“My mission is to help the industy in improving their digital decision making systems to increase the efficiency, responsiveness, and connectedness of the operations management . My focus is more into manufacturing companies that want to adapt to practices of Industry 4.0/5.0” 

Murat Firat is a member of the OPAC capacity group at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His research interests fall into the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research fields. Some of the applications he has worked on are scheduling of manufacturing systems, multi-skilled workforce management, planning in transportation, modeling uncertainty in operations and services under poor quality of information, and designing rule-based systems using expert knowledge.   

In his research, Murat develops decision support systems by utilizing AI technqiues and formulates mathematical optimization models  for operational decisions in scheduling and planning problems.

Murat Firat completed his bachelor study in the Mechanical Engineering of Bogazici University in Istanbul. Then he studied Master of Science in Systems and Control Engineering at the same university. Murat has completed his master thesis in a flexible manufacturing laboratory (Bogazici University of Flexible Automation and Itelligent Manufacturing, shortly BUFAIM) under supervision of Prof. Umit Bilge. The thesis topic was about developing routing algorithms  for Automated Guided Vehicles and explroring their effect in flow times and throughput rates. Then Murat started his doctorate study at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) under the supervision of Prof. Gerhard Woeginger and dr. ir. Cor Hurkens from the Discrete Mathematics group of Mathematics and Computer Science faculty. He worked on scheduling and assignment algorithms of multi-skilled technicians with collaboration of France Telecom. After his graduation he continued his research one more year at France Telecom as post-doctoral researcher. Then he worked on routing problems combining linear optimization and decision making using dual information during his post-doctorral work at TU/e.

Murat started his current Assistant Professor position in Information Systems group in 2017. He extended his research topics adding Artificial Intelligence and recently concentrating on Smart Manufacturing applications under Industry4.0. Murat collaborates various companies/institutions from industry to bridge academy and real-life applications via supervision of bachelor, master, and PhD students. Murat collaborate with his national and international colleauges under his research interests. 

 He is a member of the Information Systems Group, School of Industrial Engineering, TU/e and The Beta Research School for Operations Management and Logistics. 

Murat publishes regularly in several leading journals like Computers and Operations Research and  European Journal of Operational Research. He is also a reviewer of numerous scientific journals in AI and OR fields and joins several program committees of AI conferences.