Applied Operations Research & Software Engineering

Decision-support systems with professional engineering standards

I'm Francisco Zenteno Smith, an operations research scientist with a decade of experience building decision-support software in the industry.

I can:

Deliver end-to-end decision-support software.
Modernize legacy systems into production-grade platforms.
Lead and train data scientists to build systems with professional engineering standards.

As a result of these efforts, I created SEFOP, a Software Engineering Framework for Optimization Programs.

Decision-support systems → About me → SEFOP → Experience → Contact →

What is a decision-support system?

A decision-support system (DSS) is a software that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. A DSS can help in operational, tactical, and strategic decisions. A DSS is typically executed at some frequency, such as daily, weekly, or monthly. Some examples problems that can be solved with a DSS include:

Planning the annual extraction of resources from a mine.
Scheduling the monthly shift schedules of a retail store.
Planning the weekly delivery of cargo across a network.
Recovering the operation from a weather disruption in an airline.

A DSS is not a one-off research project, but a system that needs to be developed, maintained, and improved with modern and professional engineering practices as any other software system to maximize its business value. Some of these practices include:

Version control
Software design & architecture
Test-driven development
DevOps

About me

With a decade of experience applying operations research across airlines, retail, mining, cargo, and healthcare, I bridge two disciplines that are too often kept separate: mathematical optimization and software engineering. As operation research scientists we deliver our value through code, thus we need to apply the same rigorous standards of software engineering to our work.

I hold dual master's degrees in Computer Science (UC San Diego) and Industrial Engineering (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile).

SEFOP

SEFOP (Software Engineering Framework for Optimization) is a framework for building optimization systems the way you'd build any production software: Clean Architecture, dependency injection, full test coverage, and CI/CD, not throwaway research scripts. Includes reference implementations across languages and a live, deployed demo.

See the full breakdown →

Experience

2024 - Present

Senior Operations Research Scientist

American Airlines

Led the year-long refactor of a legacy decision-support system, cutting technical debt 67% by teaching the team software-engineering principles.

2017 - 2020

Senior Data Scientist

SMU

Built a simulated-annealing metaheuristic that shipped a monthly cashier-scheduling system to production for 350 stores, without commercial optimization software.

2013 - 2016

Data Scientist

Shift Workforce Management

Designed a multi-objective staff-planning model reused across 20+ consultancies for enterprise clients.