We present the transcript of the IFORS distinguished lecture delivered by the author on invitation of SOBRAPO and IFORS. The lecture concerned the development of an interdisciplinary research motivated by an application in mobile telecommunication systems, a project jointly developed by four research teams. The presentation follows the typical steps of a classical operations research study, and aims at reviewing the main theoretical and practical results that were obtained.
mobile WiMAX; two-dimensional packing; area packing; computational complexity; approximation; worst case analysis; computational experiments