EMN - École des Mines de Nantes

Decision making processes in business are becoming increasingly complex. There is so much data involved and the human and financial issues are so important that information technology has become a strategic tool. Decision support systems that manage and report data are already common in business. Today powerful new analytical and optimization methods automatically extract knowledge from data.
The GIPAD option trains engineers who can design and implement intelligent decision support systems, from data processing to decision analysis.

The first year of specialization focuses on artificial intelligence, operations research, software engineering and IT project management.
During the second year of specialization, the students acquire more advanced skills in these areas, by using them in an application context. These techniques will then be placed in perspec tive in the global decision-making process.

• The scientific and technicalcurriculum is built around this process:
  • Upstream, the activities specific to performance management (business intelligence): Data collection, integrationand warehousing; processing and analysis (interactive visualization and data mining)
  • Downstream, the activities specific to process management(scheduling, configuration) that produce and assess the effectiveness of decisions: Combinatorial optimization (operations research and constraint programming)

• Students also learn how to manage IT projects in business:
  • software technologies: architectures, quality, testing, human-computer interaction
  • social and management sciences: business organizations and change management

• Finally, all of the knowledge is put to use in the option project :
  • team project to develop a software solution for a specific industrial optimization problem, from the functional analysis of the problem through to delivery of the product