MISTA - Multidisciplinary International Scheduling Conference
2017-12-05 - 2017-12-08 | Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
This conference series serves as a forum for an international community of researchers, practitioners and vendors on all aspects of multi-disciplinary scheduling. The aim is to bring together scheduling researchers and practitioners from all the disciplines that engage with scheduling research.

Measuring the impacts of OR projects - Challenges And Experience
2018-02-15 13:00 - 2018-02-16 17:00 UTC | Paris, Paris, France
First meeting of the work group with some very exciting plenary speaker and a great opportunity to learn from and build networks among other practitioners.
Also see the attached document will all abstracts for the short sessions on Thursday . Full list of abstracts 29-1-18
EURO practice of OR workshop 11-1-2018

SW18 - Simulation Workshop
2018-03-19 - 2018-03-21 | Warwickshire, United Kingdom
19th – 21st March 2018 sees the return of the OR Society’s biennial simulation workshop (SW18). The conference always boasts an excellent mix of delegates from the fields of simulation practice and research. The conference covers application and theoretical developments across all simulation methods, for example agent based simulation, system dynamics, discrete-event simulation and monte-carlo simulation. It takes place in Warwickshire, UK. Further information in the link on the right panel.

The Annual Analytics Summit 2018
2018-06-12 | London, United Kingdom
Invited speakers and ‘how-to’ workshops showcasing the importance of decision analytics for better decision-making in virtually any area of business. Jointly organised by the UK’s OR Society and Royal Statistical Society. 2 June 2018, London. Watch this space for further info.

EURO 2018 - 29th European Conference on Operational Research
2018-07-09 - 2018-07-11 | Valencia, Spain
The biggest OR conference in Europe takes place in July in Valencia. There will be a series of activities under the ‘Making an Impact’ banner, aimed at practitioners. Further information to follow.

OR60 - The UK's 60th annual OR Conference
2018-09-11 - 2018-09-13 | Lancaster University, United Kingdom
The UK OR conference, 11-13 September 2018 celebrates its 60th anniversary. It will take place in Lancaster University, the first university in the UK with an OR department, with a long history of applied OR and liaision with industry and practice. The scientific programme will include practice-oriented talks from both academics and practitioners, as well as activities designed specifically to help practitioners outside academia become more effective.

IT Research Workshop at IFIP World Computer Congress
2018-09-20 - 2018-09-21 | Poznan University of Technology, Poznan, Poland
In conjuction with the IFIP WCC there will be a workshop focused on the collaboration between academia and industry. One of our members Andrzej Jaszkiewicz will be the chair and are looking forward to meet you. Have a look at the call for papers below.
ITRW18-CallForPapers

2nd conference of the EURO Working Group on the Practice of Operations Research
2019-03-11 - 2019-03-12 | Bologna, Italy
The 2nd conference of the EURO Working Group on the Practice of Operations Research will take place on 11th and 12th March in the beautiful city of Bologna (Italy) and is going to focus on “Operations Research meets Machine Learning: how to get the most of both worlds to achieve excellent Decision Support Systems”.
To see the preliminary program, venue information and register (free), go to https://ormeetsml.eventbrite.com
The call for abstracts is closed. See you in Bologna!
Looking forward to meeting you in Bologna.
Here is the program and schedule in a nice flyer in pdf: EWG POR second conference 11-12.

EURO-k 2019
2019-06-23 - 2019-06-26 | Dublin, Ireland
It’s time for the big EURO conference, and again the working group is present with the Making An Impact track.
For more information here is the link to the official Making an Impact page at EURO-k 2019

Operations Research towards Technology Transfer: from Data to Actionable Knowledge
2019-09-05 | Department of Economics and Business Studies (DIEC), University of Genova, via F. Vivaldi, 5 - Darsena, Genova, Genova, Italy
Save the date: on September 5th, 2019, in the wonderful city of Genoa (Italy) will take place the workshop Operations Research towards Technology Transfer: from Data to Actionable Knowledge.
The meeting will bring together companies and researchers to exchange ideas, knowledge and expertise, promote collaborations and outline the forthcoming landscape for Operational Research driven innovation.
Furthermore, the workshop will be the opportunity to illustrate successful examples on the integration between Operational Research and Machine Learning and to foster a discussion on the potential for development in areas such as Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.
Practitioners and transfer facilitators in OR and Analytics, from academia, OR start-up, spin-off and intermediary organizations, are invited to present their experiences in exploiting the synergy of Operational Research with data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning to enable more effective business decisions and more productive systems.
The workshop is organized in the framework of the International Conference on Optimization and Decision Science – ODS 2019 (Genoa, Italy – 4-7 September 2019), in the wonderful city of Genoa (Italy), simultaneously with the XLIX Annual Meeting of AIRO, the Italian Operations Research Society.

Second International Workshop on High-Performance Business Computing
2020-03-26 - 2020-03-27 | Paderborn
For more information look here.

Euro Working Group - Practice of OR Meeting 2020
2020-09-28 13:00 - 2020-11-02 17:00 UTC | Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin, Berlin, Germany
The working group meeting have gone digital (due to COVID-19)
The online event continues in the form of a webinar series on Mondays at 4pm CET, until 2 November 2020.
To register please click here.

The recordings of talks can be accessed on YouTube
Some speakers are also making their presentations available in PDF form and we will have those published as soon as possible.

For the full program see the attached PDF below (click the picture):

First Friday Webinar - Programming by Optimization: Automated algorithm configuration, selection and beyond
2021-01-08 10:00 - 11:00 UTC
In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the use of automated algorithm design methods, such as automated algorithm configuration and portfolio-based algorithm selection, across many areas within operations research, artificial intelligence and beyond. These methods are based on cutting-edge machine learning and optimization techniques; they have also led to substantial advances in those areas.
In this tutorial, I will give an overview of these automated algorithm design methods and introduce Programming by Optimization (PbO), a principled approach for developing high-performance software based on them. I will explain how PbO can fundamentally change the nature of developing solvers for challenging computational problems and give examples for its successful application to a range of prominent problems from OR and AI – notably, mixed integer programming, the travelling salesman problem, AI planning, automated reasoning and machine learning.

EWG POR webinars organisers:
Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Patrick Schittekat (SINTEF), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic

First Friday Webinar - Progress and Challenges with the CP-SAT solver
2021-02-05 10:00 - 11:00 UTC
About this Event

CP-SAT won all gold medals in the Minizinc challenge in the tracks it participated in the last 3 years. It also proved 5 open problems in the MIPLIB 2017 suite, and improved bounds on a few more. In a sense, it realizes the old dream of having a good MIP solver and a good CP solver in the same engine. In this presentation, we will present how the SAT technology has enabled this merging of the two techniques in a competitive way, and concludes with the challenges and research opportunities in front of us.

EWG POR webinars organisers:
Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Patrick Schittekat (SINTEF), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic

First Friday Webinar - Optimizing emergency response systems
2021-03-05 10:00 - 11:00 UTC
Emergency response systems, e.g. fire and rescue services and emergency medical services, have been a popular area of study for operational researchers. However, unlike for the airline industry for instance, there do not exist an abundance of success stories, where advanced operational research models and methods have been implemented in practice. In this talk, I’ll present a few emergency response problems, including the classical fire station location problem, ambulance dispatching and relocation, and volunteer management, where OR have been used in practice. I will also discuss some of the challenges with practical implementations, and the trade-off between working on something that is useful in practice, and something that can be published in an OR journal.

EWG POR webinars organisers: Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Patrick Schittekat (SINTEF), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic

First Friday Webinar - Tackling supply chain disruptions in pandemics – learning from humanitarian logistics
2021-04-09 10:00 - 23:00 (Europe/Paris)
Humanitarian logistics plays an important part in responding to disasters, crisis, but also epidemics and pandemics. This talk is about what we can learn from humanitarian logistics in tackling supply chain disruptions in pandemics. The talk also gives examples and shares results from current research projects on the COVID-19 pandemic, and also discusses the challenges with the ever-changing parameters of pandemic response.

EWG POR webinars organisers: Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Patrick Schittekat (SINTEF), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic

First Friday Webinar - Operational Research and Quantum Computing: can they join forces?
2021-05-07 10:00 - 11:00 (Europe/Stockholm)
We experience the benefits of classical computing every day. However, there are challenges that today’s systems would never be able to solve. To stand a chance at solving some of these problems, we need a new kind of computing: Quantum Computing. During this session we will explore together what quantum computers are about, and how they might be applied to operational research and more specifically optimization problems. With this, you would be able to start exploring how quantum computing can help with your research.

EWG POR webinars organisers:
Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Patrick Schittekat (SINTEF), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic

First Friday Webinars - The Intersection of Operational Research and Public Communication
2021-07-09 17:00 - 18:00 UTC
The Intersection of Operational Research and Public Communication during the Covid-19 Pandemic

About this event

In May 2020, I joined the group Independent SAGE. At the time, I thought I was signing up to one or two public meetings on YouTube, but instead our profile grew and we discovered there was a large public appetite for more information about Covid and its spread in the UK. From the summer onwards, I have been giving regular updates on the latest Covid situation in the UK during Independent SAGE weekly briefings and have been invited regularly on the media fielding questions about various aspects of the Covid pandemic. In this talk, I will reflect on how my experience of working in Operational Research applied to health care has shaped how I have understood and communicated the Covid pandemic over the past year. This ranges from thinking through problem definition and unintended consequences, combining knowledge across different disciplines to deciding on where the information lies in the data and how best to present it.

EWG POR webinars organisers: Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Patrick Schittekat (SINTEF), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic

EURO 2021
2021-07-11 - 2021-07-14
In addition to the general invite we would also like to especially recommend the “Practice of OR” track that the working group organizes and that is especially aimed at practitioners of OR. More details on this track will be published later.

EURO 2021 is the largest and most important conference for Operational Research and Management Science (OR/MS) in Europe organized by EURO – the European Association of Operational Research Society and the Hellenic Operational Research Society (HELORS).
The conference will be held at the University of West Attica (UNIWA) in Athens located in the area of the Holy Olive Grove ‘Eleonas’ of the ancient Athenians, where Plato taught his students.
We have selected several outstanding Plenaries & Tutorial Speakers that will present the state-of-the-art in Operations Research and outline pathways of its future developments.
Participants will have the opportunity to submit their work for publication in a series of special issues of very important journals.
At the same time, we are preparing a wonderful and enjoyable program of social events to be held as part of the conference.
After a year of lockdowns and limited travel, we are optimistic that the EURO 2021 Conference will again provide an excellent opportunity for the OR community to meet in person in a city that in a unique way stands for the identity of Europe. Of course, all necessary precautions will be taken to ensure the health and safety of conference participants.
Euro 2021 acknowledges that virtual conferences can’t entirely replicate the conference experience, which normally involves face to face meetings and networking opportunities. However, Euro 2021 is fully prepared to adjust its strategy in case of any similar situation and to convert the physical congress to a hybrid or virtual one, with main objective that the new format will continue to meet the needs of the Euro 2021 community and to ensure a viable future for the association’s activities in scientific education and professional support. Registered participants will still be eligible to participate, authors whose abstracts were accepted will be published in the digital abstract book, with e-posters available for virtual consultation and industry to have a wide selection of sponsorship opportunities.
We invite researchers, academics, practitioners, and students interested in any branch of Operational Research, mathematical modelling or economic analysis to submit abstracts or organize sessions and attend a high quality and safe conference.

First Friday Webinars - Recent developments of real-time train scheduling optimization in the practice
2021-09-03 10:00 - 11:00 UTC
Trains running through railway networks are monitored and guided in real time by train dispatchers. They control train movements by taking various relevant decisions, such as where trains should pass and meet each other, when trains should arrive or depart from stations, which routes they must take, etc. These decisions become crucial when one or more trains are delayed, in order to reduce knock-on effects and quickly regain punctuality.
In the past decades a significant research effort has been devoted to developing optimization models and methods for (automatic) real-time train rescheduling (dispatching). However, such academic effort did not translate into a widespread use of such techniques in the practice of train dispatching. To the best of my knowledge, only a few fully or partially autonomous dispatching systems are or have been rolled out over the years to support dispatchers. The mathematics and data technology required for supporting the practice, at least to a certain extent, have been approaching maturity for at least 10-15 years, and are possibly fully mature now. So, what has impeded a more widespread development and deployment of such systems? In the talk, I will try to formulate an answer to this question and also discuss some recent developments and “gamechangers” which show that the situation is rapidly evolving.
I will start by describing the basic mathematical models and methods for representing and solving train (re-)scheduling problems. I will then describe a new system to dispatch trains in the greater Oslo area, an important portion of the Norwegian railway network which includes the large Oslo central station and all the adjacent lines. Although not in operation yet, the system has the highest level of readiness (TLR 9) and is currently undergoing on-field testing by professional dispatchers at Oslo Control Center.
After this I will quickly review the few, real-life dispatching systems which (to the best of my knowledge) are or have been in operation for supporting dispatchers in practice.
I will end the talk by analyzing which were the main hurdles for the penetration of optimization methods into the practice of dispatching and why things are changing now. This discussion may be of inspiration for other sectors with similar obstacles (such as, for instance, air-traffic control).
Recent developments of real-time train scheduling optimization image
EWG POR webinars organisers: Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Patrick Schittekat (SINTEF), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic

First Friday Webinars - OR in Practice
2021-10-08 10:00 - 11:00 UTC
Thanks to all great developments in mathematics and computing power, we are able to solve more complex problems within a reasonable amount of time. Machine learning and other AI-techniques can boost the power of OR. But are we also able to explain the outcome to the industry? Optimal is not always logical, which leads to challenges both in modeling and in implementation. In this presentation I like to share my thoughts, based on my professorship “Logistic Optimization” at Tilburg University and my long experience (in parallel) as “Optimization Evangelist” at ORTEC. ORTEC is a global and leading partner in data-driven decision support.

Goos Kant is a full professor of Logistic Optimization at Tilburg University. He is involved in the Master program of Business Analytics and Operations Research, as well as in the master program Data Science & Entrepreneurship at Jheronimus Academy of Data Science. He is the project leader of a large R&D project on horizontal collaboration in logistics. Goos is also managing partner at ORTEC, active as “Optimization Evangelist” in various (logistic) industries. Goos is involved in courses from MBA-schools TIAS and Nyenrode. He holds both an MSc and a PhD in Computer Science.

EWG POR webinars organisers: Sofiane Oussedik (IBM), Joaquim Gromicho (ORTEC), Patrick Schittekat (SINTEF), Gavin Bell (Optimeering), Adisa Mujezinovic

First Friday Webinars - Improving Global Risk Management of Emerging Health Threats with Facilitated Decision Analysis
2021-11-05 10:00 - 11:00 UTC | Online
Professor Gilberto Montibeller (Loughborough University, UK; University Southern California, USA),
Professor L. Alberto Franco (Loughborough University, UK; University del Pacifico, Peru)
Emerging health threats, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, create extensive health, economic and social problems. A key challenge for health experts and policy makers is deciding how to balance and reduce the risk of these threats.
In this applied research project, we developed an advanced framework to support the prioritisation of emerging health threats. The project won the prestigious EURO Excellence in Practice Award conferred by the Association of European Operational Research Societies, during the 31st EURO Conference on Operational Research held in Athens this year.
The research project achieved the following impacts in two global organisations:
(i) enhanced the quality of health experts’ policy recommendations at the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and improved health risk control regulations;
(ii) informed the development of new international standards for the Food Standards Joint Programme of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization.
The contributions to Operational Research arising from the ongoing research programme are built upon three themes, which are focused on improving decision capability for the prioritisation of emerging health threats. These are tool development, process enhancement and competence building:
• Tool development encompassed the creation of rigorous decision analytic models to support decision making in the prioritisation of emerging health threats, as well as the design of risk management support tools that enable policy makers to use these models.
• Process enhancement focused on the redesign of decision processes to address the challenges posed by the prioritisation of emergent health threats, to enable the embedding of risk management support tools within organisational routines.
• Finally, competence building supported the development of health experts’ decision and risk analysis skills, together with the effective deployment of value-focused decision making and sound health risk management practices.
Health security is an important area of application for Operational Research and in this talk we will share our experiences in conducting these challenge and successful applied research projects.

Working Group meeting 2021
2021-11-16 13:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Berlin) | Online
See the working group meeting page.
For registration go to our EventBrite page

First Friday Webinars - Optimization Approaches in e-commerce: Network Design & Marketplace Dispatching
2021-12-03 10:00 - 11:00 UTC | Online
Presented by Çağrı Doğuş Iyican (Trendyol Express) and Yahya Ertuğrul Geçkil (Trendyol Express)
Trendyol Express (TEX) is the sub-branch in Trendyol that leads daily cargo operations. As in other cargo cases, it needs depots for storing, sorting and transporting to meet customer demand and manage seller supplies. In this context, TEX has two kinds of depots for its operations which are sorting centers and cross-docks (x-docks). Sorting centers are responsible for taking packages from sellers and delivering these packages to x-docks whereas x-docks are responsible for delivering packages to customers. In a growing market, first mile and last mile demands in e-commerce forces planners to design an efficient network in order to optimize delivery times. This project aims to find the optimal locations for sorting centers and x-docks under several operational constraints.
Increasing e-commerce demand is hard to satisfy because of delivery bottlenecks. Cargo capacity growth ratio is far below e-commerce sales growth. Also, delivery costs have a major effect on expenses for e-commerce companies. Furthermore, delivery management is crucial for customer satisfaction levels. However, as well as customers, the number of sellers taking place in marketplaces is also increasing dramatically. Since it is not possible to find out best practice for tens of thousands of sellers manually, it is quite possible that resources are wasted, customers can not reach their orders in desired time and sellers deal with unnecessary costs. Besides, managers waste weeks only to find out a feasible plan. A mathematical model is developed for solving the dispatching problem for marketplace sales beside backlog amount. The model aims to distribute backlog and sales by minimizing the total delivery time.

First Friday Webinars - Julia and Python - differences and features comparison on an example use case
2022-01-14 10:00 - 11:00 UTC | Online
Presented by Moulay Driss El Alaoui Faris, Energy Decision Scientist (Air Liquide)
Embedding OR functionalities in operational tools to address a large class of problems requires designing the software architecture to provide the required modularity.
In this talk we will present comparative design of component primitives (Nodes Arcs Boxes) in Python and Julia. A particular exploration question is how to use Julia for the design of object oriented software.

First Friday Webinars - Courier-oriented route optimization for last-mile delivery at Deutsche Post
2022-02-04 10:00 - 11:00 UTC | Online
Traditional last-mile delivery planning purely based on optimization methods often lacks important real-life aspects and thus does not satisfy relevant operational requirements. Only experienced couriers have tacit knowledge about the delivery area and its customers, forcing them to deviate from planned routes. They know where to find good parking spots, when to best approach certain business customers, and which neighbors to approach at what times when the actual recipient is not at home. This tacit knowledge is almost impossible to collect and maintain, let alone to incorporate in optimization algorithms.
Thus, we at Deutsche Post DHL developed an algorithm following a different approach: We aim at implicitly learning about this tacit knowledge from historical tours and combine this with optimization algorithms to plan routes that an experienced courier would choose. In this talk we will present details of our algorithm, which incorporates machine learning, statistics, and optimization in a novel way. Furthermore, we show how it impacted last-mile delivery planning at Deutsche Post after its rollout across Germany.

About the speakers
Speaker Ugur Arikan is an Operations Research Scientist in the Data Analytics Center of Excellence at Deutsche Post DHL. He got his MSc and PhD degrees in Industrial Engineering at Middle East Technical University. His PhD and postdoc studies focused on airline disruption management and distributionally robust traffic equilibrium, respectively. He joined DPDHL after his postdoc at Singapore University of Technology and Design. Currently, he focuses on last-mile delivery and service network design projects within the team.
Speaker Jonas Witt is working as Operations Research Scientist in the Data Analytics Center of Excellence at Deutsche Post DHL, currently focusing on last-mile delivery and service network design projects. He has a B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree in Mathematics from RWTH Aachen University as well as a doctoral degree from RWTH Aachen University on decomposition methods for mixed-integer linear programming. Besides his operations research expertise, he gained experience working on more general data analytics projects as consultant.

First Friday Webinars - Why puzzles are very interesting for OR consulting?
2022-03-04 10:00 - 11:00 UTC | Online
Presented by Alex Fleischer, Optimization Expert (IBM)
When trying to solve puzzles, practitioners train themselves on OR techniques (and other techniques). Puzzles are good ways for large and small companies to have OR practitioners from academia and consulting take a look at their specific issues (ROADEF / Euro challenges). Puzzles can support challenging students to show motivation and skills.
Why puzzles are very interesting with regards to equivalent computational challenges? We need to map real world concepts to mathematical concepts and that’s useful! They also tell a story, so they’re very easy to share and explain.
Kaggle challenges are part of the buzz around data science. During the presentation, I’ll mention other public challenges with examples: The IBM Ponder this challenge, the Decision Management challenge, and, not to forget, the “Comité International des Jeux Mathématiques”, and I will request the audience’s feedback with regard to deciding if challenges are good training paths for OR consulting and, also, if real-world business OR helps practitioners get better at challenge.

First Friday Webinars - How BT is using OR to make sustainable impact in resource management
2022-04-01 10:00 - 11:00 UTC | Online
Presented by Dr. Anne Liret, Research Manager (British Telecommunications)
In the face of the climate emergency, several measures are being taken to move to more sustainable sources of energy. The transport sector has increasingly adopted Electric Vehicles (EVs) in order to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions. This has led to the necessity of accounting for these technologies in the area of field services delivery. In particular BT Research have been developing technical solutions to support the introduction of EV into their large fleet operations. This led to new models to plan for new EV chargers deployment minimising the energy risk, and then to schedule jobs and charge activities of electric vehicles in the feasible operational manner for field engineers while minimising the productivity impact.
By optimising the infrastructure, the required investment can be determined as well as minimising the disruption to the operations caused by the rollout of the new VE fleet and infrastructure can be minimised. As usual in operational research applied to decision-making support, the measuring of the impact on real-case trials is key to make sure changes adoption is going smoothly.

First Friday Webinars - Optimisation for airports – London Heathrow
2022-05-06 10:00 - 11:00 UTC | Online
Dr Jason Atkin is a member of the Computational Optimisation and Learning lab in the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham. He has been working with NATS and Heathrow airport since he started his PhD on the topic in late 2003. Although he has also worked on various other airport optimisation and modelling problems, his work has primarily been focusing on real-world runway sequencing at the airport, considering the ‘often messy’ real world constraints and characteristics of the problems. Having previously been a software engineer in industry, he applied various software engineering techniques to the challenge, which gives a somewhat different perspective to the usual academic approaches.
This talk will discuss the work with NATS and Heathrow, which contributed to Heathrow being able to predict take-off times accurately enough to gaining CDM compliance. Various versions of the problem will be discussed, introducing both the real world situation at Heathrow and considering the various academic simplifications that have sometimes been used for similar problems, and their implications in the real world. Ongoing work with Heathrow is still providing further enhancements and improvements over time.

EURO Working Group on Practice of OR/Practitioners’ Forum past and planned activities are available to the Forum members, as well as the wider public. Register as a member for free, to get the regular updates on all activities: EWG POR Member registration page
The recordings and details from previous webinars are available here. Follow the Forum on Twitter and LinkedIN , and feel free to get in touch.

Comparing services: why hospitals should call
2022-06-03 10:00 - 11:00 UTC
About the speaker:
Ger Koole is full professor of business analytics and optimization at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is also founder and lead scientist of the call center workforce management company CCmath. He obtained his PhD at Leiden University in 1992 with theoretical work on the control of queueing systems.
Before moving to Amsterdam he held the postdoc positions at CWI and INRIA. Over the years, his interests moved to applications of optimization under uncertainty, especially in call centers, health care and revenue management.
Abstract:
In this talk, I will make a comparison between call centers and hospitals, from the point of view of operations management.
I will show how advanced prediction and optimization techniques impact call center operations and how academia and industry interact to move the field forward. We will compare this with the current state of our health care system, identify similarities and differences, and discuss what blocks further improvements in quality and efficiency.

EURO Working Group on Practice of OR/Practitioners’ Forum past and planned activities are available to the Forum members, as well as the wider public. Register as a member for free, to get the regular updates on all activities: EWG POR Member registration page
The recordings and details from previous webinars are available here. Follow the Forum on Twitter and LinkedIN , and feel free to get in touch.
