Looking Forward to the 2025 INFORMS Conference in Atlanta!

All five presentations are now done! The 2025 INFORMS  conference will definitely be a whirlwind conference. It will take place October 26 -29, 2025. I am so looking forward to the talks, the social events, serendipitous encounters, the exhibits, and the various business meetings and special luncheons.

Detailed information on the conference is available here:https://meetings.informs.org/wordpress/annual/

Three of my PhD students will be coming - Ismael Pour, Samira Samadi, and Dana Hassani. 

Ismael will present our latest paper on integrated crop and cargo war risk insurance, co-authored with Borys Kormych of the Odesa Law Academy, which was recently published in the January 2026 issue of the International Transaction in Operational Research, and is available free access: 

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/itor.70038?af=R. 

I will speak on the panel in honor of Hani Mahmassani, who passed away on July 15, 2025. The panel is chaired by Karen Smilowitz, the Editor of Transportation Science and fellow panelists are: Srinivas Peeta, Michael Hyland, and Marco Nie. The panel will be a moving tribute to a leading scholar, educator, mentor, and friend, who is deeply missed.

Samira will present two of our papers (because my schedule is loaded with many meetings and conference events) - a paper, co-authored with Deniz Besik of the University of Richmond on a continuing passion of ours - impact on fresh produce quality of various supply chain disruptions - and the  paper, "Multicommodity Trade, Tariffs, and Rerouting," that is forthcoming in a very special edited volume: Convex and Variational Analysis with Applications: In Honor of Terry Rockafellar’s 90th Birthday, with Themistocles M. Rassias and Panos M. Pardalos as Editors, Springer Nature Switzerland AG; see: https://link.springer.com/book/9783032078599

Dana will present a paper of ours that was also recently published: "Quantification of International Trade Network Performance Under Disruptions to Supply, Transportation, and Demand Capacity, and Exchange Rates in Disasters." This paper was co-authored with colleagues at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE): Oleg Nivievskyi and Pavlo Martyshev and appears in: Dynamics of Disasters- From Natural Phenomena to Human Activity, Ilias S. Kotsireas, Anna Nagurney, Panos M. Pardalos, Stephan Pickl, Chrysafis Vogiatzis, Editors, Springer Nature Switzerland AG; see:https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-74006-0#toc

And on the first evening of the conference, I will receive the INFORMS President's Award, for which I am deeply grateful and very honored:  https://www.informs.org/News-Room/INFORMS-Releases/Awards-Releases/Anna-Nagurney-Honored-with-2025-INFORMS-President-s-Award

Freight as the Weakest Link in the Chain

I travel a lot by plane, train, automobile, and/or bus and frequently write on this blog about my travel experiences. In my writings I have also commented on my air travel experiences and lack of security at distant airports. In my research, I assess network systems, in particular, those in transportation and logistics, including supply chains, from their efficiency to their vulnerability. A recent study of ours: "Fragile Networks; Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain Age" highlights the system-wide aspects of network performance and the negative impact of disruptions as well as total link failures.

The events over the past couple of days in which cargo shipments, originating in Yemen, were found to contain explosive devices, which could have brought down airplanes, have further highlighted the importance of checking cargo.

As reported in the article, Mail Bombs Highlight Flaws in Systems for Screening Air Freight, in today's Boston Globe: "If you talk to anybody senior at airports, they will tell you freight is the weak link in the chain." This quote by Chris Yates, an aviation security specialist, is literally on target.

As for the facts reported in the article:

• Approximately 60 percent of all cargo coming into the United States is on passenger planes with the remainder of about 40 percent arriving on cargo planes.
• About 50,000 tons of cargo is shipped by air within the United States every day, with approximately 25 percent of that shipped by passenger airlines.

One particular vulnerability in the system: Trusted companies that regularly do business with freight shippers are allowed to ship parcels as “secure’’ cargo that is not automatically subjected to further checks.

Some countries such as England already have heightened and thorough cargo security checks which delay shipments up to 24 hours but offer safety and piece of mind. Here we see multicriteria decision-making in action -- counterbalancing cost vs. time vs. safety/security.

Read the terrific article in the Boston Globe by Gregory Katz and ponder what else besides the passengers and crew may be on that plane with you as you circle the globe.