Planning for the Public Sector

Nowadays, sound theories and principles of production and operations management are more and more needed and applied in the public sector. At one time, public sector operations were seen as rather uncomplicated and their improvement had only a marginal value. This view has changed drastically in the last decades. Decision makers now understand that modern, scientific techniques applied to the public sector can substantially contribute to the general welfare. At our centre, operations research techniques are designed for personalised mobile tourist guides and to support decision makers in railway scheduling. Different metaheuristic algorithms are designed to deal with real-life planning problems, in real-time.
Healthcare is without any doubt an important sector in modern society. Recently healthcare organizations are undergoing quite some changes. In these changes patient-centeredness is a main issue. In order to optimize logistic processes in healthcare organizations, many concepts from industrial logistics are customized and adopted.