Optimisation & Decision Analytics

Optimisation and decision analytics technologies are ubiquitous in the modern world. These technologies are applied in many real-world contexts such as telecommunications, transportation, logistics, internet commerce, life sciences, transportation, network management, supply chain management, energy efficiency, environmental sustainability, and many others. Making decisions in many settings can offer too many choices, many of which are incompatible, few of which are optimal.

Building on over a decade of cutting-edge research at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Insight’s Optimisation and Decision Analytics research programme develops the science and technologies that will make it easier for computers to help us make these decisions. We will develop leading-edge decision analytics technology capable of supporting decision making in settings that are characterised by: independent and strategically self-interested agents; concerns about the impact of decisions on communities, societies and groups; highly stochastic and online real-time settings; and openness and constant change.

Through this research programme we will contribute new scientific breakthroughs in the fields of constraint programming, discrete and continuous optimisation, reasoning about preferences and uncertainty, simulation, forecasting, and algorithmic decision theory. We will develop innovation optimisation and decision analytics systems and tools which we will deploy in collaboration with our academic and industry partners to maximise the societal impact of our research.