Quintessa’s operational research consulting services provide objective, analytical and quantitative support for the evaluation and optimisation of complex situations arising in industry, services and business. In the UK, this is usually called Operational Research (OR) but elsewhere it also referred to as Operations Research, Operations Management, Business Analytics and Management Science.
The goal of our operational research consulting services is to optimise the effectiveness of resources within the context of a wide variety of internal and external constraints. Key OR issues include optimisation, planning, scheduling, efficiency and productivity.
As with other areas of Quintessa’s work, the key is working in partnership with our clients to formulate the problem in a way that will lead to an effective and useful solution. This is where the wide-ranging experience of our mathematicians and scientists can have a major impact.
Quintessa has worked on the optimisation of environmental monitoring programmes, the scheduling of nuclear reactor inspections and forecasting their likely outcomes, and the optimisation of algorithms for exploring and testing genome databases. An example of this is our CHANSELA software, produced for EDF Energy, which takes account of a wide range of factors to support decisions on which selection of channels of Advanced Gas Cooled Reactors (AGRs) should be inspected to support continued safe operation. A paper with further details of the methods used in CHANSELA was published in Nuclear Engineering and Design in 2018.