What does challenges such as climate change, labor shortage, health logistics and economic uncertainty have in common? Certainly, then need to better understand these phenomena, to accurately predict trends, and design efficient, resilient, sustainable and safer systems, that guide our future actions towards a more prosperous and fairer world.
For the last five decades, the Interuniversity Research Center on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT) has been innovating in research and developing applied decision-making tools for its partners, which benefit the entire society.
With more than 120 professors in 15 universities in Quebec, CIRRELT improves practices in key areas: health and humanitarian logistics, energy and forestry, manufacturing and service industry, road safety and transportation planning (people and goods), and smart cities. This will be done through partnerships in which researchers will manage real-life industrial problems in collaboration with personnel from the field: research contracts, subsidized research, and highly qualified students doing internships in organizations.
CIRRELT’s expertise is known worldwide. Spin-offs have emerged from CIRRELT and today dominate the market in their field, such as INRO, ExPretio and GIRO. The latter is now present in 28 countries and optimizes the postal services and bus, train and metro lines of more than 200 transport companies.
Throughout the world, CIRRELT is one of the three largest transportation research centers, and is the one with the highest concentration of operations research experts. CIRRELT is characterized by it’s interdisciplinarity approach and some of its members are among the most influential in the world, in terms of significant publications and citations, with remarkable advances in combinatorial optimization and hybrid models (machine and real-time optimization).
Today, CIRRELT has more than 700 students at all levels, some 60 active industrial partners, motivated by innovation and technology transfer, as well as academic partnerships with Quebec research centers and foreign partners.
Whether the goal is to plan the reconstruction of a country after an earthquake, to improve our road safety record, or to offer a better public transport service, CIRRELT deploys all means to improve the efficiency of operations. CIRRELT leads and carry the flame of sustainable transition and innovation.
