Celebrating 30 years of International Transactions in Operational Research

Field: Decision Sciences (Social Sciences)

This 30th Anniversary Selected Articles Special Issue contains a unique article selection, chosen by the Editors of International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) to celebrate the journal's 30th anniversary. International Transactions in Operational Research is the flagship journal of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS), whose main goal is to promote the development of Operational Research worldwide. As such, International Transactions in Operational Research is committed to advancing and promoting the methodology, understanding, education, and practice of Operational Research (OR) throughout the World by creating bridges between theory and application and between academics and practitioners. The journal also has the goal of fostering the interface of Operational Research with related disciplines, such as management science, data science and analytics, computer science, artificial intelligence and machine learning, economics and game theory, simulation, statistics, applied mathematics, mathematical programming and optimization, large scale networks, computer and social networks, among others. International Transactions in Operational Research encourages the submission of different types of articles, including research articles, surveys and tutorials, original or innovative applications, contributions from the industry, documented case studies, experimental algorithmic work, computational studies, methodological developments, theoretical results and new problems (complexity, algorithms), education issues in OR, and special thematic issues or collections of articles (by a proposal to the Editor-in-Chief). “The idea for a new academic journal emerged following a meeting of the IFORS Administrative Committee (AC) in Philadelphia in 1989 that concluded with a call for action to improve IFORS' financial situation. Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of Helle Welling at the IFORS office, IFORS had existed on a shoestring budget for many years. However, it was clear to the AC members, led by President Bill Pierskalla and Treasurer David Schrady, that if IFORS was to thrive and prosper, it needed additional revenue sources. I was serving as Vice President (North America) and was assigned the additional role of coordinator of IFORS publications, and it was clear to all that the most promising source of additional revenues for IFORS was through publications. IFORS already published one profitable journal, International Abstracts in Operations Research, which was a specialized abstracting journal. Hence, the apparent path to a new publication was a more mainstream academic journal. However, the 1980s and 1990s were a difficult time for Operations Research. Russell Ackoff had published his famous article “The Future of OR is Past” (Journal of the Operational Research Society 30 (2), 1979, pp. 93–104), and universities and particularly business schools had been eliminating “OR” related faculty and courses at an alarming rate. Launching a new journal in this challenging climate would require content to publish, subscribers to buy the journal and an editorial structure. Fortunately, IFORS had easy access to all of these. IFORS held a major conference every three years and published a fat proceedings tome that was mailed to all the conference attendees, with a few sold to libraries. The founding concept for a new journal was basically to replace these proceedings volumes with three years of a new journal. The money reserved from registration fees for the triennial conferences would provide a three-year subscription to the new journal for each conference registrant (who would now be subscribers to ITOR). The plan was for papers submitted following presentation at the next IFORS Triennial Conference to be held in 1993 in Lisbon to be rigorously refereed and, on acceptance, become the first content of the new journal. I proposed the title International Transactions in Operational Research since there was no competing journal with “Transactions” in the title. Also, my undergraduate experience suggested that journals with “Transactions” in the title were often the best place to start for research assignments. In particular, these transactions journals were often a good source of review articles that provided a solid introduction to a new topic, and publishing reviews could become a distinctive role for the new ITOR. “Transactions” in the title resulted in many discussions, but no clear alternative emerged, so the new journal became ITOR. The initial editorial structure had me taking on the role of Editor-in-Chief (EiC) and appointing many friends and colleagues from IFORS to the new Editorial Board. IFORS was now able to approach publishers with a business plan for a startup that included a source of publishable articles, a subscriber base, and an editorial board that read like the “Who's Who” of international OR. Elsevier agreed to a publication deal starting with Volume 1 in 4 issues in 1994, and ITOR was born. It was agreed that as soon as sufficient publishable material was available, ITOR would expand to six issues annually. Consequently, my priority was to generate publishable papers. This meant contacting the Editorial Board and the IFORS membership to try to persuade these distinguished academics to publish their best articles in a journal that no one had ever heard of! Presenters at the 1993 IFORS Triennial Conference in Lisbon were invited to submit articles based on their presentations for consideration for publication in the new IFORS international journal ITOR. Rolfe Tomlinson (National Coal Board and Warwick University) initially agreed to serve as Conference Editor for the four issues of volume 1 and arranged to referee of the more than 200 submitted articles. Volume 1 contained 44 articles with authors representing 23 countries meeting IFORS’ objective of having a truly international journal. The volume of submitted articles extended Rolfe's term through the first six issues before Paul Gray (Claremont Graduate School) took over for the balance of Volume 2 and into Volume 3. ITOR had now “consumed” the materials from IFORS Lisbon and had 6 to 8 issues with filling before papers from the next IFORS Triennial conference (Vancouver 1996) became available. Extending the invitation to submit articles to presenters at the IFORS special interest conferences (SPCs) filled this gap. Paul Gray edited papers presented at the IFORS SPC on Digital Technologies/Multimedia: OR/MS in Strategy, Operations, and Decision Support held in Santa Monica, USA in January 1995. Reuven Levary (Saint Louis University) edited papers from the SPC on OR and Engineering Design held in St. Louis, October 1995, and Derek Bunn (London Business School) oversaw the refereeing of articles from presenters at the SPC on Energy Policy Modelling held at London Business School, July 1995. In 1995 I became IFORS President and handed over the Coordinator of Publications role to Graham Rand (Lancaster University). However, I retained the ITOR EiC role to see ITOR more firmly established. IFORS and Elsevier had hoped that Volume 3 (1996) would be six issues, but Volume 2 was under the page budget, and sufficient submissions to expand the journal were not in sight. With the Vancouver conference coming up in 1996 and expectations of huge attendance, Paul Stähly (University of St. Gallen) agreed to serve as Editor of the papers submitted following the conference. The Vancouver conference proved to be a watershed for ITOR since it produced more than 300 submissions that after Paul's diligent refereeing, filled all of six issues of now expanded Volume 4 (1997) and half of Volume 5 (Issues 1, 2 and 3; 1998). During this period, contributed and invited articles continued to appear, with Volume 5 Issue 4 as the first issue free of any link to a conference. While there would continue to be ups and downs, ITOR now appeared to be on a sustainable path. Before stepping down as ITOR Editor-in-Chief in 2000, Theodor Stewart (University of Cape Town) had agreed to serve as Editor of articles submitted following the IFORS 1999 Beijing conference and had received some 240 submissions. In the belief that I had now met the commitment to IFORS to start a sustainable new academic journal, I handed the Editor-in-Chief position to Cathal Brugha (University College, Dublin), who served until 2006. However, in 2006 I was invited by the President of IFORS to serve as acting EiC while a search was underway for a new permanent EiC. In 2006–2007, ITOR had a new publisher (Blackwell) since Pergamon had decided, starting with the 2001 volume, it was not interested in continuing. There were about 150 articles in the process of being reviewed, but the inflow of contributed articles was not much improved from the early days. In my report to the IFORS Administrative Committee, I noted that two major issues had emerged that were limiting ITOR's potential. The first was that ITOR was perceived as a proceedings journal because so much of the published material was sourced from conferences. A second issue was the fact that ITOR was not indexed. The indexing issue had emerged recently: during my seven years as EiC the lack of indexing had never been raised as an issue. My report concluded with the following: “In my opinion, the new Editor has some opportunities that are challenging but ought to be very rewarding.” Fortunately for ITOR and IFORS, Celso C. Ribeiro (Universidade Federal Fluminense) agreed to serve as the next ITOR EiC in 2007, and under his new leadership, ITOR has flourished.” The journal's Editorial Board was restructured in 2007 to include a new generation of motivated professionals capable of attracting and reviewing more submissions, developing new or emergent areas, involving new collaborators as authors and referees, and increasing ITOR's readership. The Editorial Board, now strong of 72 Associate Editors from 23 countries, has worked very closely with the EiC and has been instrumental in the journal achieving its goals. Since 2007, the Editorial Board has handled more than 6300 submissions from 97 countries. A steady flow of regular submissions has been complemented by submissions to frequent special issues in a variety of subjects and application areas such as matheuristics, metaheuristics, stochastic local search, data driven optimization, multicriteria decision making, decision support systems, ethics, healthcare, agriculture, finance, education, banking, supply chains, blockchain, autonomous technologies, logistics, cutting and packing, and freight transport, among others. ITOR was indexed in the Journal Citation Reports in 2011 following our first application, and its first JCR journal impact factor was announced in 2012. The IFORS Administrative Committee approved in 2020 the final terms of the annual IFORS – ITOR – Wiley Best Paper Awards for articles published in the International Transactions in Operational Research. The awards are given annually in two categories: (1) Methodology and applications, and (2) Surveys and tutorials. The winner in each category receives a US$ 500 cash award prize. Winners and runner-ups in each category receive a certificate issued by IFORS. Candidates for the awards in any given year are all papers published in an issue of ITOR in the volumes of the two preceding years. The Editor-in-Chief leads the selection process, which is carried out by a jury formed by members of the Editorial Board, one representative of the IFORS AC, and possibly, other invited personalities. All candidate papers are evaluated by bibliometric information and by their relevance, impact, and originality. The EiC communicates the winners and runner-ups to the Administrative Committee. The President of IFORS makes the official announcement of the Awards. The annual Best Paper Awards have been announced for 2019, 2020, and 2021, while the selection for the 2022 awards is ongoing. In this 30th Anniversary Selected Articles Special Issue, the Editor-in-Chief presents a selection of 30 representative and influential papers in the journal's history. This selection was made from among all articles published in ITOR until the end of 2021. It comprises 30 representative papers, complemented by three of the mainly accessed articles of our Hall of Fame series. This article selection shows that ITOR covers the broad field of OR, with a wide range of authors from institutions and countries from all over the world. We encourage you to read this anniversary issue and see the milestones and recent trends in the field of Operational Research and related areas, as reported in the selected articles. We also take this opportunity to announce a special gift to our readership. In addition to this 30th Anniversary Selected Articles Special Issue, Volume 30 (2023) of ITOR will comprise six special thematic issues specially planned for this occasion, with all the articles published as open or free access to everyone. This is also the appropriate time to thank all authors and readers of International Transactions in Operational Research. The journal is yours, and it is made for you. We are grateful for your interest and confidence in the journal over these 30 years. We are also very thankful to the hundreds of referees that anonymously and voluntarily collaborate with the journal. Our mission would not be possible without their assistance. Finally, we acknowledge to all members of the Editorial Board for their continuous support and close collaboration. Enjoy the reading. The whole VSI can be accessed through this link: ITOR - Special Virtual 30th Anniversary Issue: International Transactions in Operational Research (wiley.com).