Prof. Dr. Anita Schöbel has been elected as the next president by the Council of the »Association of European Operational Research Societies« (EURO) on July 9, 2021. EURO is the European section of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS) and aims to promote the field of operations research throughout Europe. Currently, 32 national OR societies are represented in the association, including the German Society for Operations Research (GOR), whose president was Anita Schöbel in 2019 and 2020.
She took office in January 2022, initially as »President Elect« of the »Association of European Operational Research Societies«. This year, Anita Schöbel began her two-year term as President.
The field of »Operations Research« (OR) develops quantitative models and methods for decision support for social and industrial, often business management, problems. It is characterized by interdisciplinary collaboration between mathematics, economics and computer science. »For me, Operations Research is an important research topic at the university, but also in the practice of the Fraunhofer ITWM. We use OR methods in many projects, for example, in health care, logistics, production, or energy optimization«, says Anita Schöbel, who, in addition to her leadership function at Fraunhofer ITWM, researches in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau in the field of optimization. An example for the use of OR methods in logistics are supply chains, respectively their maintenance. The various supply bottlenecks during the Corona pandemic show how difficult this can be.
Her goal is to increase the visibility of operations research in science and industry and to show in how many areas business and society can benefit from the use of OR methods. We interviewed her and asked her about her new position as president.
You can find the interview here on our website.