The VIVES Forecasting research group turns historical data into reliable predictions for companies and public organisations. Below you find three real use cases, each with a small game. Flip the switches, make your call and see how you do against the model.
Every demo has the same drivers a real model uses: weather, promotions, lead times, threat signals.
Decide how much to cook, when to reorder or where to put your defences.
Compare your gut feeling with a data driven forecast. Most people lose. Some win.
Every day, kitchens in schools, hospitals, company restaurants and catering guess how many people will show up. Cook too much and food ends up in the bin. Cook too little and guests leave hungry. In the TETRA project Smart Meal Planning, VIVES builds machine learning models (gradient boosted trees such as LightGBM) together with foodservice partners. The models learn from past sales, the calendar, the weather and the menu to predict demand per day and per dish, so kitchens can plan with confidence and cut food waste.
Stock is money on a shelf. Too little and customers walk away, too much and you pay for storage, capital and products that expire. Classic reorder rules (order Q units when stock drops below a fixed level) ignore what is coming next: a promotion, a seasonal peak, a supplier that delivers late. Forecast driven replenishment looks ahead. It predicts demand over the lead time and orders exactly what is needed, with a safety buffer that grows with the uncertainty.
Security teams drown in alerts, and small organisations often have no security team at all. Predictive cybersecurity uses the same forecasting logic as demand planning: learn from signals such as failed logins, phishing waves, unpatched systems and employee behaviour, then estimate where and when an incident is most likely. With limited people and budget, you protect the right systems first. This work links to our research on phishing and digital resilience in Flemish SMEs, where the human factor is often the weakest link.
6 attacks will hit in the next 24 hours. A shield protects only the system you put it on. Protect where the risk and the damage are highest.
We help organisations turn historical data into forecasts they can act on: from pilots and proof of concepts to funded research projects (TETRA, VLAIO) with companies, care organisations and public partners. Got a planning, stock or risk question? Let's test it on your data.
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