POD, Physics Of Decisions winner in the Enterprise & Productivity Solution category
POD, Physics Of Decisions wins Business and Productivity Solution Award at Laval Virtual 2025. Laval Virtual is Europe's largest XR event.
POD uses Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality to represent a system's performance as a single trajectory, and potential risks, opportunities or decisions as forces that can influence that trajectory. This solution helps to improve the performance of organizations.
Artificial intelligence and virtual reality to boost organizational performance
Work on POD, Physics of Decisions was initiated in 2017 and involves researchers from IMT Mines Albi's Industrial Engineering Center and Georgia Tech H. Milton Stewart School of ISyE. It was at IMT Mines Albi's Centre Génie Industriel that the idea germinated and the various successive applied prototypes were developed. At the end of 2019, the Centre Génie Industriel initiated the first official work, launching two theses in autumn 2019. It has since been supported by various French companies and institutions (Scalian, Airbus, Ministère de la transition écologique, Immersive Factory), and today draws on the results of 5 PhD theses.
POD (Physics Of Decision) is a theoretical approach combining artificial intelligence, data science and immersive technologies to improve organizational performance.
International recognition for the expertise of IMT Mines Albi's Industrial Engineering Center
The Centre Génie Industriel (CGI) is one of IMT Mines Albi's three training and research centers, headed by Professor Matthieu Lauras. The CGI is unique in that it combines a range of scientific expertise rarely found together, on the borderline between Industrial Engineering and Artificial Intelligence:
- data science,
- model engineering,
- knowledge-based engineering,
- operations research,
This award is a real recognition of the collective work carried out by the research teams at the Centre Génie Industriel. Behind the POD project, an entire research team is involved: Nafe Moradkhani, Thibaut Cerabona, Clara Leduff, Camelia Bellepeau, Benoit Morvan, Jiayao Li, Aurélie Congès, Tianyuan Zhang, Anthony Hunt, Alexis Evain, Julien Lesbegueries, Camille Durthaller-Renard, Victor Romero, Guillaume Martin, Frederick Benaben and Matthieu Lauras.
The solution was selected from over 450 entries for 11 awards. This distinction underlines the international expertise of IMT Mines Albi's Centre Génie Industriel (CGI). It is also the validation of an original and ambitious idea. POD is in fact a vision that is far removed from traditional schemes, and one that was very easy to doubt. This point demonstrates that research can also be nourished by ambitious and offbeat visions.
This is the second award for the CGI. Indeed, the Centre Génie Industriel (CGI) has already won a Laval Virtual Award in 2022 in the Industry category for its EGCERSIS project, which proposed an immersive virtual reality environment dedicated to corporate training in a crisis management context.
Frederick BENABEN
Professor at the Centre Génie Industriel and head of the POD project
"Imagine that an organization's performance can be visualized as a ray of light tracing its trajectory towards its target on the horizon. Imagine, too, that risks, opportunities, decisions and all the events accompanying the organization's existence could be represented as force fields capable of deviating, braking, accelerating or correcting this trajectory. Imagine, finally, that this visualization enables us to interact with this trajectory and these force fields, so as to be able to anticipate the consequences of our decisions, or the impact of the occurrence of certain risks. This is the vision offered by POD (Physics Of Decision), a theoretical approach combining artificial intelligence, data science and immersive technologies."
What are the prospects for the POD research project?
The Industrial Engineering Center at IMT Mines Albi is pursuing 3 objectives simultaneously:
- pursue and consolidate the theoretical framework of POD and its application in the field of industrial engineering. This means continuing with the theses already started, launching new collaborations and carrying out work and experiments in the continuity of what has already been achieved.
- exploit the POD paradigm to meet new contributions that are not on the "main track" currently being followed. In particular, this means exploiting the physical analogy to talk about energy, changes of state, density of the space traversed by the trajectory, etc.
- industrialize the results obtained to offer a service or product that embeds and concretizes this research work.
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