Professor Mikio Kubo visits UESP

During the month of March, the Manufacturing Systems Engineering Unit (UESP) was visited by Mikio Kubo, Professor at the Tokyo University of Science and Technology and President of Log Opt, a company of consultancy in Management and Operational Research.

Professor Mikio Kubo is a specialist in logistics, having developed several applications in the area of meta-heuristics for problems of combinatorial optimization. He is also the author of several scientific books, very popular in Japan, and more technical books on optimization. Right now, he is finishing a book on optimization in supply chains and another on logistics.

Besides the excellence of the research he has carried out over the last years, the activity of Professor Kubo involves a strong component of highly successful provision of services and consultancy, which is a fine example of the university-companies connection.

Given the strict relationship between Professor Kubo’s intervention areas and many of UESP’s interests, several meetings were held with the purpose of exploring the possibility of a future collaboration in research projects and in the promotion of the results of UESP’s activity in Japan.

One of the initiatives carried out by UESP regarding this visit was a lecture spoken by Professor Kubo, on the 23rd of March entitled “Supply Chain Optimization - Models, Algorithms, Decision Support Systems, and Applications", where he presented several examples of projects with companies that resulted in significant improvement in the performance of the supply chain and in the operations management. In many of those projects, the resource to Operational Research and Optimization techniques was relevant.