Cookies Policy
The website need some cookies and similar means to function. If you permit us, we will use those means to collect data on your visits for aggregated statistics to improve our service. Find out More
Accept Reject
  • Menu
Facts & Numbers
000
Presentation

Industrial Engineering and Management

The centre is an international reference in business analytics through decision support systems for service and operations management, contributing also in service design, performance assessment and asset management.

Our core areas of application include Mobility/Transports, Retail/Industry and Healthcare, also with significant contributions in the Energy Sector and a strengthened collaboration with the Centre for Power and Energy Systems.

In the latest years, CEGI substantially contribute to Industry 4.0 initiatives (improving scheduling rules based on the additional information available in manufacturing systems).

Latest News
Systems Engineering and Management

What should we know to make our homes more energy efficient? There's a European project that can support us.

Homes in Europe are estimated to be responsible for approximately 40% of the European Union's energy consumption and 36% of greenhouse gas emissions. DECODIT, a European project featuring INESC TEC, will support the energy transition of homes, through the development of digital services to support citizens in the decision-making process of renovating and managing the energy of their homes. These services will help us choose the solutions that best meet our personal needs.

18th February 2025

Systems Engineering and Management

TestBed 5G: INESC TEC in half of the pilots that aim to boost the manufacturing industry

INESC TEC’s Industry and Innovation Laboratory (iiLab) has already received six of the 12 planned pilots. The demonstrations aim to provide industrial solutions with different operating and coordination features.  

29th October 2024

Systems Engineering and Management

Sorting, organising, palletising: INESC TEC technology paving the way to an optimised supply chain

The Institute contributed to a solution that reduces manual efforts and ensures a more flexible supply chain. This involvement was “fundamental”, stemming from the ongoing progress of the PRODUTECH R3 mobilising agenda.  

29th October 2024

Drones, automation and sensing: here are INESC TEC’s solutions to the challenges of the wine sector

INESC TEC researchers led discussions on innovative solutions for vineyards at an event that brought together companies, universities and players in the sector.  

24th October 2024

Systems Engineering and Management

INESC TEC researcher warns companies about the quality of data generated through AI in a paper published by MIT management journal

Could the increasing interest in language models, like ChatGPT, be diverting resources away from companies to adopt advanced analytics practices that truly support smart decisions? Pedro Amorim, INESC TEC researcher, and João Alves (from INESC TEC LTPLabs spin-off) believe so. In a paper published in MIT Sloan Management Review, they warn about the quality and unpredictability of data generated solely from generative language models - despite advocating for more investment in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that incorporates these models with advanced analysis (with concrete reasons provided).

25th June 2024

002

Featured Projects

ChurnManagement

Framework de controlo e gestão de churn com tomada de decisão dinâmica

2025-2027

PFAI4_5eD

Programa de Formação Avançada Industria 4 - 5a edição

2024-2024

Team
Publications

CEGI Publications

View all Publications

2025

A GRASP-based multi-objective approach for the tuna purse seine fishing fleet routing problem

Authors
Granado, I; Silva, E; Carravilla, MA; Oliveira, JF; Hernando, L; Fernandes-Salvador, JA;

Publication
COMPUTERS & OPERATIONS RESEARCH

Abstract
Nowadays, the world's fishing fleet uses 20% more fuel to catch the same amount offish compared to 30 years ago. Addressing this negative environmental and economic performance is crucial due to stricter emission regulations, rising fuel costs, and predicted declines in fish biomass and body sizes due to climate change. Investment in more efficient engines, larger ships and better fuel has been the main response, but this is only feasible in the long term at high infrastructure cost. An alternative is to optimize operations such as the routing of a fleet, which is an extremely complex problem due to its dynamic (time-dependent) moving target characteristics. To date, no other scientific work has approached this problem in its full complexity, i.e., as a dynamic vehicle routing problem with multiple time windows and moving targets. In this paper, two bi-objective mixed linear integer programming (MIP) models are presented, one for the static variant and another for the time-dependent variant. The bi-objective approaches allow to trade off the economic (e.g., probability of high catches) and environmental (e.g., fuel consumption) objectives. To overcome the limitations of exact solutions of the MIP models, a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure for the multi-objective problem (MO-GRASP) is proposed. The computational experiments demonstrate the good performance of the MO-GRASP algorithm with clearly different results when the importance of each objective is varied. In addition, computational experiments conducted on historical data prove the feasibility of applying the MO-GRASP algorithm in a real context and explore the benefits of joint planning (collaborative approach) compared to a non-collaborative strategy. Collaborative approaches enable the definition of better routes that may select slightly worse fishing and planting areas (2.9%), but in exchange fora significant reduction in fuel consumption (17.3%) and time at sea (10.1%) compared to non-collaborative strategies. The final experiment examines the importance of the collaborative approach when the number of available drifting fishing aggregation devices (dFADs) per vessel is reduced.

2025

A three-phase algorithm for the three-dimensional loading vehicle routing problem with split pickups and time windows

Authors
Leloup, E; Paquay, C; Pironet, T; Oliveira, JF;

Publication
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH

Abstract
In a survey of Belgian logistics service providers, the efficiency of first-mile pickup operations was identified as a key area for improvement, given the increasing number of returns in e-commerce, which has a significant impact on traffic congestion, carbon emissions, energy consumption and operational costs. However, the complexity of first-mile pickup operations, resulting from the small number of parcels to be collected at each pickup location, customer time windows, and the need to efficiently accommodate the highly heterogeneous cargo inside the vans, has hindered the development of real-world solution approaches. This article tackles this operational problem as a vehicle routing problem with time windows, time-dependent travel durations, and split pickups and integrates practical 3D container loading constraints such as vertical and horizontal stability as well as amore realistic reachability constraint to replace the classical Last In First Out (LIFO) constraint. To solve it, we propose a three-phase heuristic based on a savings constructive heuristic, an extreme point concept for the loading aspect and a General Variable Neighborhood Search as an improvement phase for both routing and packing. Numerical experiments are conducted to assess the performance of the algorithm on benchmark instances and new instances are tested to validate the positive managerial impacts oncost when allowing split pickups and on driver working duration when extending customer time windows. In addition, we show the impacts of considering the reachability constraint oncost and of the variation of speed during peak hours on schedule feasibility.

2025

Static stability versus packing efficiency in online three-dimensional packing problems: A new approach and a computational study

Authors
Ali, S; Ramos, AG; Oliveira, JF;

Publication
COMPUTERS & OPERATIONS RESEARCH

Abstract
In online three-dimensional packing problems where items are received one by one and require immediate packing decisions without prior knowledge of upcoming items, considering the static stability constraint is crucial for safely packing each arriving item in real time. Unstable loading patterns can result in risks of potential damage to items, containers, and operators during loading/unloading operations. Nevertheless, static stability constraints have often been neglected or oversimplified in existing online heuristic methods in the literature, undermining the practical implementation of these methods in real-world scenarios. In this study, we analyze how different static stability constraints affect solutions' efficiency and cargo stability, aiming to provide valuable insights and develop heuristic algorithms for real-world online problems, thus increasing the applicability of this research field. To this end, we embedded four distinct static stability constraints in online heuristics, including full-base support, partial-base support, center-of-gravity polygon support, and novel partial-base polygon support. Evaluating the impact of these constraints on the efficiency of a wide range of heuristic methods on real instances showed that regarding the number of used bins, heuristics with polygon- based stabilities have superior performance against those under full-base and partial-base support stabilities. The static mechanical equilibriumapproach offers a necessary and sufficient condition for the cargo static stability, and we employed it as a benchmark in our study to assess the quality of the four studied stability constraints. Knowing the number of stable items under each of these constraints provides valuable managerial insight for decision-making in real-world online packing scenarios.

2025

Local stability in kidney exchange programs

Authors
Baratto, M; Crama, Y; Pedroso, JP; Viana, A;

Publication
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH

Abstract
When each patient of a kidney exchange program has a preference ranking over its set of compatible donors, questions naturally arise surrounding the stability of the proposed exchanges. We extend recent work on stable exchanges by introducing and underlining the relevance of a new concept of locally stable, or L-stable, exchanges. We show that locally stable exchanges in a compatibility digraph are exactly the so-called local kernels (L-kernels) of an associated blocking digraph (whereas the stable exchanges are the kernels of the blocking digraph), and we prove that finding a nonempty L-kernel in an arbitrary digraph is NP-complete. Based on these insights, we propose several integer programming formulations for computing an L-stable exchange of maximum size. We conduct numerical experiments to assess the quality of our formulations and to compare the size of maximum L-stable exchanges with the size of maximum stable exchanges. It turns out that nonempty L-stable exchanges frequently exist in digraphs which do not have any stable exchange. All the above results and observations carry over when the concept of (locally) stable exchanges is extended to the concept of (locally) strongly stable exchanges.

2025

Biomimicry for sustainability: Upframing service ecosystems

Authors
Gallan, S; Alkire, L; Teixeira, JG; Heinonen, K; Fisk, P;

Publication
AMS Review

Abstract
Amidst an urgent need for sustainability, novel approaches are required to address environmental challenges. In this context, biomimicry offers a promising logic for catalyzing nature’s wisdom to address this complexity. The purpose of this research is to (1) establish a biomimetic understanding and vocabulary for sustainability and (2) apply biomimicry to upframe service ecosystems as a foundation for sustainability. Our research question is: How can the principles of natural ecosystems inform and enhance the sustainability of service ecosystems? The findings highlight upframed service ecosystems as embodying a set of practices that (1) promote mutualistic interactions, (2) build on local biotic and abiotic components supporting emergence processes, (3) leverage (bio)diversity to build resilience, (4) foster resource sharing for regeneration, and (5) bridge individual roles to optimize the community rather than individual well-being. Our upframed definition of a service ecosystem is a system of resource-integrating biotic actors and abiotic resources functioning according to ecocentric principles for mutualistic and regenerative value creation. The discussion emphasizes the implications of this upframed definition for sustainability practices, advocating for a shift in understanding and interacting with service ecosystems. It emphasizes the potential for immediate mutualistic benefits and long-term regenerative impacts. © Academy of Marketing Science 2025.

Facts & Figures

13Academic Staff

2020

2Book Chapters

2020

19Senior Researchers

2016