had the civil wedding in Holland on the 1st of August 2007 and the church wedding in Poland on the 11th of August 2007. Below a picture taken in the garden of the cathedral in Gdansk:
