Annual Conference Videos


This main event is usually held in early September and attracts over 350 delegates from the UK, Europe, North America and elsewhere. The most recent annual conference was the OR60 Anniversary Conference, in September 2018 which was hugely successful attracting around 500 delegates.

The three-day conference programme contains a mixture of plenary sessions given by keynote speakers and parallel streams, covering all aspects of OR which are of interest to both the academic and practitioner delegates. The one-day Making an Impact stream is specifically tailored to be of interest to practitioners. In addition there is a comprehensive social programme, including tours, day trips, dinners and even the occasional ceilidh.

From recent annual conferences:

Operational research: the transfORmative discipline for the 21st Century

Anna Nagurney

40 years of engagement with ‘social’ and ‘management’ science, including OR ‘hard’ and ‘soft’

Peter Checkland

New challenges for operational research in the age of AI and big data

John Hopes, president of The OR Society

50 Years of Government Operational Research

Tony O'Connor CBE FORS

Findings from the application of a systems thinking approach to the Grenfell Tower disaster

John Foley and Kerry Turner

Meet the editors with Richard Eglese

Tom Archibald, Pär Ågerfalk, Giovanni Schiuma, Christine Currie, Sally Brailsford, Dursun Delen, Sudha Ram

Everything you wanted to know about OR in Schools

Sophie Parker

Using simulation software to optimize call centre staffing and performance

Liam Hastie

Presidents Medal: improving Sheffield’s health with the public sector scorecard

Max Moulin & John Soady

Presidents Medal: bringing together OR best practice and engineering expertise to improve the waterways of England and Wales

Ian Griffiths, Sheena Wilson, James Adamson and Richard Wakelen

Presidents Medal: delivering on the promise of next-generation mobile services

Robert Leese