About Us

The Operations Research and Education Laboratory (OREd) promotes the use of modern tools of decision science in education and public administration sectors, enabling administrators to make decisions wisely, to articulate planning needs to the public and stakeholders, to thoroughly evaluate policy alternatives, and to gain public confidence on the decisions.

What is Decision Science?

The multidisciplinary field of decision science is also known as operations research or management science and can be described as the science of making informed and systematic decisions for individuals, groups, and organizations. There are widespread applications of operations research in military science, manufacturing, finance, and business management.

Integrated Planning for School and Community and the Application of Decision Science to Reassignment and School Siting

OREd specializes in the applications of decision science for school districts dealing with the politically sensitive and complex issues of student reassignment and new school planning through a process called Integrated Planning for School And Community (IPSAC). OREd has over 20 years of experience working with school districts dealing with challenges in enrollment projection, demographic analysis, developing attendance areas for new schools, system-wide redistricting for improving demographic balance, and identifying optimal land banking of school sites for long-range school facility planning.

The IPSAC program has won the Edelman Prize, awarded by the International Forum of Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), the world’s leading association of operations researcher and management science professionals.

OREd is part of the Institute for Transportation Research and Education (ITRE) located within the Centennial Campus Research Park at North Carolina State University (NCSU). ITRE is an inter-institutional research center that utilizes and supports the professional technological resources for research from the 15-campus University of North Carolina system and Duke University.

History of the OREd

Incorporated in 1990 as a private computer and graphics facility by Dr. Raymond Taylor, OREd initially provided computer programming and operations research consulting to doctoral students and faculty researchers from several universities. [read more]

Research Fellows

Raymond Taylor, Research Fellow and Founder of OREd [read more]