Bulletin 105, Mai 99 

According to a well established tradition the OR Societies of Austria, Germany and Switzerland organize every fourth year a joint conference. After Vienna, 1990, and Berlin, 1994, Zurich was chosen as meeting point for 1998. The conference was hosted by ETH Zurich and chaired by Prof. H.-J. Lüthi, who also served as chairman of the organizing committee. The program committee under the chair of Prof. P. Kall invited four plenary speakers, 11 semiplenary speakers and scientific contributions in 11 streams to report on recent developments in all branches of Operations Research. This conference was of particular importance to our German colleagues, since the newly founded German OR Society, GOR, merged from DGOR and GMÖOR, held its first annual meeting at this Conference. Moreover SIGOPT, the Special Interest Group in Optimization, co-sponsored this event. This conference was a really international event: 447 participants from 41 countries all over the world took part in the conference. It is interesting that almost half of the participants were not members of one of the five organizing societies.

The Conference was opened in the time-honored Aula of the University of Zurich. After the welcoming addresses of Dr. Stephan Bieri, Vice-President of ETH, and Alain Hertz, President of SVOR, the GOR-Prizes for outstanding doctoral dissertations and diploma theses were awarded. The prize for an outstanding doctoral dissertation was awarded to Dr. Thomas Christof (University Heidelberg) for his thesis "Low dimensional 0/1 polytopes and branch and cut in combinatorial optimization", to Dr. Frank Dellmann (University of Essen) for his contributions to use partial probability information in decision support systems and to Dr. Kathrin Fischer (University of Hamburg) for her work on location planning under market conditions. The winners of the GOR Student Prizes were Andreas Bley (Node Disjoint Length Restricted Paths), Thomas Nitschke ( Dynamic Fleet Assignment) and Martin Oellrich (Construction of Reliable Network Platforms in Telecommunication Networks).

After the prize ceremony Prof. F.-J. Radermacher gave a plenary talk on "Challenges and Contributions of OR at the transition to the 21st Century" and Prof. M. Grötschel lectured on "Combinatorial Online Optimization". During the Conference we heard two other plenary talks by prominent speakers: Prof. F. Jensen reported on "Bayesian Networks and Influence Diagrams" and F. Delbaen gave a survey on "Duality and Superhedging in Mathematical Finance" . A special event was the live discussion with Prof. T. Magnanti at MIT on

"OR and the Virtual Campus: Teaching in the Brave New World of Distance Education" which showed that traditional lines of higher education will surely persist in the next years.

The contributed lectures were organized in 11 parallel streams. The stream of continuous optimization included 24 papers, discrete optimization 50 contributions, stochastic modeling and simulation 28 lectures, econometrics and statistics 9, mathematical economics and game theory 15, banking and finance 14, operations and product management 22, energy and ecology 9, telecommunication 9, logistics and transportation 35 and, finally, fuzzy systems and neural networks 3 papers. This shows a right balance between theoretical contributions and papers from practice. Beside the scientific program the participants had the opportunity to visit software and book exhibitions.

Also the social program did not go short. Monday evening the City and State of Zurich invited the participants to a welcome wine party in the main building of ETH. Wednesday evening there was a dinner cruise on the beautiful Lake of Zurich. During the coffee breaks the participants could not only enjoy beverages and good coffee, but also tasteful pastries and newspapers. The conference was imbedded in a kind and stimulating atmosphere. Many thanks to Prof. Lüthi, Prof. Kall and their teams for this successful and future reaching event. Good bye in Klagenfurt (Austria) 2002!

Prof. Dr. Rainer Burkard, Universität Graz
burkard@opt.math.tu-graz.ac.at

This proceedings volume contains a selection of papers presented at the OR 98 conference that was held at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich from August 31-September 3, 1998.

The selection of papers included in this volume reflects well the number of papers in the corresponding sections at the conference. Thus, we observe that the intellectual mainstream in Operations Reserch still is mathematical optimization and its application in logistics and transportation systems. In addition to these traditional areas the conference emphasized the potential contributions of Operations Research in the new, challenging area of system design and management in the liberalized energy and telecommunication markets.