May1997

MINUTES of Spring 1997 BUSINESS MEETING

Minutes of the Optimization Section (OS) business meeting during the INFORMS conference in San Diego, 6 May 1997:

1. The meeting was called to order by Leon Lasdon, OS chair, at 6:15 pm.

2. Sen asked for the section's help to cut down the turnaround of papers submitted to the Optimization Section of Operations Research. Some of the ideas suggested were: form a list of referees that promise fast review; require a standard submission form such as postscript; electronic submission/handling of reviews; a submission fee applied towards journal subscription; free reprints for electronic submission.

3. Lasdon mentioned that we still need nominations for at least a chair-elect and two vice chairs. Birge pointed out that INFORMS will require the election of a vice chair for membership as well. Elections must be finalized in August/September.

4. Birge mentioned OS had 356 members as of Dec. 31, 1996 and 377 members as of March 31, 1997. This is considered very healthy.

5. Saltzman proposed to run an optimization meeting withing the INFORMS meeting every three years in a way that does not overlap with the Mathematical Programming Symposium or the SIAG/OPT Optimization meeting.

6. Scaible and Higle pointed out that it is difficult to organize high quality sessions in both the spring and fall meetings. To maintain the presence of optimization in both meetings, Saltzman proposed we emphasize 3 of our areas in the fall meeting and the other 3 areas in the spring meeting.

7. Sahinidis will include links from the OS web page to other relevant pages. Some of the suggested links were: Greenberg's math programming glossary, book reviews, LP and NLP FAQs etc.

8. The meeting was adjourned at 7:15 pm.
Respectfully submitted by Nick Sahinidis, OS secretary/treasurer.