SOLA seeks to be a welcoming community in which researchers, educators, and practitioners from all around the world can come together to advance facility location, assist in the professional development of junior members, recognize the long-term achievements of senior members, and facilitate connections with other professional associations worldwide focused on facility location.
As facility location decisions are undertaken by a wide range of organizations in the private, governmental, and nongovernmental sectors, SOLA has natural links to a variety of other OR/MS application areas, including health services, humanitarian logistics, environment and natural resources, transportation and logistics, production and inventory management, public services, and nonprofit operations. Facility location also has natural links to many OR/MS methodological areas as well, including mathematical programming, multicriteria decision models, analytics, economics, and stochastic modeling. Therefore, SOLA attempts whenever possible to strengthen links between the section and other INFORMS subdivisions whose interests overlap the application areas and methods listed above.