The French Society for Operational Research and Decision Support ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROADEF (the French Society for Operational Research and Decision Support, **https://www.roadef.org**) is a nonprofit association governed by France's 1901 law. Its mission is to promote and foster the development of operational research (OR) and decision support (DS) in France, raise awareness of them among businesses, and encourage their teaching in both initial and continuing education. ROADEF is a learned society listed by the French Ministry for Research and New Technologies.
It is run by a seven-member executive committee, elected for two-year terms, and by the many colleagues in universities and industry who organize conferences and take part in the association's activities.
The annual ROADEF conference brings together some five hundred participants, including researchers, industry practitioners and students. It is primarily a venue for scientific exchange, but also a forum for sharing best practices in business, training, keeping up with the latest developments in the field and finding a job.
ROADEF's website attracts a great many visitors, particularly because its forum carries internship and job listings.
Activities for everyone -------------------------
ROADEF regularly awards prizes that showcase researchers in the field (the Robert Faure Prize), innovative industrial projects (Les Pros de la RO), OR students (the Master's Thesis Prize) and doctoral students (the Young Researcher Article Prize). It also joins forces with its European counterpart, EURO, to organize the Industrial Challenge (see The ROADEF/EURO Challenge), whose aim is to find the best possible solutions to a complex problem submitted by a company.
For its part, GDR RO holds a major annual industry-focused event at which companies in the field and researchers come together to discuss their work in a given area (for example, the event entitled "Decision-making, energy and large-scale networks: what problems and challenges?", held at the Institut Henri-Poincaré in Paris in June 2019; see **). In addition to its working groups and scientific meetings, GDR RO offers mobility grants to doctoral students, helping them establish collaborations abroad; considers the ethical aspects of research, notably through a very active discussion forum; and responds to requests from public institutions by offering OR expertise on societal issues (for example, the COVID-19 crisis, **).
OR in business --------------------------------
OR is widely used in business because it helps companies understand, model and solve complex problems. Broadly speaking, it enables them to meet their commitments and constraints at lower cost. Its methods are increasingly being incorporated into the computational cores of software systems. The *White Paper on Operational Research in France\, available online, provides a useful overview of how businesses use OR in sectors as diverse as rail and air transport, the automotive industry, energy production and transmission, telecommunications, large-scale digital applications and ecology. Some twenty companies—large corporations, specialized service and consulting firms, dedicated software vendors and startups—describe how their OR teams are organized and integrated into the wider company. They also explain the kinds of problems they tackle using OR and the successes they have had. This White Paper also shows that these companies increasingly need OR to work alongside related disciplines such as data science and artificial intelligence if they are to handle the complexity of their problems more effectively. As a result, their need to recruit young people trained in these methods is growing sharply.