IWOR: tribute to Professor Laureano F. Escudero on occasion of his 65th birthday

Abstract

The International Workshop on Operational Research (IWOR) conference held in Madrid (5–7 June 2008) was intended to be a tribute to the outstanding professional and scientific career in Operational Research of Professor Laureano F. Escudero on the occasion of his 65th birthday. During the conference, the participants presented more than 100 papers on many different topics in Operational Research. Furthermore, six plenary lectures were delivered by Brenda Dietrich (Math at IBM), Rudiger Schultz (Dominance Constraints in Two-stage Stochastic Programming), Gautam Mitra (Downside Risk and Portfolio Models), Monique Guignard-Spielberg (Primal and Convex Hull Relaxations for Nonlinear Integer Programming Problems), Maarten H. van der Vlerk (Some Approaches to Solving Stochastic Mixed-Integer Programs), and Martin Grostschel (Controlling Paths), which are related to several of the topics in which Professor Escudero contributed. This special issue of TOP has a double purpose. On the one hand, it contains a collection of selected papers from an open call for papers on Operational Research topics, and, on the other hand, it constitutes an additional tribute to Professor Laureano F. Escudero. Since this special issue is devoted to the figure of Professor Laureano F. Escudero, before going to summarise the contents of it, we provide a brief biography of him. Laureano F. Escudero Bueno (September 23rd, 1942) is PhD in Economic Sciences and currently full professor at the Department of Statistics and Operational Research at the Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid, Spain, since 2007). Previously, he