The proposal to create the European Working Group on Stochastic Programming and Applications (EWGSP) within the European Association of OR Societies (EURO) is approved during the Special Workshop STOPROG-2012, held on July 3-6, 2012, Neringa, Lithuania (www.mii.lt/STOPROG-2012).

The EWGP on Stochastic Programming has been approved by the EURO Executive Committee.

In December 2016, the group was renamed to EURO working group on Stochastic Optimization (SO).

 

Stochastic optimization(SO) is an active research area having important real-world applications, and close links with other branches of Operational Research. SO research focuses on the formulation and solution of stochastic optimization problems, i.e., optimization problems whose parameters are random variables. The fact that every strategic decision is made in the presence of uncertainty is a clear evidence for the practical importance of SO. Important fields of application are energy and water management, and finance. Emerging ones are healthcare, agriculture and sustainable development.

Characteristic examples are: production and distribution system design; financial portfolio restructuring; hydrothermal electric generation planning; oil, hydrocarbon and chemical supplying; transformation and distribution logistics; strategic and tactical production planning; sequencing and scheduling; strategic & tactical supply chain management; revenue management; production planning dimensioning and location; plant location & sizing in strategic supply chain management; road construction selection in forestry harvesting planning; design of connected rapid transit networks; tactical portfolio planning in the natural gas supply chain; prison facility site selection under uncertainty; air traffic flow management planning; flight routes selection; cluster location in multi-period copper extraction planning in mining; multiperiod location-assignment; energy generation capacity expansion planning and sources location for a price taker; financial branches restructuring and delocation; humanitarian logistics under exogenous & endogenous uncertainty; antiterrorism defence under exogenous & endogenous uncertainty; and many others.

 

The creation of the Working Group was initiated during the Special Workshop Stochastic Programming for Implementation and Advanced Applications (STOPROG-2012), held in July 2012, in Neringa, Lithuania. The Workshop was organized under the auspices of the SP Community and EURO, as a satellite event of the EURO XXV conference. Participants of STOPROG-2012 approved the creation of the EWG on Stochastic Programming. Informal discussion about the purposes, activities and creation of the new EWG continued among the European SP Community.

A special meeting of the Committee on Stochastic Programming (COSP) was held during the 21st International Symposium on Mathematical Programming (ISMP), in August 2012, Berlin. Here COSP agreed to collaborate with EWGSP, and to coordinate activities with those of the new EWG. The creation of the EURO Working Group on Stochastic Programming was approved by the EURO Executive Committee in February 2013.   In December 2016, the group was renamed to EURO working group on Stochastic Optimization (SO).

 

The purpose of this new Working Group is to strengthen the collaboration within the European SO community in order to advance SO research, education, and applications. We intend to collaborate with related EURO Working Groups, and to coordinate our activities with those of the European national OR Societies. Moreover we intend to collaborate with COSP on a mutual basis, in promoting the development and application of SP theory, models, methods, analysis, software tools and standards, and encouraging the exchange of information among practitioners and scholars.

 

- to promote and support the organization of SO related conferences (workshops), or streams at large conferences, as EURO, INFORMS, IFORS meetings;

- to organize and support SO related workshops (spring/summer/autumn/winter schools) for young scientists and PhD students;

- to promote and support special issues of OR journals focused on SO theory, models, methods, analysis, software tools, and applications, with a special emphasis on EJOR and the three newly launched EURO journals;

- to organize EWGSO annual meetings;

- to interact with other EWGs.

 

More news will be upcoming shortly!