Going for Gold: IFORS first 50 years at a glance

Membership
Within two years of the formation of IFORS, the three founding members, United States (ORSA), United Kingdom (ORS), and France (SOFRO), had been joined by a further seven national societies. Currently, 48 active member societies make up the IFORS family. The table below shows the years these national societies joined IFORS.

The national member societies represent some 30,000 individual members. Their membership ranges from around 10,000 (INFORMS) to about 3,000 (UK and Japan) to those with less than 50
(Belarus, Lithuania, Slovakia).

Conferences
The 1957 Oxford Meeting was followed by preparation of the Statutes, which set as its purpose, “the development of operational research as a unified science and its advancement in all nations of the world.” A striking aspect of the Statutes is the provision that in all formal votes taken by the Board, the voting strength of each member society is in proportion to the square root of the qualified membership. This is meant to give greater weight to larger societies but not to overwhelm the smaller societies. The by-laws further stated that all papers shall be published or presented in French or English. The first conference following the founding of IFORS was held in Aix-en-Provence in September 1960, attended by delegates from its ten member societies. The subsequent conference locations are as indicated below:

Under the initiative of Jean-Pierre Brans, a new series of conferences was created in the 1990’s. The Special Purpose Conferences (SPCs) enable OR specialists to hold smaller meetings on any OR topic, and organized independently or jointly with other professional organizations such as a national OR society. A list of those held so far follows:

IFORS Special Purpose Conferences
Decision Support Systems, Bruges, Belgium, 1991 Transition to Advanced Market Economies, Warsaw, Poland, 1992 Digital Technologies/Multimedia: OR/MS in Strategy, Operations and Decision Support, Santa Monica, CA, USA, 1995
Energy Models for Policy and Planning, London, England, 1995
OR Engineering Design, St Louis, Missouri, USA., 1995
Simulation, Gaming, Training and Business Process Reengineering in Operations, Riga, Latvia, 1996
Information Systems in Logistic and Transportation, Gothenburg, Sweden, 1997
Organisational structures, management, simulation of business sectors and systems, Kaunas, Lithuania,
1998
Intelligent Systems and Active DSS, Abo, Finland, 1999
Simulation, Gaming, Training and Business Process Reengineering in Operations, Riga, Latvia, 2000
New Trends in Banking Management, Athens, Greece, 2001

IFORS Distinguished Lecture (IDL)
In 1999 IFORS established a special program, called IFORS Distinguished Lectures (IDL), to recognize distinguished OR scholars and analysts and support member societies and regional groupings. Through this program IFORS sponsors lectures by distinguished OR scholars and analysts at conferences of its regional groupings.

Regional Groupings
During the 6th IFORS Conference in Dublin in 1972, the idea of meeting more frequently for European operational research workers was put forward. Two years and many meetings later, the First European Conference on Operational Research was held in Brussels in 1975. In a year, the Association of European Operational Research Societies within IFORS was formally constituted.

In 1982, the Association of Latin American OR Societies (ALIO) was established. In the succeeding period, IFORS gave its encouragement to the development of a grouping in the Asia-Pacific region, which came into being as the Association of Asian-Pacific OR Societies within IFORS (APORS) in 1985. When, in 1987, the IFORS constitution was changed, NORAM, the Association of North American OR Societies within IFORS, composed of the OR Societies in Canada and the USA, was created solely so that a Vice- President would be able to represent North America.

Kindred Societies and International Membership
The need to include within IFORS bodies other than the National Societies was recognized very early and The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS), and the Airlines Group of IFORS (AGIFORS) became kindred societies, followed later by the Czechoslovak Economico-Mathematical Commission (EMCO) in 1966 the Mathematical Programming Society (MPS) in 1975, the Fellowship for Operational Research (FOR), and the OR wing of the Investment Advisory Centre of Pakistan in 1978. The kindred society status provided the means for IFORS to have links in countries where a national society was not ready to join IFORS. TIMS merged with ORSA in 1995 to form INFORMS, which thus became the US National Society. Inspired by UNESCO, IFORS joined with four other international federations to form FIACC (the Five International Associations Co-ordinating Committee). FIACC existed to exchange information about conferences of the sister federations, which include the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), the International Federation for Information Processing
(IFIP), the International Federation for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (IMACS), and the International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO).

Publications
International Abstracts in Operations Research
The history of International Abstracts in Operations Research (IAOR) goes as far back as 1958 when Hugh Miser, then secretary of ORSA, proposed to Sir Charles Goodeve that one of the early items of IFORS business should be the possibility of funding and operating a journal that would bring all “unclassified” OR work to the attention of the worldwide OR community

The journal was started in January 1961, under the editorship of Herbert P. Galliher. The first issue appeared in November 1961.In 1968, Hugh Bradley took over. A year later, responsibility for the production of IAOR from ORSA was transferred to IFORS. Graham Rand served as editor for 12 years starting 1979, after which, David Smith, the current editor, took over. David Smith recommended in 2005 that IAOR embrace new technologies which could strengthen the journal and help maintain its historic leadership in providing access to the OR literature. The IAOR Strategic Planning Committee was formed and their recommendation to restructure IAOR as an online journal which also publishes a paper version is being implemented.

Conference Proceedings and International Transactions in Operational Research

From the first conference in 1957 up to the Athens Conference in 1990, a volume of proceedings was published. These volumes include a selection of papers presented as well as records of discussions at workshops. These volumes were made available to each participant at the conference though very few institutional libraries purchased volumes. Moreover, some authors refused to allow their papers to be published in the proceedings,
because they believed their papers would not receive recognition.

To avoid the above problems, it was decided to change the method of publication of conference papers. After the 1993 Lisbon conference and under the editorship of Peter Bell, the first volume of the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) was published. In 2001, the editorship of the journal passed to Cathal Brugha, who reported on the difficulty of maintaining a steady stream of quality paper submissions to ITOR. A Review Committee chaired by former IFORS President Bill Pierskalla was formed to address these issues. The Committee recommended in 2006, that ITOR should be oriented toward international perspectives of OR and focused on application areas, but with supporting algorithmic, methodological, and theoretical papers and that its Editor-in-Chief be provided sufficient financial support to initiate programs that will attract more submissions. After an extensive editorial search, Cathal, whose term lapsed in 2005, was succeeded by Celso Carneiro Ribeiro (Brazil), who reconstituted the Editorial Board and revisited the editorial policy as soon as he took over in 2007.

Developing Countries
A significant turning point in putting OR for development on the IFORS agenda was the IFORS Conference held in Japan in 1975. The theme of the Conference was “OR in the Service of Developing Economies.” The conference reflected its theme, and a number of initiatives started since have their origin here. The second significant stage followed discussion at the 1984 IFORS triennial conference in Washington, where several initiatives were started. With the aim of increasing the use of OR as a practical tool for decision-makers in Asia by influencing the way OR is taught, regional workshops for teachers of OR in developing countries were held in Ahmedabad (1986), Bombay (1987), Kuala Lumpur (1988), Singapore (1989), and Jakarta (1990).

In December 1992, participants of the first International Conference on OR for Development (ICORD) held in Ahmedabad, India, came out with their recommendations on how OR could best be advanced in developing countries. What has come to be known as the Ahmedabad Declaration called for a range of actions from IFORS to support and strengthen OR in developing countries. Successor ICORDs were held in Rio de Janeiro (1996), Manila (1997), Berg-en-dal (2001), Jamshedpur (2005) and Fortaleza (2008).

IFORS has in the past published OR for Developing Countries Newsletter, the purpose of which is to keep people in contact between the ICORD conferences. The IFORS Prize, awarded at every triennial conference, recognizes exemplary work in the application of OR to address issues of development. With the help of EURO, IFORS has initiated several activities, including sponsoring conferences and scholarships in the African continent in an effort to address the lack of organized OR activity in the area.

IFORS Website
The IFORS website http://www.ifors.org, is a key tool promoting OR internationally as well as a valuable resource for any practitioner or academic. The site includes information about local and international conferences, activities of member societies, updates on IFORS committee activities, links to national societies and regional groupings, the IFORS newsletter, and educational and training material. As part of fostering excellence in OR education, the website includes OR Educational Resources, the goal of which is to gather high quality educational material such as case studies, methodological readings and algorithms and makes them available to IFORS members. One component of this project is tutORial, which aims to develop an extensive collection of interactive web-based tutorial modules on generic OR topics. The IFORS website has been given a new look in 2007 by its webmaster, Moshe Sniedovich.

Young Scholars Program
Started in 2000, IFORS has continually provided scholarship funds for participants to join summer institutes and workshops as part of the regional activities. So far, several scholars have been sent to the EURO, ALIO, and APORS workshops. The sponsorship is aimed at encouraging the establishment of groups of promising young OR scientists who will continue to work and network in the future.

Presidents
The initial structure of IFORS did not require there to be a President. The affairs of the Federation were to be administered by a ‘foster’ society for every three-year period. The Statutes provided for a Secretariat consisting of an executive officer (the Secretary) and atreasurer; both nominated by the designated ‘foster’ society. The initial foster society was the Operational Research Society (ORS) in the UK, who appointed Sir Charles Goodeve. ORSA took over as foster society for 1962-1964, with Philip Morse appointed as Secretary. A change in structure of the administration of IFORS came into effect in 1968, after France had taken its turn as the third foster society, with the creation of an Administrative Committee (AC). A further change was introduced in 1989, when the vice-presidential component of the AC became four regional VPs, plus one VP at large, elected by the IFORS membership as a whole. The presidents of IFORS are as shown in the following table:

Looking forward
As IFORS celebrates its 50th anniversary at the 2008 Triennial Conference in South Africa, the Federation has seen a lot of significant accomplishments. Owing to the efforts and activities put in motion by its past leaders, IFORS, starting the last 18 years, has come out of operating on a financial shoestring. IFORS is now in a position to do more. As the present treasurer, Peter Bell, says, the issue today is not so much, “Do we have the
money?” as “What else can and should IFORS be doing?” This is indeed a challenge for the current and future leadership not to waste this opportunity to make a difference in the years to come.

Acknowledgement
This article is taken largely from the two articles on IFORS history by Graham Rand:
Rand, G.K., 2000a. IFORS: The formative years. International Transactions in Operational Research 7, 101-107.
Rand, G.K., 2001. Forty years of IFORS. International Transactions in Operational Research 8, 611-633.
Other information was taken from Annual Reports from 1999 to 2007 and the IFORS website.