TutORial Volumes: Product and Ordering Information

Joseph Geunes,Tutorials Chair and Volume Editor
Paul Gray, Series Editor
Harvey J. Greenberg, Series Founder

The 2011 TutORials volume, as in previous years, covers a broad range of fields within operations research. The 8 chapter's in this edition includes a brief history of operations research, behavioral operations management, queues with limited patience for waiting, two tutorials on OR applications in cancer treatment, two tutorials on operations within supply chains for physical goods and coordination and the use of contracts between a supplier and a buyer in a supply chain to ensure maximum supply chain protability. It is a rich collection of ideas that should spur continued transformational research in the operations research community.

Current INFORMS Members are able to access the entire ONLINE contents of the 2011 TutORials as an expanded member benefit. To access the 2011 TutORials Online go to the LOGIN page and then enter your username and password.

Abstracts and complete frontmatter are available for FREE to non-members. Non-members may purchase and download chapters online by clicking here.

John Hasenbein,Tutorials Chair and Volume Editor
Paul Gray, Series Editor
Harvey J. Greenberg, Series Founder

The 2010 TutORials volume is a collection designed to address the debate on risk and optimization in an uncertain world. The 11 chapters are extended versions of tutorials presented at the 2010 INFORMS Annual Meeting. The papers in this volume discuss the risks from infectious diseases and nuclear reactors, methods for dealing with risk through decision analysis, finding optimization under uncertainty both quantitatively and through simulation, and competitive bidding strategies. It is a rich collection of ideas that should spur research in the operations research community.

Current INFORMS Members are able to access the entire ONLINE contents of the 2010 TutORials as an expanded member benefit. To access the 2010 TutORials Online go to the LOGIN page and then enter your username and password.

Abstracts and complete frontmatter are available for FREE to non-members. Non-members may purchase and download chapters online by clicking here.

Mohammad R. Oskoorouchi
Tutorials Chair and Volume Editor
Paul Gray, Series Editor
Harvey J. Greenberg, Series Founder

The 2009 TutORials in Operations Research is the sixth published volume in the series. Its 9 papers cover a wide range of topics that build a bridge between theory and practice allowing readers to keep pace with new developments in the field. The tutorials in this book focuses on advancements in theory and implementations of methodologies, probabilistic and stochastic models, and logistics and transportation in global supply chains. Some tutorials explore practical applications ranging from HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment policies, to addressing optimality gap estimators in an algorithmic way, to the decision analysis technique behind the merger of ORSA and TIMS to become INFORMS.

Zhi-Long Chen and S. Raghavan
Tutorials Co-Chairs and Volume Editors
Paul Gray, Series Editor
Harvey J. Greenberg, Series Founder

The 15 tutorials in this volume collectively illustrate the state-of-the-art operations research methods and their applications to decision-making problems that arise in our current information-intensive age. The range of applications covered in this volume is broad, encompassing healthcare, supply chain management, logistics, eCommerce, and service industries. The range of methods covered is also broad including game theory, heuristics, discrete and continuous optimization, optimal learning, queuing theory, simulation, statistics, stochastic programming, and stochastic processes.

Theodore Klastorin
Tutorials Chair and Volume Editor
Paul Gray, Series Editor
Harvey J. Greenberg, Series Founder

TutORials in Operations Research 2007, subtitled “OR Tools and Applications: Glimpses of Future Technologies”, is the fourth published volume in the series that was started by Harvey J. Greenberg in 2004. Like its predecessors, the tutorials in this book, as well as eight others, were presented at the 2007 INFORMS annual meeting in Seattle, Washington. They all represent both the breadth and depth of methodologies and applications that define operations research’s (OR) varied and significant contributions. For this year, we were fortunate to have a group of tutorials presented by mostly senior INFORMS members who have extensive experience in advancing their respective topics as well as applying and presenting their material.

Michael P. Johnson, Bryan Norman, and Nicola Secomandi,
Tutorials Co-Chairs and Volume Editors
Paul Gray, Series Editor
Harvey J. Greenberg, Series Founder

This volume of Tutorials in Operations Research, subtitled “Models, Methods, and Applications for Innovative Decision Making,” is the third in a series that started with the volume edited by Harvey Greenberg and published by Springer in 2004. Like the previous volume of TutORials (which was edited by J. Cole Smith, published by INFORMS, and made available at the 2005 INFORMS meeting in San Francisco, CA), this volume continues an innovative tradition in scholarship and academic service. First, all of the chapters in this volume correspond to tutorial presentations made at the 2006 INFORMS meeting held in Pittsburgh, PA. This conveys a sense of immediacy to the volume: readers have the opportunity to gain knowledge on important topics in OR/MS quickly, through presentations and the written chapters to which they correspond. Second, the chapters in this volume span the range of OR/MS sectors that make this field exciting and relevant to academics and practitioners alike: analytic methods (deterministic and dynamic math programming and math programming under risk and uncertainty), application areas (production and inventory management, interactions between supply chain actors, and supply chain network design), and OR/MS practice (spreadsheet modeling and analysis).

We believe that this volume, like its predecessors, will serve as a reference guide for best practices and cutting-edge research in OR/MS: It is a “go-to” guide for operations researchers.

Harvey J. Greenberg, Series Editor
J. Cole Smith, Tutorials Chair and Volume Editor

One of the primary goals of the 2005 INFORMS meeting tutorials is to address the evolving challenges faced by our community, especially with respect to the visibility and impact of our profession. Indeed, communicating the role of operations research and management science (OR/MS) to industrial and governmental organizations often remains quite difficult, even to those organizations that can benefit the most from OR/MS. After all, the vast majority of people who navigate to and from work, plan their weekly budget,and decide when and at what price to buy airplane tickets never know that they are (heuristically) solving complex OR/MS problems. While the loss of five minutes on the way to work or paying 5% over the cheapest-possible airfare is of little consequence, it is well-documented that decision processes worth millions of dollars, or even those determining the difference between life and death, can unquestionably benefit from OR/MS principles.

INFORMS tutorials sessions provide an opportunity to witness the application of OR/MS to new problem domains, investigate new theoretical investigations from first principles, understand the foundations and procedures of new methods,and participate in the ongoing implementation of our findings in the classroom and in practice. However, they currently lack a certain outreach ability: Those who are not familiar with OR/MS will likely not attend the annual meeting in the first place,and even those present must budget their resources between subdivision meetings, parallel sessions, and other service responsibilities. Moreover, those who are in fact able to attend the tutorials sessions often do not have a written artifact of the topic to which they can refer after the conference. It is therefore the goal of this book to remedy these shortcomings and widen the visibility of new research and applications in our field.