Sections are technical interest groups devoted to advancing the professional interests of members in specialized and technical aspects of our profession.
INFORMS College on Artificial Intelligence (CAI) brings together researchers and practitioners interested in the theories, applications, and methodologies of artificial intelligence. Please feel free to correspond with our officers if you want to organize or participate in CAI-sponsored activities.
Market mechanisms such as auctions and matching markets are being widely used to solve resource allocation problems with multiple decision makers. Market design is concerned with the design of real-world markets and it considers criteria such as allocative efficiency, stability, fairness, truthfulness, and computational complexity. The study of market mechanisms requires theoretical and empirical methods and is based on techniques from economics, operations research, and the management sciences.
AAS encourages the development and dissemination of applications and research in areas relating to aviation, including but not limited to airline planning and operations, air traffic control, airport planning, aviation financial, economic and policy analysis, aviation forecasting, and aviation human factors.
Behavioral Operations Management Section provides a continuing, specialized focus within INFORMS aimed at leading the development of research into behavioral dynamics in operations management modeling, policy prescription and practice. Its intent is to provide mechanisms for the exchange of ideas, experiences and techniques for research growth in this area with the end goal of increasing the practical applicability of operations management.
The eBusiness section promotes research, teaching, and networking among academics and practitioners, in eBusiness technology, theory, measurement, and applications.
The objectives of the section are to provide a continuing, specialized focus within INFORMS on the topic of financial services, with the aim of identifying current and potential problems and contributions to their solutions; to lead in the development, dissemination, and implementation of knowledge, basic and applied research and technologies in the area of finance and financial services; and to promote high professional standards and integrity in all work done in the field.
GDN emerges from evolving, unifying approaches to group decision and negotiation processes. These processes are complex and self-organizing involving multiplayer, multicriteria, ill-structured, evolving, dynamic problems.
SOLA's mission is to promote the development of analytical methods, techniques and tools in the tradition of OR/MS as applied to the study of facility location. “Facility location” is defined as the choice of location(s) for entities at which services are provided in order to optimize measures of efficiency and possibly equity and effectiveness, subject to resource constraints and institutional considerations.
The Section has an interdisciplinary and broad focus on different methodologies, such as multiple objective optimization (including Goal Programming and Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization) and discrete choice problems (including Multi-Attribute Utility Theory-based methods, Outranking methods, and Optimization-based interactive methods), as well as the support for the decision maker and the decision making process in such problems with computer-based models.
The College on Organization Science brings together scholars and practitioners interested in organizational behavior, organization theory, and strategic management. Its goal is to further the theoretical understanding of organizations, and help put theory into practice.
The Practice Section of INFORMS serves the entire community of full-time and part-time practitioners. Thus, while it concentrates on practical applications, The Practice Section has wide interests that range over the full scope of OR/MS methods and fields of application. The Practice Section administers three INFORMS level awards: Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations Research, Franz Edelman Award, and UPS George D. Smith Prize.
PSOR is dedicated to, in the words of the INFORMS slogan, “doing good with good OR.”
The section furthers the use of OR/MS in the following areas: Public Policy, Public Programs, Public Safety, Public Service, and Public Needs
Comprised of members from industrial engineering, statistics and business communities from many different countries.
The purpose of the QSR Section is to encourage discussion and interaction among individuals having an interest in Quality, Statistics and Reliability research.
RAS was founded in 1994 to facilitate productivity improvements and growth in the rail industry through appropriate application of management science techniques.
The purpose of the section is to advance the development and application of operations research methods, techniques and tools as they apply to the field of revenue management; to promote the development and application of revenue management in new industries; to encourage the exchange of information among practitioners, users, and researchers in the area of revenue management; and to promote high professional standards in the application of revenue management.
Promotes and disseminates research and applications among professionals interested in theory, methodologies, and applications in service science, which cuts across the fields of service business strategy and modeling, service operations research and management, information systems, marketing science and analytics, management science, e-commerce and e-business, industrial engineering, and social and cognitive science.
The Social Media Section attempts to capture the breadth of inclusion of INFORMS’ mission as it pertains to social media analysis.
The mission of the Section on OR in Sports (SpORts) is to promote and disseminate research and applications among professionals interested in theory, methodologies, and applications of OR/MS to sports problems.
The Strategy Science Section is devoted to supporting a community of researchers within INFORMS with an interest in questions of business strategy. The intent is to offer a “big tent” that accommodates scholars across a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches, but who all share a concern with enhancing our understanding of key questions in the strategy field.