MAKING AN IMPACT

MAKING AN IMPACT: The practitioners’ stream 2025

For everybody who uses modelling and analytics to help their organisation and their customers.

The Making an Impact stream is there to help you increase the impact of OR on real-world practical challenges – whether you are in a company, commercial consultancy, or in academia. Every session of the stream is designed to deliver value.

  • Discover! new techniques, latest developments, collaboration opportunities, new ideas
  • Share! Practical experiences, successes, challenges, tips for better outcomes
  • Meet! Practitioners from across Europe and across sector, academic experts, software suppliers

The 90’ sessions include tutorials, presentations, panel discussions and other participative activities:

  • extend your repertoire of techniques, tools and approaches on topics including: digital twins; generative AI; system dynamics; systems thinking; agile practices; and learning how thinking like designers can
  • explore the many challenges of practical OR and ways of addressing them, with sessions on: successful collaborations with academic partners; building convincing explanations for results and systems; persuading management and customers to invest in new OR projects and products; exploring what we are doing, as practitioners, when we are not actually modelling
  • Lightning talks and case study sessions, spotlighting the ways other people are using OR, to stimulate your own practical ideas
  • meet colleagues and exchange ideas through speed networking.

List of planned sessions (each session is 90 minutes)
note that some of these will be running in parallel with each other, and not all are confirmed

(1) Lightning Talks: Up to 15 x 5-minute talks showcasing a huge range practical OR:; demand and supply management in District Heating Networks; systems thinking to address biodiversity and climate change; resolving the curse of data quality; and many more

(2) Speed networking: meet your peers in a friendly, informal way

(3) Exploring System Dynamics: introduction to how System Dynamics can be used to model interconnected, dynamic systems

(4) Introduction to Systems Thinking in practice – the UK government example: 90’ tutorial

(5) Explainability: a workshop around the challenges of explainability and exploring a tool to enable explanation

(6) OR making an impact (1): Hear about how OR is applied in the UK Government and in the organisation responsible for oversight of the National Health Service, NHS-England

(7) What are we doing when we’re not doing modelling: workshop on the different ways we develop and use soft skills in working with clients and ensuring our models are implemented

(8) Generative AI: practitioners’ experiences of using GenAI especially LLMs

(9) Getting to do the things we do: panel discussion on how we persuade customers and managers to invest in (a) exploring possible OR solutions and (b) actually implementing them

(10) Successful collaborations: a 90’ panel discussion on experiences of collaborations between academics and industry, in particular through engaging students

(11) Design thinking: workshop exploring how the principles of successful design can help with planning and implementing OR solutions

(12) Digital Twins: tutorial on ways that digital twins can help practitioners, combined with discussions with subject matter experts on specific issues

(13) Matching the pace, OR and IT: panel discussion and Q&A on ways of working with IT, when operationalising OR models into business systems.

(14) New generation solvers: speakers from some of the newer solver companies

(15) OR making an impact (2): 3 x case studies of fully-implemented projects, followed by a facilitated discussion between the speakers on common features

(16) Short tutorials: 2 x 45’ tutorials on issues of common concern

To find out more, contact us at [email protected]

This stream has been designed by a pan-European group of practitioners and academics interested in practice, led by the EURO Practitioners’ Forum. EURO Working Group on Practice of OR – Applying O.R. to make an impact

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