About us

The OPL - Operational Research in Production and Logistics - is a research group and laboratory affiliated with the Industrial Engineering Department at Federal University of Ceará (UFC), Fortaleza, Brazil, led by principal investigators Anselmo R. Pitombeira Neto and Bruno A. Prata. The group is interdisciplinary in nature, with researchers and students in different areas, including: engineering, industrial mathematics, computer science and mathematics.

The laboratory carries out research projects with an emphasis on mathematical modeling and computational analysis of production, logistics and transportation problems, using mathematical optimization, stochastic simulation, machine learning and data science. Our objectives include: solving real problems in industry, increasing levels of efficiency and effectiveness of production systems, high-level training of human resources, and application development using algorithms in line with the demands of industry 4.0.

The OPL Lab has its research activities currently focused on the following domain areas: production planning and scheduling, cutting and packaging, resource allocation, facility location, vehicle routing, simulation of logistic systems, and traffic analysis on transportation networks. Other problems of practical interest in the aforementioned areas are also potential targets of our studies.

In our projects, we apply techniques from a broad range of areas, including: mathematical programming, combinatorial optimization, stochastic simulation, machine learning, data science, and statistics (mainly Bayesian), with intensive use of computational tools based on Python, Julia and R.