GPO - Research Group in Operational Research
Operational Research is an area of science applied to decision making. It emerged during World War II when military resources were scarce and the objective was to make do during the war. Considering this, problems arose related to logistics and combat strategies, i.e., problems involving great complexity. Thus, the first studies published in operational Research were based on World War II's military base. The success of the techniques used by operational Research made the research groups formed to transfer these concepts to companies who experienced strategy and decision making problems. The Operational Research Group from Industrial Engineering aims to study and develop techniques to support decisions in production and logistics systems. Professionals in this area are prepared to understand, model and solve problems of different natures, i.e., they are flexible professionals who are able to develop different methods and solutions for a given problem. The target public are graduates from Production Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, Computing, Economics, Administration or related areas. The main areas of activity of professionals in operational research are problems related to production planning and control, design and planning problems in manufacturing systems and logistic networks, problems in configuring and operating medical and emergency systems, batch sizing and sequencing, routing and scheduling problems, cutting and packaging problems, among others. To address these problems, the group uses optimisation approaches and performance analysis such as mathematical modelling and combinatorial optimisation, stochastic modelling and the queuing theory, heuristics, metaheuristics and exact methods, among others.
Contact: morabito@ufscar.br