Academic Exchange

Open to researchers from other academic institutions and industry research units for short- and medium-term work. Visitors may use the Institute's heterogeneous experimental environment — the resource most operations researchers lack, since building a real-scale environment spanning multiple vendors and platforms costs far more than a typical research budget allows.

An annual symposium on the science of automated operations, scheduled to articulate with the COR Council's annual meeting.

The symposium deliberately breaks with the convention of separating academic and practitioner sessions: research papers and practitioner cases are presented in the same session, with authors required to answer practitioners' challenges and practitioners required to state how far their case generalises.

Organisations are encouraged to submit, in de-identified form, the full account and review of a major operational failure. Such material is extremely sensitive and very rarely published, yet it is the most valuable research material this field has.

The programme uses a strict de-identification procedure and review mechanism, and the submitting organisation decides the scope in which the results may be used.

Channels are maintained with other research units concerned with system reliability, site reliability engineering and infrastructure automation, working together to establish operations research as a formally recognised field — including common benchmarks, a shared dataset format, and a terminology that can be cited across groups.