XI Latin American Summer Workshop on Operations Research (ELAVIO), Villa de Leyva, Colombia

Martin J. Geiger, Hohenheim

This year, the Latin American Summer Workshop on Operations Research took place in Villa de Leyva, Colombia, from 25th to 29th of July. For already the eleventh time this workshop brought together students, researchers and professors in the field of Operations Research in Latin America. After previous workshops in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Cuba it was the first time for Colombia to host the event. Consequently, the organizing team around Andrés L. Medaglia and René Meziat of the Uiversidad de los Andes ensured a perfect organization of the conference. Villa de Leyva was well-chosen as a conference venue. Being reachable within a three-hours-bus ride from Bogotá, it is a relatively small village popular as a holiday destination with around 4000 inhabitants. The marvellous waterfalls close by are an attractive target for excursions, and one afternoon of the conference was reserved for a trip in this region. The program of the conference comprised 80 contributed talks organized in three parallel sessions, starting at 8:00 am to 6:45 pm. In addition, plenary sessions and introductory tutorials have been presented:

• Carlos A. Coello-Coello (Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del IPN, Mexiko) on "Introduction to Mulitobjective Evolutionary Optimization",
• Alina Fedossa (Departamento de Matemáticas y Ciencias Básicas, Universidad Autónoma de Bucaramanga, Kolumbien) on "Introduction to Semi-infinite Optimization",
• Alfredo Garcia (Department of Systems & Information Engineering, University of Virginia, USA) on "Game Theory with Engineering Applications",
• Cesar Jaramillo (Facultad de Ingeniería Industrial, Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira, Kolumbien) on "Lúdica en Investigación de Operaciones",
• Gonzalo Mejía (Departamento de Ingeniería Industrial, Universidad de los Andes, Kolumbien) on "Petri Nets-based Scheduling",
• Germán Riano (Departamento de Ingeniería Industrial, Universidad de los Andes, Kolumbien) on "Modelaje y Optimización de Call Centers",
• Cipriano Santos (Hewlett Packard Labs, Palo Alto, USA) on "Applications of Mathematical Programming Approaches for the Allocation and Scheduling of Computer Resources at Large Scale Distributed Computing Environments" and
• Michael Spagat (Department of Economics Royal Holloway College University of London and CEPR, UK) on "From Old Wars to New Wars and Global Terrorism"

The tutorials of Carlos A. Coello-Coello and Cipriano Santos on multi objective evolutionary algorithms and grid scheduling applications turned out to be particularly interesting with respect to my personal research activities. Unexpectedly many presentations dealt with applications of metaheuristics like simulated annealing and genetic algorithms for the resolution of multi objective problems, and therefore have been in a similar area of research to my talk presenting and discussing an optimization system for multi objective production scheduling. As an example, Banu Solu und Murat Köksalan (Industrial Engineering Department, Middle East Technical University) presented a novel evolutionary algorithm and its application to multi objective knapsack problems. Other talks to mention are in particular applications of operations research techniques to problems addressing human factors in manufacturing. Cristobá Miralles (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spanien) and Claudia P. Escobar (Auburn University, USA) gave presentations about "Solving procedures for the Assembly Line Worker Assignment and Balancing Problem. Application to Sheltered Work Centres for Disabled" and "Integrating Operations Research and Human Factors Engineering: Improving Human Performance and Worker's Well-Being Through Applied Optimization".

Besides the scientific exchange, it is a main objective of ELAVIO to bring together young researchers from countries all over Latin America in order to allow them to establish personal contacts and to stimulate further joint research activities. This aim is supported by one IFORS and two EURO fellowship, providing financial support for the participation of non-Latin American researchers. In this context, the future development of ELVAVIO has been a discussed topic. A possible outcome may be that abstracts submitted to future ELAVIO are preferably going to be written in English language.

Acknowledgements: The author's participation was financially supported by GOR, EURO, and IFORS.