This book contains 93 selected papers from the symposium "Operations Research 2008" which was held from September 3-5, 2008 at the University of Augsburg, Germany. The international conference, which also serves as the annual meeting of the German Operations Research Society (GOR), attracted 580 participants from more than thirty countries. The general theme "Operations Research and Global Business" stresses the important role of Operations Research in improving decisions in the increasingly complex global business environment. Operations Research represents one of the most successful instruments for organizing business processes, as many applications in areas like supply chain management or financial management show. The book gives a broad overview of the various facets of Operations Research: mathematical methods such as optimization, forecasting, data analysis or game theory and their applications in business, economics and social life.

Zusammenfassung
The international conference \Operations Research 2008", the annual meeting of the German Operations Research Society (GOR), was held at the University of Augsburg on September 3-5, 2008. About 580 p- ticipants from more than 30 countries presented and listened to nearly 400 talks on a broad range of Operations Research. The general subject \Operations Research and Global Business" str- ses the important role of Operations Research in improving decisions in the increasingly complex business processes in a global environment. The plenary speakers Morris A. Cohen (Wharton School) and Bernd Liepert (Executive Board of KUKA Robotics) addressed this subject. Moreover, one of the founders of Operations Research, Saul Gass (U- versity of Maryland), gave the opening speech on the early history of Operations Research. This volume contains 93 papers presented at the conference, selected by the program committee and the section chairs, forming a representative sample of the various subjects dealt with at Operations Research 2008. The volume follows the structure of the conference, with 12 sections, grouped into six \Fields of Applications" and six \Fields of Methods and Theory". This structure in no way means a separation of theory and application, which would be detrimental in Operations Research, but displays the large spectrum of aspects in the focus of the papers. Of course, most papers present theory, methods and applications together.

Inhalt

Finance and Accounting.- Health Care and Environment.- Production and Service Management.- Scheduling and Project Management.- Supply Chain and Inventory Management.- Traffic and Transportation.- Applied Probability and Stochastic Programming.- Business Informatics, Decision Support and Artifical Intelligence.- Discrete and Combinatorial Optimization.- Forecasting, Econometrics and Game Theory.- Linear, Nonlinear and Vector Optimization.- Network Optimization.