OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT RESEARCH GROUP

The group’s research activities are concerned with the development of approaches, methods and tools for designing, planning and managing systems for the production and distribution of goods and services. Our goal is to propose solutions to problems appearing in real-world applications. The group mainly covers the Operations Management research domain. Our research is mainly based on the complementarity of qualitative and quantitative approaches.

The first ones allow to qualify and structure the problems to be tackled with regards to its major challenges and dimensions (economic, environmental, human and societal, risk, …). Second, starting from a formalized problem description, we base our work on quantitative approaches for modeling, analyzing, simulating, evaluating and improving performances and optimizing the studied systems. There exist multiple tools and methods supporting decision aid.

The use of those two complementary approaches will lead us to use, adapt and develop new methodological and formal approaches applicable in a more generic scope than the applications they were originally developed for.

The group addresses the following two main research areas:

1. Operations management for the production and distribution of goods:

This is a major topic for many industrial companies in all sectors as well as for retail companies (large retail chains, specialized retail, e-commerce). The common challenge is the ability to improve the responses to client expectations while guaranteeing a sustainable development.

2. Operations management for services:

Optimizing the performances of service related activities is key to achieve client satisfaction (service quality, waiting times, etc.) and production efficiency (investment cost, operational cost, environmental impact, sustainability, etc.).