The Operations Research / Management Science Blog

According to Innovations Report, four British universities, Lancaster, Nottingham, Cardiff and Southampton, are brought together by a £12 million initiative named LANCS to boost Operational Research (OR) in the UK. The LANCS initiative is supported with a Science and Innovation Award from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which is the main UK government agency for funding research and training in engineering and the physical sciences.

OR was born in the UK. Therefore, it makes sense that the UK government is willing to spend money and effort to support OR research and to ensure that UK maintains its status as one of the leaders in this field. This requires increasing the number of research activities going on by increasing the number of researchers developing the underpinning theories of OR. The four members of LANCS will be collaborating on expanding their research capacity on the development of theoretical OR. This is something that I am really happy about because British researchers have always been particularly strong at studying OR theories and that an increasingly solid theoretical foundation is very important for the health and prosperity of OR. Although OR is applied problem-solving by nature, more innovative applications are only possible with advanced theories.

The summary of the purposes of the funding copied from the official grant page on EPSRC’s website is shown below:

The United Kingdom is the home of Operational Research (OR) and it maintains an application-oriented research tradition which is both true to its roots and which is also highly distinctive, if not unique. Many industries and public services are the beneficiaries of this effort, not least healthcare, finance, transport and defence. However, the EPSRC/ESRC 2004 International Review of the Research Status of OR in the UK warned that this leading position in applied work in OR could be jeopardised in the absence of a critical mass of researchers developing underpinning theory. In the LANCS (Lancaster, Nottingham, Cardiff, Southampton) initiative, four universities, which have been at the forefront of UK research in OR, have committed to a major expansion of research capacity in its theoretical foundations, supported by the additional resources available as a result of the current Science and Innovation call. The universities concerned have already worked together in the creation of NATCOR, an EPSRC-supported initiative aimed at strengthening doctoral programmes in the mathematics of OR. They have also evidenced their commitment to the subject by recent decisions (in advance of this call) to invest substantially in it. In total, the LANCS initiative will oversee additional new investment of approximately 12M through the five year period of the award, of which more than half comes from the institutions themselves. All the institutions have also committed to sustaining this additional capacity beyond the five year EPSRC funded period. This will have a major impact on the subject. The initiative aims to build and maintain a substantial new national capacity in its theoretical base by establishing this major cross-institutional and multi-disciplinary collaboration. Such a programme is crucial to support the health of the application oriented research which was highlighted as such a strength by the 2004 international review. Indeed, the main motivation of this proposal is to underpin the health of the UK research base in this critically important area. This far sighted initiative aims to establish theoretical advances in the field which are informed by, and which feed into, real applications.

The Science and Innovation Awards were created by EPSRC to invest in important research areas that are either missing or no longer have the capacity needed for research and education (i.e. “at risk”) in the UK. Therefore, the establishment of LANCS kind of indicates that OR is “at risk” in the UK. I certainly hope that this grant will serve its purpose by creating more OR-related activities that can make substantial progress, boost research, and encourage innovation in business and industry.

References
“£12m investment to boost Operational Research” by Emma Thorne, Innovations Report, Jan 2008
“The LANCS (Lancaster, Nottingham, Cardiff and Southampton) Initiative in Foundational Operational Research: Building Theory for Practice“, EPSRC
“Science and Innovation Awards“, EPSRC