INESC Coimbra’s statutory mission is to perform scientific research, technological development, and knowledge integration and transfer, based on several disciplines of Engineering and Management Science / Operations Research, aiming at contributing to a better performance of businesses and institutions and to the progress of knowledge, within an engineering systems approach, by creatively combining theory and methodology, technical issues and human factors to tackle complex problems.

The different backgrounds (mainly in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Civil Engineering, Geographical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Management and Mathematics) and scientific interests allow INESC Coimbra’s researchers to collaborate, to challenge each other and to learn from each other in addressing complex problems.

On the one hand, sciences of engineering are used to address management and performance analysis problems (e.g. planning, controlling, project analysis and system evaluation). On the other hand, management science’s decision aiding techniques are used to address engineering problems (energy planning and rational use of energy, telecommunication networks analysis and planning, teletraffic engineering, urban and regional planning, computational mechanics). The joint projects, papers, and thesis supervisions demonstrate this synergy.