We're looking for abstracts from across the optimisation community — industry practitioners, researchers, and students at every stage. If you've solved a real problem, run into an interesting wall, or built something that's actually in use, we'd like to hear about it.

Formats

• Presentation — 15 minutes, plus 5 for questions.
• Poster — presented during the poster session.
• Presentation preferred — you'd rather give a talk, but you'll take a poster slot if the program fills up. Choosing this doesn't make a talk any less likely; it just means we can offer you a poster, instead of turning you down.

Writing your abstract

500 words or fewer. We'll also ask for a title, your institution or company, and which theme(s) your work fits.

One thing worth knowing before you start: our audience is deliberately mixed — industry people, academics and students in the same room. Please keep talks largely non-technical, with no more than a slide or two of heavy detail. The work that lands best at OPTIMA-CON is the work explained in terms of the problem it solves.

Themes

We're not running to a single theme. Tag your submission with whichever apply:

• Arts;
• Infrastructure, Logistics and Transport; Defence and Cybersecurity;
• Energy, Water and Resource Management;
• Advanced Manufacturing;
• Climate and Environment;
• Health and Wellbeing;
• Social Good; Education, Finance and the Service Economy;
• Food Security and Agriculture;
• Optimisation Technologies;
• Scientific Discoveries
• Other

If none of them fit, say so — we'd still like to see it.

Questions about submitting go to info@optima.org.au. Registration, venue and travel details are on the conference website.

The first 15 industry abstracts submitted and selected are eligible for a discounted registration. Discounts are limited to one per company and are not available where the company or individual is already eligible for discounted registration through OPTIMA membership, sponsorship or another arrangement.

Due to the non-technical nature of the conference, formal conference proceedings will not be published. However, selected work arising from OPTIMA-CON 27 will be compiled into a post-conference paper for submission to an academic journal, following the approach taken after our previous conference.

You can view the paper arising from the previous conference here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11590-026-02299-5