Bulletin 104, December 98 

Marc Pirlot, President of the Belgian OR Society, has initiated a discussion in AIROnews on the role and the future of the national OR Societies. In the last three issues of AIROnews, the presidents of the Hellenic, French and Irish OR Societies have responded to his "plea". The discussion in fact started during the traditional lunch of the presidents of the OR Societies within EURO, at the EURO XV Conference in Barcelona. Many interesting ideas have been exchanged at this occasion. When I turned back to Switzerland, I decided to share this discussion with the committee of the Swiss OR Society, as well as with our members. I will try, in the next few lines, to summarise our reflections.

Roughly speaking, the role of a national OR society is to promote OR on a national level and to establish a strong link with the international OR community. One task devoted to EURO is to stimulate and to co-ordinate such activities. EURO and the national OR Societies should therefore work in concert, in a complementary way, to the realisation of the above objectives.

There are two main fields where actions can be undertaken to promote OR. First of all, OR people should have the opportunity to meet each other. This objective can be fulfilled by means of conferences, workshops or seminars organised on a national or international level. It is also important to publish research results and information about forthcoming OR events. Scientific journals, newsletters or information bulletins are crucial tools that allow such interchange of ideas within the OR community. I describe below several concrete actions that the Swiss OR Society undertakes in these two directions.

1) Organisation of meetings

Many specialised or non-specialised international OR conferences are organised all around the world. Researchers have many opportunities to meat colleagues sharing their OR interests. It is therefore questionable whether or not national conferences of smaller scale should complement this wide offer. As observed by Marc Pirlot, national meetings are places where young researchers can make their first experience, and express themselves in their own language. Switzerland is however a small country that would probably hardly attract 30 participants to such national conferences. We found alternatives that aim to fulfil the same objectives.

• Switzerland is a multilingual country having a central position in Europe. This certainly explains why joint conferences are regularly organised with German speaking countries as well as with French speaking ones. One more step should be done to include the Italian community.
• Every year, in the springtime, a three to four days seminar is organised in a lovely village of the Swiss Alps. During these seminars, prominent speakers make surveys on OR topics, and PhD students are kindly invited to talk about their recent research results.

Additional events are organised that help reinforcing cohesion within our Society. For example, a one day scientific meeting is organised every year, where two to three specialists in some hot OR topic are invited to give a talk before and after the General Assembly of our Society.

The above activities are mainly intended for academic members of our Society. The offer to promote practical OR is much more modest. Every two years, in autumn, we organise a Tutorial on an applied topic where OR has a significant role to play. These Tutorials are neither mini-conferences, nor workshops for specialists. They are aimed at members of the OR community interested in applications, as well as professionals with some quantitative background interested in what OR can significantly contribute to their domain.

In spite of this rich list of activities, we still believe that we can do better. We have for example observed that each member or our Society has a very hazy idea on the research activities of his Swiss colleagues. A kind of "Information Day" could therefore be organised in order to give the opportunity to each member to describe his OR activities. This would certainly contribute to a better synergy within our Society.

A second point with which we feel unhappy is the low participation rate to our Tutorials. We don't know how to convince practitioners that OR can help to solve their problems in a more efficient way. We should perhaps organise a second kind of "Information Day", giving an overview of some success stories where OR methods have proven to be very useful.

2) Publications

There are many (perhaps too many) scientific journals where OR researchers can publish their papers. We do not think that Switzerland has the critical mass for a national journal. Most academic members of our Society look for an international audience and would probably not publish their best papers in such a national journal.

Groups of countries have put their resources in common for publishing a journal (e.g., CEJORE, jointly edited by the Austrian, Croat, Czech, Hungarian and Slovak societies). But such journal are not really perceived as more attractive then national journals.

We think that national OR societies should invest their efforts in the publication of a kind of newsletter, informing the members on OR events or activities. We publish such an bulletin three times per year, and distribute it to all our members. The bulletin contains information on forthcoming OR meetings (national or international), as well as brief summaries of important OR events that took place in Switzerland. We also announce available positions in universities or companies, publish summaries of PhD theses, and make a overview of the educational activities in Switzerland.

Marc Pirlot raised a pertinent question by asking how many members read such newsletters. We try to put in our bulletin original and interesting information that can hardly be found elsewhere. We will try to enrich the above mentioned contents by publishing case studies or success stories that may convince practitioners that OR tools can help to improve efficiency.

We do not limit our activities to the organisation of national meetings and the publication of an information bulletin. Complementary actions are undertaken in order to attract young members and to reinforce our links with the international OR community. For example, we promote OR in the Swiss High Schools and stimulate research activities in OR by awarding prizes for the best PhD and Diploma theses. We regularly remind the OR community of our lively and enthusiastic existence by hosting international conferences. We facilitate information exchanges and publicise our achievements with the help of our Web page that has many links to other OR pages. We carefully examine what other national OR societies are doing and do not hesitate to imitate successful actions. We will for example try to reproduce an idea of the Dutch OR Society by organising a public OR problem-solving contest.

Marc Pirlot asked whether we should let the national OR societies die. Playing on words, I can say that there will be no suicide from the Swiss side. It is our opinion that national OR societies have an important role to play. Many actions can be undertaken in order to increase the synergy within national societies. We have the chance in Switzerland to have a very active executive committee, ready to invest time for the promotion of OR, and never in lack of ideas. The two main ingredients that are needed to ensure a long life to national societies are the active involvement of members from the young OR generations, and willingness, which is the necessary fuel to go ahead.

Prof. Alain HERTZ

Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne,
Département de Mathématiques,
CH - 1015 Lausanne (Suisse)

Tel: +41 21 693 25 68
Fax: +41 21 693 42 50
alain.hertz@epfl.ch

This article has been published in the AIROnews n°3/98, and is part of an AIRO initiative taken after the meeting of national ORS Presidents during the EURO Conference in Barcelona, July 1997.