Many of my O.R. colleagues, both in the United States and Europe, are preparing for EURO XXII, the European Conference on Operational Research, to be held in Prague on exactly the same dates. For many of us, the scheduling is unfortunate, forcing a choice between two attractive venues and exciting programs. Exhibitors and recruiters may find that providing adequate staffing at two meetings simultaneously places a strain on conference resources. Looking on the bright side, for some O.R. groups having two popular conferences on the same dates does help curtail travel expense; no one on my staff requested authorization to attend both meetings.

In future years, INFORMS will consult the EURO conference committee before selecting a conference date.

Meeting conflicts, however, will undoubtedly continue to arise. There are two few available meeting dates and too many organizations or focus topics that require gathering experts together for

information exchange. Video conferences, search engines, wikis, e-meetings and endless e-mail make some aspects of our work more efficient. But they also generate new connections between activities as information is more rapidly and freely shared in

the scientific community. Operations research, being an interdisciplinary field with applications in many industries and housed in various academic departments (engineering, math and business, to name a few) has an abundance of current and potential connection points.

Minimizing the impact of meeting conflicts on our community can be cast as an optimization problem. A naïve formulation of the calendaring feasible space, in which 0-1 decision variables are used to select from amongst a list of possible time slots for each meeting, is left as an exercise to the reader.

The challenge arises representing the conflicts. Should some conflicts simply be prohibited? If so, which ones? Do time slots that are adjacent (e.g., Monday-Wednesday and Thursday-Friday of the same week) or only partially overlap count as conflicts? Whether a participant could attend both meetings may depend on their respective locations, adding to the model complexity. Should conflicts be counted, and the number of them minimized? Should a conflict be weighted by the number of people likely to be impacted? How do we calculate that number? Is it the number of potential attendees to both conferences? Is it the number of likely attendees to both conferences? How do we deal with budget constraints that limit the number of meetings we each attend each year? And how to we deal with origin-destination dependent travel costs?

Further, while INFORMS can set the dates of its major conferences, our subdivisions also have the ability to schedule meetings, and INFORMS can at best influence the meeting schedule of other professional societies. This may be a thesis topic rather than a simple modeling exercise.

As with all good modeling exercises, one needs to examine the available data. We know how many meetings INFORMS and its subdivisions should hold each year. We know that the annual meeting runs from Sunday to Wednesday, that it starts after the N.Y. Wool and Sheep Festival (third weekend in October) and ends at least a week before Thanksgiving. We know that the Practice meeting runs from Sunday evening through Tuesday after Easter and before Memorial Day, and that the summer meeting runs during the summer, in years when INFORMS is not involved in a joint meeting with another society.

Further, we know, by name, who has attended our meetings over the past several years. We know, or can easily find out, what related societies have done as far as meetings are concerned in previous years and what meetings they have announced for the near future. So what's missing? We don't know what other meetings our members attend or would like to attend. We don't know what other professional affiliations our members have. And we don't know how many of our conference attendees are primarily affiliated with other professional societies.

So tell us. Check on www.informs.org for a link that will allow you to enter information on your other professional affiliations and to tell us about meetings that have or should have INFORMS members participating. If the link isn't up, and you just can't wait, send an e-mail with the information to informs@informs.org. And if you'd like to volunteer to be part of an ad-hoc committee on INFORMS relations with other professional societies, drop me a note at president@informs.org.

Table of Contents

OR/MS Today Home Page


OR/MS Today copyright © 2007 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.


Lionheart Publishing, Inc.
506 Roswell Rd., Suite 220, Marietta, GA 30060 USA
Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969
E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com
URL: http://www.lionhrtpub.com


Web Site © Copyright 2007 by Lionheart Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.