The 27th National Workshop on Cutting, Packing, Lot-Sizing, and Scheduling Problems and Related Topics (ONPCE) was held on March 12–13, 2026, at the UFSCar campus in Sorocaba, São Paulo. The event brought together more than 100 researchers, graduate students, and industry practitioners from across Brazil and abroad, marking the fourth consecutive in-person edition since the pandemic.

Organized within the scope of the FAPESP Thematic Project "Cutting, Packing, Lot-Sizing, Scheduling, Routing and Location Problems and their Integration in Industrial and Logistics Settings" (process 2022/05803-3), the workshop served as both a scientific forum and a collaborative gathering for the OptPL research network.

"The ONPCE series has been central to consolidating our research community over more than 25 years. It is where ideas turn into collaborations, and collaborations turn into results."

— Prof. Reinaldo Morabito, Project Coordinator, UFSCar

Scientific Program

The two-day program featured three invited talks, five technical sessions, a poster session, and a panel discussion on industry–academia collaboration. On the first day, Prof. Dr. Helenice Oliveira (UNESP) delivered a talk on nonlinear cutting stock problems, followed by Prof. Dr. Claudia Archetti (University of Brescia, Italy) who presented recent advances in vehicle routing under uncertainty. The second day opened with a lecture by Prof. Dr. Eduardo Uchoa Barboza (UFF) on exact methods for combinatorial optimization.

Technical sessions covered all seven research areas of the OptPL project — cutting, packing, lot-sizing, scheduling, routing, location, and integrated problems — with 32 paper presentations selected from submitted abstracts. A poster session with 18 contributions was held during the coffee breaks, fostering informal discussion among participants.

Industry–Academia Panel

One of the highlights of this edition was the panel discussion on Friday afternoon, featuring Gabriela Furtado (Mercado Livre), Volnei dos Santos (UniSoma), and Prof. Dr. Tiago A. de Almeida (UFSCar). The panelists discussed the challenges and opportunities of transferring optimization research into real industrial applications, sharing case studies from logistics, e-commerce, and manufacturing sectors.

Event at a Glance