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Philosophy

Operations Management & Operations Research (OM/OR) is an interdisciplinary concentration of ESSEC Business School PhD Program. It provides students a structured education in quantitative research methods and complex tools for management science. It focuses on theoretical, empirical and methodological research of managerial decisions that drive all disciplines interested in the process of formulating, evaluating and executing high quality decision making, possibly applied to economics, management, marketing, digital business, finance, risk management, operations, supply chain management. The period of courses lasts for 1,5 year, with Research Apprenticeship Modules (RAMs) that start in the first year (under the supervision of a Professor) and aim at producing a first research paper before the Dissertation Proposal, which takes place at the end of the second year.

Each applicant has to choose a single specialization in the application file BEFORE entering the program, explaining her/his specific motivation for the selected specialization. There are open positions in both specializations each year.

Subfields

Operations Management not only concerns the traditional creation, production, and delivery of products and services, but it takes a broader view that comprises several areas such as supply chain management, logistics, purchasing management, project management, and new product development. All these fields have a strong operational focus and a potential impact on the successful management of operations. This subfield is hosted by the OMOR cluster and the OM department.

Recent research interests of our faculty include:
- Environmental management and monitoring
- Humanitarian logistics and relief operations
- Supply Chain Management and coordination
- New product development
- Digital operations

Operations Research concerns both the application of quantitative methods to optimally solve planning decision problems. Our faculty performs research on the development of new methods and applications in Operations and Supply Chain management (production planning, transportation and routing, facility location, network design, sustainable operations). This subfield is hosted by the OMOR cluster comprising professors of the IDS and OM departments.

Recent research interests of our faculty include:
- Advanced Decision Theory
- Continuous-time Dynamic Games
- Optimal control Theory
- Robust optimization
- Selection problems with choice models (application to assortment, facility location)
- Bilevel programming
- Decomposition methods (Column Generation, Branch-and-Price-and-Cut, Benders decomposition)

The courses in OM/OR cover the following topics: introductory optimization methods (Linear Programming, duality, graph problems, dynamic programming), advanced optimization methods (decomposition methods, Column Generation, Benders decomposition, cutting plane methods, robust optimization), technology management and new product development, sustainable operations, optimal control, game theory, dynamic games, dynamic methods, advanced decision theory, SCM, applied statistics, econometrics, simulation for operations management.

Coding skills are important to implement models, methodologies and solving algorithms. Coding languages and softwares are presented in various courses.

Faculty

Laurent ALFANDARI is Professor in the Department of Information Systems, Decision Science & Statistics and holds a Doctorate in Operations Research from Université Paris IX Dauphine. His research fields are: operations research, discrete optimization and applications to operations management (network design, city logistics, scheduling, production planning, routing problems and facility location).

Claudia ARCHETTI is Associate Professor in Operations Research. Prior to joining ESSEC in 2019, she was appointed as Associate Professor at the University of Brescia. Research interests of Claudia Archetti include models and algorithms for vehicle routing problems; mixed integer mathematical programming models for the minimization of the sum of inventory and transportation costs in logistic networks; exact and heuristic algorithms for supply-chain management; reoptimization of combinatorial optimization problems. She is author of more than 60 papers in international journals. She was Area Editor of Computers and Operations Research. She is Associate Editor of Transportation Science and of Networks and member of the Editorial Board of European Journal of Operational Research. She is currently VIP3 of EURO, the Association of European Operational Research Societies, in charge of publications and communication.

Philippe-Pierre DORNIER is Professor in the Department of Operations Management and holds a Doctorat en Ingénierie et Gestion from École des Mines de Paris. His research is focused on change management in supply chain and on optimization of the sales point within the supply chain.

Fouad El OUARDIGHI is Professor in the Department of Operations Management and holds a doctorate in Business Administration from Université Paris Ouest (Paris 10 Nanterre). His main research interests are in the interface of operations management and marketing, in R&D competition, and in pollution control. He is Associate Editor for International Game Theory Review.

Ivana LJUBIC is Professor at the Department of Information Systems, Decision Science & Statistics and holds a Doctorate in Computer Science from the Vienna University of Technology. She serves as Associate Editor for the journal Omega and she is member of Editorial Advisory Board for the journal Computers and Operations Research. She also served as guest-editor of journals: European Journal of Operational Research and Annals of Operations Research and she is currently vice-president of the INFORMS Network Analytics and Telecommunication Section. Her research interests include network design problems, combinatorial optimization, optimization under uncertainty and bilevel optimization.

Felix PAPIER is Associate Professor in the Department of Operations Management and holds a Doctorate from the University of Cologne. His research interests include supply chain and inventory management, sustainable operations, rental fleet optimization, and spare parts management.

Sara REZAEE VESSAL is Assistant Professor at the Department of Operations Management. She received her Doctorate in Operations and Supply Chain Management from HEC Paris. Her research interests include collaboration in supply chain, new product development and collaboration in highly uncertain projects, value of information in coordinating supply chains, and sustainable supply chain.

Recent placement of Alumni

Bocconi University (Italy), Mercy College, New York (USA)The Lebanese American University (Lebanon),Tecnologico de Monterrey (Mexico), Curtin Business School, Perth, (Australia).