Swedish Operations Research Association
The Swedish Operations Research Association (SORA; in Swedish: Svenska Operationsanalysföreningen, SOAF) is a professional non-profit association for the promotion and dissemination of the scientific field of Operations Research in Sweden. SORA was founded in 1959 with the dual purpose of promoting the development within the different branches of operations research, and work for its application within different problem domains. The association is a member of the European umbrella organization, the Association of European Operational Research Societies (EURO), and of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS). The main communication channel of the association is its website, available at http://www.soaf.se.[1]
History
SORA was inaugurated in early 1959, inspired by the OR meeting in Oxford in 1957, where Sweden had 17 participants, ranking 4th among the participating nations. SORA joined IFORS in 1960, and was one of the founding members of EURO in 1975. It hosted the 2 nd EURO conference in Stockholm in 1976. For more information on the history of SORA, see.[2]
Governance
The society is managed by a board consisting of up to eight members. The board should always have a President, a Vice President, a Secretary, a Treasurer, and an Editor. The board is elected by the members at the annual meeting for a period of one year.
Membership
SORA offers membership to both organizations and individuals. Currently (2014), the society has 19 organizations and 15 individuals as members. Nine of the member organizations are companies, seven are academic institutes, and three are governmental authorities. The majority of the organizations are active in the domain of transportation and logistics, but other areas such as, e.g., maintenance, health care and military defense, are represented as well.
Publications
Together with the Danish Operations Research Society, SORA publishes the ORbit magazine twice a year.
Conferences
SORA organizes a bi-annual national conference in operations research. In 2013, the conference was organized in co-operation with the Danish OR Society and the Norwegian OR Society as the joint conference SOAK (Svenska OperationsanalysKonferensen in Swedish) and NOS6 (The 6th Nordic Optimization Symposium) at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. The conference attracted approximately 80 participants.
References
- ^ http://www.soaf.se, Main SORA website (in Swedish)
- ^ Rapp, B (1988), Operations Research in Sweden, Omega 16 (3), 189–195