What is Decision Science: Planning, Optimization and Statistics?

Planning and Scheduling

The problem of planning human or material resources consists in designing a planning enabling a forecast of optimal use of resources. Scheduling consists of indicating the order of production or satisfaction of services, so as to maximize a given objective. The difficulty is to respect several types of constraints: availability, characteristics specific to each resource, maximum load or wear, etc. Our skills in this field, especially staff planning, allow us to propose appropriate tools, meeting the specific needs of each problem.

Optimization

Optimization consists in determining the optimum (maximum or minimum) of a function, subject or not to constraints. We prefer the combinatorial aspect of optimization, which consists in determining the best possible solution among a finite choice of solutions. The main tools we use are graph theory (flows and multiflots), algebra and linear programming.

Statistics and Data Mining

The statistics make it possible to describe a set of data synthetically, to test hypotheses relating to a situation, and more generally to treat all kinds of data, whether qualitative or quantitative. The statistical tools allow, among others, the decisional analysis in deterministic or stochastic environment, and the prediction by methods of surveys or analysis of history. Data Mining consists of finding structures underlying a very large amount of data (magnitude: Gigabyte). Through specialized software, "data mining" allows prediction, classification, segmentation or scoring.