Optimization
Our mission is to develop optimal solutions to complex co-ordination problems in industry and the public sector, for instance within planning, scheduling, rostering, routing, and design. We utilize the latest optimization methods and advanced software engineering techniques to deliver sophisticated solutions to our customers.
Both industry and the public sector face numerous challenges in today's competitive environment. The open access to information in the modern network society has expanded companies' markets to a global scale. Customers expect services to be cheap, timely, and efficient. Organizational flexibility is vital to accommodate further growth.
Efficient use of time and resources is a key to success in any organization. Applying optimization and planning technologies enable businesses to better coordinate resources including people, equipment, vehicles, materials, time, and money. The result is substantial improvement of critical parameters such as resource utilization, operational costs, profit, customer service, and environmental impact.
Co-ordinating activities within an organization is a time consuming process, where even small, relative improvements would result in large savings. Industrial experience from the area of transportation management shows that more than 10% cost reduction and 75% saving in planning time may be achieved by use of modern optimization technology.
The Group of Optimization has an excellent record of delivering tailored, high performance solutions to the industry and public sector. Our customers cover a broad range of application areas.
Business Areas
During the past years we have developed solutions within:
Research Themes
At the core of planning, design, and coordination tasks in industry and the public sector there are complex and computationally hard discrete optimization problems. Typically, these tasks are too complex for humans. Human problem solving must often concentrate on finding a satisfactory solution in reasonable time. Computer tools based on discrete optimization methods will assist the human planner in exploring the vast space of possible solutions more thoroughly. Better solutions are found in less time.
For some optimization problems in real-life applications, the best solution will be found in reasonable time using exact optimization methods. However, in most cases the problem will be too hard, so finding the optimal solution will take too much time even with the fastest computer. In the latter case one must use an approximative method.
It is especially important to utilize the most efficient optimization method for the task at hand. Our group has deep competence in the lastest exact and approximative methods in discrete optimization. Equally important, we are experts in analyzing real-life applications, choosing the best optimization method, and developing tailor-made optimization algorithms if needed.
Our areas of competence include:
