The Applied Optimization Systems (SOA) group conducts research on both general and specific problems of relevance to any industry. The SOA group focuses on production issues, logistics, routes and inventories, forecasting, health, among many others. It provides solutions to these problems for which existing procedures, both specific and general, have not been able to provide satisfactory answers. To do this, they use the most advanced optimization techniques from operations research, computer science, and artificial intelligence, such as heuristic, metaheuristic, and agent-based algorithms. The SOA group has participated in more than 20 publicly funded projects and more than 30 projects with companies.
The SOA group is attached to the Technological Institute of Informatics (ITI) of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). It is currently made up of 3 tenured university professors and two ITI researchers, one of whom holds a doctorate. In addition, there is a postdoc funded by the ValgrAI foundation and 4 PhD students. The SOA group is characterized by having a high scientific production and, at the same time, a great interest in the transfer of its research to both public and private entities. SOA has worked on several lines of research in recent years, all of them related to optimization problems in different areas (production, transport, port logistics, health emergencies, …), where both mathematical models and heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms have been developed to solve them. In the last 5 years, the SOA group has worked on three research projects of the National Plan, as well as in other projects financed by other public entities, such as the Valencian Innovation Agency (AVI). The group’s researchers have published more than 40 scientific articles in high-impact journals, most of them in the first quartile.