In early September I was fortunate enough to attend The OR Society Conference #OR66, which took place at Bangor University this year. For those of you who've never heard of it, operational research is the application of mathematical techniques to solve logistical problems and was used extensively during the World Wars (l think a link is attached to this post!)
This conference was a wonderful opportunity to see work in the same field but across several industries, which I'd recommend to anyone who is on the fence about attending similar conferences. There were so many excellent talks at the conference, I couldn't even try to describe all of them, but I've tried to give a brief overview of my favourites:
- President's address by Dr Gilbert Owusu focussed on the shape of operational research now and its possible future form. My favourite part of his address was the emphasis on the personal skills required for effective operational research; ‘It's easy to focus on the technique and not think about the "soft side"'. I have always found the OR Society focusses on more than other, related organisations like the RSS on promoting these skills and this was a nice reminder of that emphasis.
- Plenary from Dr Jeroen Mulder discussing various applications of OR within AirFrance-KLM. I could feel lots of parallels to the flight industry and the health and care industry, particularly if we think about the many complex factors that impact the industry and the person-centred focus.
- Strategic workforce modelling that colleagues in HEIW showed, looking to forecast future workforce using a system dynamics model. The model hopes to make projections up to 15 years into the future, to inform the commissioning of education to create that workforce.
- ‘Grand challenges in OR’ workshop. This workshop was an opportunity to put our profession into practice in a completely different setting. We heard the story of the football club the North Wales Dragons, a club that was formed to increase wellbeing through football. The team wanted to find more of the options for assessing their impact and I was able to point them to assessment similar to PROMS/PREMS. It felt amazing to be able to help the club and lend some of my experience for another good cause.
If this sounds like something that would interest you in future, there is a #Simulation workshop scheduled for the end of March and the European conference for #OR, #EURO25, is in Leeds in June 2025.
