Dear Colleagues,

It is already time to prepare for the upcoming INFORMS Annual Meeting, November 4-7, 2018, to be held in Phoenix, Arizona. I'm responsible for organizing the Location Analysis cluster. If you are interested in organizing a session within the SOLA cluster, just let me know a tentative title and I can set-up your session in the system right away. There is also a possibility of organizing a joint session with other societies and sections (TSL, Healthcare, PSOR, Service Science, etc.) to attract more audience.

They made some changes for the contributed talks this year such as having 6 talks per session or having "flash" sessions with 10 talks! So, you may want to make sure that you and your students present in an invited session. I can certainly arrange for that.

The deadline to add a session chair in the system is March 16th. So, please let me know before then.

Here is a list of the sessions that we have within our SOLA cluster so far:

1. Continuous Location I

Zvi Drezner

2. Continuous Location II

Pawel Kalczynski

3. Location Models

Oded Berman & Dmitry Krass

4. Location applications in the context of humanitarian logistics

Rajan Batta

(joint session with Public Sector OR)

5. Random stow strategies in warehousing

John G. Carlsson

(joint session with TSL/Facility Logistics)

6. Location Models for Social Good

Kayse Maass

(joint session with Public Sector OR)

7. Alternative-Fuel Vehicles Refueling and Routing Problems I

Ismail Capar & Yudai Honma

8. Alternative-Fuel Vehicles Refueling and Routing Problems II

Ismail Capar & Yudai Honma

9. Alternative-Fuel Location Decisions with Service Constraints

Ismail Capar & Yudai Honma

(joint session with TSL)

10. (Title to be determined)

Sibel Alumur Alev

If you want to present in any of the above sessions, you may contact the session organizer(s) directly to ask if there is any space. If not, please let me know and I can still arrange for you to present in a SOLA sponsored session.

We have quite a good number of sessions already. I seek help from all Location researchers for their participation so that we have well-attended sessions and a productive meeting!

Best regards, Sibel

Sibel Alumur Alev, PhD Assistant Professor Department of Management Sciences University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1 CANADA tel: +1-519-888-4567, ext. 33365 e-mail: sibel.alumur@uwaterloo.camailto:sibel.alumur@uwaterloo.ca url: http://www.mansci.uwaterloo.ca/~salumura/