Beale Lecture 2026

The Beale Lecture 2026 was a hybrid event held at Newcastle University and online. This year’s lecture welcomed Beale Medal winner Stewart Robinson and Doctoral Award winner Joe Farrington.

Beale Lecture 2026: How We Develop Models: Reflecting on 40 Years (Nearly) of Modelling

Developing models has long been at the core of Operational Research and Data Science. While well-established techniques exist for representing and improving the world, less is understood about how we actually create an appropriate model when presented with a problem situation.

Reflecting on nearly 40 years of simulation modelling, Stewart explored how modellers model and how decisions were made about what to model.

Beale Medal Winner 2024

Stewart Robinson

Stewart Robinson holds an honours degree in Management Science (Operational Research) (1985) and a PhD in Management Science (1998), both from Lancaster University. He is a Fellow and former President of the Operational Research Society (2014-15) and Chair of the Chartered Association of Business Schools (2024-). Stewart started his career as a business analyst for a shoe retailing company and then as aconsultant with ISTEL (now Royal HaskoningDHV). During this time, he gained much experience in performing and supporting simulation studies with a wide range of organisations. As a result of this experience, Stewart’s academic research focuses on the practice of simulation and modelling.  In 1992, Stewart moved to Aston Business School where he lectured in Operations and Information Management. Stewart then spent 13 years at Warwick Business School (1998-2011), from 2005 as Professor of Operational Research. He held various roles during his time at Warwick including Director of the Executive MBA Programme, Associate Dean for Specialist Masters Programmes, and Head of the Operational Research and Management Sciences Group.

Stewart joined Loughborough University in July 2011 as Professor of Management Science and Associate Dean Research (2012-2015), subsequently becoming Dean of the School of Business and Economics in 2015. He completed his term as Dean in 2021 and in July 2022 Stewart joined Newcastle University Business School as Dean and Professor of Operational Research. Stewart’s research interests are in the practice and use of simulation models. He has published seven books and over 200 refereed journal and conference articles making contributions to our understanding and the practice of conceptual modelling, model validation, output analysis, participatory modelling, behavioural OR and the comparison of simulation methods. Stewart is cofounder of the UK OR Society Simulation Workshop conference series and the Journal of Simulation.

Stewart Robinson
Newcastle University Business School/span>

Doctoral Award Winner

Dr Joseph Farrington 

Talk Title: Faster Optimization, Earlier Evaluation: Lessons from Integrating Operational Research and Machine Learning in a Hospital Blood Bank 

Joseph’s doctoral research focused on improving decision-making in a hospital blood bank, a classic perishable inventory problem in which the blood bank must keep sufficient stock to serve patients while minimising wastage. In this talk, he will discuss two generalisable ideas at the intersection of OR and machine learning (ML) that arose from this work.

Joseph first explained how high-level software tools developed by the ML community enable operational researchers to take advantage of modern graphics processing units. This makes it possible to compute exact solutions for larger, more realistic perishable inventory problems that are often described as infeasible or impractical in the literature.

 He went on to describe the simulation-first approach to ML model development he used in his work to reduce platelet wastage. By using OR-based workflow simulations to investigate how predictive model performance would translate into KPIs before model development, this approach enables early evaluation of practical utility and helps to focus ML modelling effort on prediction tasks most likely to deliver impact in the real world.

Dr Joseph Farrington