Optimizing marine insurance brokerage

My name is Gunvor, and I recently finished a Master of Science in Informatics, specializing in optimization. I chose optimization because it is mathematically interesting, and applicable to real-world problems. Halfway through my degree I accepted a job offer of working as a consultant upon completing my degree.

A great deal of industrial problems can be formulated as either minimizing a cost or maximizing a profit, and these are in fact optimization problems. A specialization in optimization enables you to recognize similarities between such problems and well-known, extensively researched optimization problems. Acquiring this skill allows you to analyze, model and efficiently solve real-world problems. This is rewarding on a personal level, and can be immensely valuable for future employers. Studying optimization is suitable for anyone who enjoys programming and wishes to apply theory to solve practical problems.

For my master thesis I collaborated with the marine insurance brokerage company Edge Group AS. My task was to create a model that generates insurance coverages for Edge's customers, and find an efficient way of solving the model. This was an engaging problem, and the final result was a full software implementation. In less than one second the software searches a vast space of solutions, generating insurance coverages that brokers would need hours to create manually.

Supervisor: Dag Haugland