Searching for Optimisation

Operations Research (OR) can be dened as a scientic approachto the solution of problems in the management of complex systems.It uses quantitative methods to help decision makers design, analyse,and improve the performance or operation of these systems. An im-portant part of this, is dening and solving optimisation problems.One can only be interested in nding the best solution, but often (inpractice) a combination of, or interaction between, the quality of thesolution and the computation time is important. Model-based algo-rithms and heuristics have traditionally played a role in this, however,data-based methods such as machine learning are increasingly used.Hardware improvements are also not to be underestimated. A majorimprovement in the computing power of conventional computers hasmade problem solving methods more ecient over the past 40 yearsand is still ongoing. This is currently being reinforced by the useof GPU processors, the emergence of quantum computers and othertechnological solutions such as photonic accelerators. This playingeld of OR problems and the use of machine learning and existingand emerging hardware accelerations to dene and solve them is thetopic of the eld of `Computational Operations Research', which isdiscussed further in this article