Outstanding EUROPT Conference in Linz, Austria

I am writing this blogpost from Vienna, Austria, where I will soon be registering for the IFORS Conference.

This summer, as is my tradition, I enjoy speaking at conferences, and especially those in Europe.

The travel began on June 26, 2026, when I flew to Naples via Amsterdam to take part in the SING 21 Game Theory Conference, where I delivered the opening keynote on the following Monday morning. The conference was a joy, despite the heat, and I blogged about it: http://annanagurney.blogspot.com/2026/07/i-enjoyed-giving-keynote-at-game-theory.html

Then, last week, I spoke at the EUROPT Conference in Linz, Austria. Linz is the third biggest city in Austria, and it is quite industrial. It was my first time there. Below is a photo of the view from our hotel, which overlooked a nice courtyard.

The EUROPT Conference took place at the Johannes Kepler University, which has a beautiful, green campus, complete with a pond, that reminded me a bit of the UMass Amherst pond.

Many thanks to the organizers of the EUROPT 2026 Conference in Linz, Austria. It was an excellent conference, with great scientific presentations and discussions. Information on the conference can be found here: https://www.jku.at/en/institute-of-business-analytics-and-technology-transformation/conference-europt-2026/. It was wonderful to see Professors: Steven Gabriel of the US, Mauro Passacantando of Italy, Tamás Terlaky of the US, Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber of Poland, Bissan Ghaddar of Canada, Miguel Lejeune of the US, Oleg Prokopyev (now of Switzerland), Immanuel Bomze of Austria, and many others and to make new friends from Georgia (the country), Sweden, Brazil, Canada, and Hong Kong. The link to the slidedeck of my presentation on Ad Valorem Tariffs in Global Supply Chain Networks and Impacts on Labor, based on a recently co-authored published paper with my Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst PhD student Samira Samadi:  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01605682.2025.2592758 is here: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/EUROPT-2026.pdf

The 4 hour conference banquet in a beer hall in an indoor courtyard with a heavenly dessert of warm chocolate cake, cherries, and sorbet, we will all remember!

And, at the Linz train station yesterday, we saw Professor Tamas Terlaky, who was also heading to the IFORS Conference - https://www.ifors2026.at/home/

I Enjoyed Giving a Keynote at the Game Theory Conference in Naples, Italy

Last week the game theory SING21 Conference took place at the University of Naples Federico II in Naples, Italy. I was deeply honored to give the opening keynote talk on the first day of the conference. The title of my talk was: "Game Theory, Supply Chains, Labor, and Tariffs: Insights from Variational Inequalities." It was very warm in Naples but the hospitality was even warmer. Many thanks to Professor Annamaria Barbagallo for inviting me, with gratitude also to all the local organizers. It was a delight to see Professor Suresh Sethi of UT Dallas,  whose talk I very much enjoyed, and also Professors Frieda Granot and Daniel Granot from the University of British Columbia as well as Professor Yigal Gerchak from Telaviv University. There were delegates from numerous countries at this game theory conference, in addition to the US and Canada and European countries, including: Thailand, Japan, South Korea, HK, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Israel. The slidedeck of my keynote presentation can be downloaded from the Supernetwork Center website: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/visuals/SING-Naples-Nagurney-2026.pdf

I also very much enjoyed the keynote talks by Professors Francis Bloch and Hans Peters and many other presentations. The full program is available on the conference website: https://sites.google.com/view/sing-21

The conference banquet on the Mediterranean with a view of Mt. Vesuvius was fabulous with multiple courses and a delicious chocolate almond cake for dessert. Below are some photos. Professor Annamaria Barbagallo presented me with a lovely gift of a plaque of Mt. Vesuvius!

I am grateful to all those who devote so much time and energy to organizing outstanding scientific conferences in locations that are truly special. Thank you! 

My PhD Students Had a Great Year So We Celebrated

One of the great pleasures of being at a research university is working with PhD students and also celebrating their accomplishments. Yesterday, we celebrated some of the accomplishments of my Isenberg School of Management Operations Management PhD students over this past year with a delicious lunch at The Commonwealth Restaurant at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Highlights of an excellent academic year have included:

• Dana Hassani receiving the 2026 Isenberg School Outstanding Doctoral Student Teacher Award;
• Ismael Pour successfully teaching a full course, for the first time, and publishing the co-authored paper, "Integrated crop and cargo war risk insurance: application to Ukraine," co-authored with Professor Borys Kormych of Ukraine, and me, in the International Transactions in Operational Research: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/itor.70038
• Samira Samadi publishing the paper, "Fresh produce spatial price equilibrium on general networks: Capturing commodity quality deterioration through endogenous transportation time delay functions with capacities," with Professor Deniz Besik and me in the European Journal of Operational Research: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221726003759 and also the paper with me, "Ad valorem tariffs in global supply chain networks and impacts on labor," in the Journal of the Operational Research Society: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01605682.2025.2592758. In addition, Samira successfully taught a full course for the first time plus she served as the President of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter!

These PhD students were also very active in presenting their research at conferences of the professional societies: INFORMS, POMS, and DSI. And, Sarvagya Jha had a terrific first year as a PhD student and recently submitted his first paper to a journal. We shared the five exquisite desserts in the photo below.

Wishing all PhD students and their faculty a fabulous and productive summer with great, impactful research.

Super Excited to be Presenting at International Conferences this Summer

Conferences are outstanding venues at which to exchange latest research results and ideas, to do networking, and to reconnect with colleagues from around the globe. And, when the conferences are located in beautiful locations, the experiences become even more special and worthwhile.

This summer will be a very busy one. I will soon be presenting 4 talks at 3 different conferences in 2 different countries.

My first talk is the opening keynote talk at the Game Theory Sing21 Conference in Naples, Italy. I am very grateful to Professor Annamaria Barbagallo for the invitation. The title of my keynote is: "Game Theory, Supply Chains, Labor, and Tariffs: Insights from Variational Inequalities."

The program for the conference is now available online: https://sites.google.com/view/sing-21/programme_1/scientific-programme

I will then travel to Linz, Austria to speak at the EUROPT Conference: https://www.jku.at/en/institute-of-business-analytics-and-technology-transformation/conference-europt-2026/ At that conference, I will present a paper that was co-authored with my Isenberg School PhD student, Samira Samadi, which was recently published in the Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS). The paper, entitled, "Ad Valorem Tariffs in Global Supply Chain Networks and Impacts on Labor," can be accessed from the journal website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01605682.2025.2592758

The IFORS Conferences, which take place only every three years are some of my favorites! IFORS is the umbrella organization for national Operations Research Societies, including INFORMS. And, since the 2026 conference will take place in Vienna, it is one not to be missed. I love Austria and had a Fulbright at SOWI in Innsbruck, Austria. My family and I very much enjoyed living in Austria.

It will be an easy journey from Linz to Vienna.

Working on the two presentations for IFORS was very enjoyable. I would like to take the opportunity to thank Professor Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber for inviting me to speak in the stream: Moments in the History (and Future) of OR. Preparing my presentation, "Highlighting Some Historical Women in OR," took me on a very nostalgic journey since I was blessed to have known some of the truly remarkable female OR pioneers. And my other presentation at this conference is on a paper co-authored with two females: Samira Samadi and Professor Deniz Besik (who was my former PhD student at the Isenberg School): "Fresh Produce Spatial Price Equilibrium on General Networks: Capturing Commodity Quality Deterioration Through Endogenous Transportation Time Delay Functions with Capacities," which was recently published in the European Journal of Operational Research:  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0377221726003759. Of course, in the former presentation, I will highlight the new initiative of  IFORS: GLOW - Global Leadership of Women in Operational Research! 

More information on the IFORS conference can be found on its website: https://www.ifors2026.at/home/

Safe travels, everyone!

Thrilled that Our Paper on Tariffs and Effects on Labor in Supply Chains is Published Free Access in JORS!

My Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Samira Samadi, and I are thrilled that our paper on ad valorem tariffs and their effects on labor in competitive supply chains is now published in the Journal of Operational Research (JORS). JORS is the flagship journal of the Operational Research Society, which is based in the United Kingdom.

The paper is titled, "Ad Valorem Tariffs in Global Supply Chain Networks and Impacts on Labor." The model is a game theory one of firms competing in an oligopolistic manner, each one seeking to maximize its profits, in the presence of tariffs. The firms seek to determine the optimal production of commodities and their distribution as well as the labor needed, with wages and productivity of labor included.

Illustrative examples are provided along with a global soybean trade case study. Numerical results reveal how such tariffs shift trade flows, reshape labor allocation, and affect demand prices as well as profits, with labor shortages and cost disruptions further negatively compounding the effects.

The Editor in Chief, (EIC) of JORS, Kostas Nikolopoulos of Durham University, has kindly made the paper free access and the link to it is below: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01605682.2025.2592758

With tariffs having wide impacts, both locally and globally, this is one of the very first papers to quantify the effects on labor, trade flows, and profits. We thank the EIC for the expert handling of our paper as well as the anonymous reviewers who provided valuable feedback on the original paper.

Our Paper on Tariffs and Labor in Global Supply Chain Networks is Accepted!

We are delighted to report that there is an update on the paper in this post. Today, on the day before Thanksgiving, it was published on the journal website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01605682.2025.2592758?src=

There are two streams of research that I have been heavily engaged in and they are the impacts of tariffs on both producers and consumers plus the integration of labor into supply chain networks and I have even published a book on the subject: Labor and Supply Chain Networks: 

https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/bookser/Labor-book.html

I have been working with my PhD student, Samira Samadi, on investigating impacts of tariffs on labor, including employment, and integrating the two streams of research.

I am delighted that, this past week, we heard from the Editor in Chief (EIC) of the Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS), Professor Kostas Nikolopoulos of the Durham University Business School in the United Kingdom, that our paper, "Ad Valorem Tariffs in Global Supply Chain Networks and Impacts on Labor," has been accepted in this outstanding journal.

The journal now requires both an abstract and a practitioner abstract and both are below.

We very much enjoyed researching and writing this paper, which also includes a case study on soybeans, and investigates quantitatively the impacts of tariffs on major countries affected, including China and the US. The mathematical model is that of a competitive global supply chain network under oligopolistic competition and the tariffs are ad valorem ones, which are now widely applied to many products, including commodities. 

A preprint of the paper can be found on the Supernetwork Center website: https://supernet.isenberg.umass.edu/articles/TariffsandLaborinGlobalSupplyChainNetworks.pdf

We are grateful to the EIC, the Associate Editors, and to the two anonymous reviewers for the professional handling of our paper and their constructive comments and suggestions.

The Amazing IFORS Conference in Santiago, Chile

I hope that everyone who took part in the amazing IFORS Conference in Santiago, Chile, which took place July 10-14, 2023, has safely and comfortably returned to their home destinations.

The conference, which is a triennial one, was face to face and attracted over 700 presentations and 900 registrants from around the globe.

Kudos to the Co-Chairs of the Local Organizing Committee: Professors Rafael Epstein and Jorge Vera, and to the Chair of the Scientific Program - Professor Alice Smith and to their teams for putting together such an informative and rich scientific as well as social program. And even the weather cooperated - the winter while we were in Santiago was quite mild.

It has been an incredibly busy several weeks, since, shortly before the IFORS Conference, I had co-organized the Dynamics of Disasters Conference in Greece. 

It was so inspiring to see the great attendance and enthusiasm of the conferees and, I must add that, on my direct flight from Madrid to Santiago on Iberia, there were several conferees from Italy (Paolo Toth, Grazia Speranza, and Claudia Archetti) and, just after passport control, I had the pleasure of seeing the INFORMS President Laura Albert. It was wonderful to stroll to the conference venues and to be greeted and to share greetings with conferees. It was truly special to have exchanges with both Professors Tom Magnanti and Fred Hillier, luminaries in Operations Research.

The below collage was prepared as a memento of the conference.

I was thrilled to see my latest book, "Labor and Supply Chain Networks," on display at the Springer book at the exhibition hall at the conference and very much enjoyed speaking to the Springer Editors: Matt Amboy, Razia Amzad, and Jialin Yan. 

I also very much enjoyed the plenary and keynote sessions as well other sessions plus Editorial Board meetings of both the International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) and the European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR).

Many thanks to Celso C. Ribeiro, the Editor of ITOR, and to Roman Slowinski, the Editor of EJOR, for such informative meetings!

With the size of the conference and the two venues, I regret that I did not have a chance to speak with as many conferees as I would have liked to. Additional highlights included meeting colleagues that one had interacted with virtually in the pandemic and finally got to meet in person, including the amazing Anand Subramanian, the developer and interviewer behind the outstanding youtube series Subjectto_

And Professor Subrmanian, with some assistance, brought 16 of his special mugs, to present those who were at the conference and had had the pleasure and honor of being interviewed by him! I will treasure my mug. He has, to-date conducted 72 interviews - an extraordinary effort of historical scientific value.

I'd like to thank Professor Margaret Brandeau for her warm introduction to my keynote talk and I am grateful to all those who came to my presentation. I am grateful to my UMass Amherst engineering colleague Professor Chaitra Gopalappa for taking the photo below.

It was wonderful to also see my UMass Amherst engineering colleague Professor Hari Balasubramanian, who, with his wife, were at the same hotel as I in Santiago - the Ismael Hotel.

Some resilience on my part was required, since as I was shampooing my hair, with a head full of lather, the hotel had a pipe break, and there was no water. This happened about 2 hours before my keynote. Resilience comes with being Ukrainian.

I have posted the slide deck of my keynote on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website. In my keynote, I spoke about, among other work, recent research done with my Isenberg School of Management PhD student Dana Hassani and colleagues at the Kyiv School of Economics in Ukraine Oleg Nivievskyi and Pavlo Martyshev, which was published in the Journal of Global Optimization.

It was truly special to have my former Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Dmytro Matsypura, who is head of the Business Analytics Department at the University of Sydney in Australia come to my keynote as well as Professor Renata Konrad on WPI and Professor Moldovan of Romania.

Many thanks to IFORS for the incredible work on this conference! The conference website can be accessed here.

A Conference that Ended in a Standing Ovation, Thanks to WPI!

How often have you experienced a standing ovation at the end of a conference?

I must admit that I had, for the first time, such an experience on June 2, 2023, at the outstanding Innovations in Immigration Analytics Conference at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, Massachusetts. Kudos to the conference organizers: Dr. Geri Dimas (who will be an Assistant Professor at Bryant University, starting this Fall), and WPI Professors Andrew Trapp and Daniel Reichman.

The program, which can be viewed here, brought together faculty, practitioners, as well as students, who are very much engaged in issues of migration and immigration.

The format, consisting of individual presentations, lightning talks, as well as a panel, was excellent, and with coffee breaks and a delicious buffet lunch provided. And there were no registration fees!

The conference opened up with remarks by the WPI Provost Winston "Wole" Soboyejo, who set the stage for the importance of the issues and challenges that we discussed at the conference including: refugee resettlement, dynamic migrant flows and operational responses, matching refugees to employment opportunities, strategic border resource deployment challenges, and even the modeling of US immigration courts using discrete-event simulation.

My presentation was entitled, "Refugee Migration Networks with Regulations," and it has been posted on the Supernetwork Center site at the Isenberg School of Management, UMass Amherst. 

The presentation was based on a paper published in the Springer Nature Journal of Global Optimization and was co-authored by Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania and Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney of the University of Hartford. 

I also spoke in my presentation on recent work on investing in immigration to alleviate labor shortages in supply chains and coalition formation among countries to address migrant issues. The former topic is a chapter in my latest book, "Labor and Supply Chain Networks," with info on the book here.

The latter topic was explored in a recently published paper that I co-authored with Professors Passacantando and Raciti and is available open access!

It was terrific to meet conferees with the passion and focus to address one of the greatest challenges of our time with 103 million people around the world having been forced to leave their homes. I was deeply touched to hear, time and time again, Ukraine mentioned at this conference and the impacts of Russia's war on it, including by Dean Debora Jackson of the WPI Business School in her brilliant closing remarks. Research matters and making it accessible to organizations, nonprofits, and governments can create positive change and truly benefit humanity. 

Below, I have posted a collage of photos from the conference. 

Many thanks to the organizers: Dr. Geri Dimas and Professors Andrew Trapp and Daniel Reichman for bringing us together in such a warm and engaging event. Much work remains to be done but, together, we can accomplish much good and we will.

And for those who are interested in additional work of ours on human migration networks, a topic that we have been researching for several decades, have a look at my post.

My "Labor and Supply Chain Networks" Book is Published!

I was delighted to receive a shipment of my new book, "Labor and Supply Chain Networks," yesterday. The book was published by Springer Nature and contains 12 chapters, with Acknowledgments, Preface, and an Appendix.

Writing this book was a true labor of love. The book is dedicated to: essential workers and to those fighting for freedom in Ukraine, with gratitude for your heroism. It is the result of many years of  research and writing, accompanied by adrenaline during the COVID-19 pandemic and now the war on Ukraine. 

Springer has produced both hardcopy and online versions, with more information available on the Springer website for the book. I am indebted to Elizabeth Loew of Springer for her outstanding shepherding of this book project with publication even ahead of schedule!

The front matter for the book, with the Preface and the Acknowledgments, is available for free download. In the Acknowledgments, I thank the great Isenberg School Dean Anne P. Massey, the two Operations and Information Management Department Chairs: Professors Bob Nakosteen and Senay Solak, over the period that this book was written, as well as the Vice Provost for Global Affairs at UMass Amherst Kalpen Trivedi, for his leadership of international programs. With the war in Ukraine still raging, and with my service for the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) in Ukraine a very important part of my life, both professionally and personally, I also thank the President of KSE Tymofiy Mylovanov and Rector Tymofii Brik plus KSE colleagues Oleg Nivievskyi and Nataliia Shapoval, who have done extraordinary work on documenting the impacts of the war. 

Collaborators throughout this challenging time have made work fascinating and enjoyable. I am indebted to Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney of the University of Hartford, Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania in Italy, Professor Tina Wakolbinger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Professor Deniz Besik of the University of Richmond, Professor Sara Saberi of WPI, Professor Pritha Dutta of Pace University, and Professor Mojtaba Salarpour of Texas A&M Commerce. All are Center Associates of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks that I founded in 2001 and continue to direct. Acknowledgments are also extended to my long-time collaborators on Dynamics of Disasters conferences and co-edited volumes: Professor Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida and Professor Ilias S. Kotsireas of Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. I also thank my PhD student Dana Hassani.

Of course, writing a book requires a great deal of focus and time and dedication, and I am so thankful to my family for their support. And, in the pandemic, having a professional society such as INFORMS that helped us to stay connected and informed and also advocated our work to the media and government, was incredible supportive and sustaining.

Workers need to be valued, supported, recognized, and paid for their contributions. Supply chains would collapse without them, as we have seen. I hope that my book, which contains chapters on both profit-maximizing firms and non-profits, including blood service organizations and those in emergency response and disaster management, helps in decision-making as well as policy-making. I believe that students will also appreciate and gain value from the material therein.

I hope that this book will inspire further research as well as implementation in practice of results therein from wages that should be paid to laborers to the productivity investments that should be made for the benefit of workers, consumers, firms, and organizations.

After all, as I wrote in my ORMS Today invited essay (thank you, INFORMS): In the End,  It's All About People!

The Outstanding Optimization and Decision Science Conference in Beautiful Firenze, Italy

I would like to thank the organizers of the outstanding Optimization and Decision Science Conference that took place August 30-September 2, 2022 in the stunning city of Firenze, Italy.

It was a conference of great scientific value, with wonderful social activities, at the University of Firenze, which brought together researchers from many different countries for face to face exchanges. For many of us, it was the first international face to face conference since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I very much enjoyed all the sessions on variational analysis and equilibrium problems!

I would also like to extend my deepest appreciation to the Conference Co-Chairs: Professors Fabio Schoen and Paola Cappanera, for the warmth and hospitality extended to all of us. The conference website can be found here. Thanks to the Local Organizing Committee and to the Program Committee for their outstanding work!

It was a great honor to give the opening keynote talk at the Museum of Innocents this past Tuesday, followed by a cocktail hour and tour of the museum.  The title of my keynote was: Labor and Supply Chain Networks: It's All About People. The slidedeck can be downloaded here.

Above I am with Drs. Alice Raffaele and Marti Fischetti, two incredibly talented OR researchers and very dynamic leaders of AIROYoung!

The energy and enthusiasm of the conferees was heartwarming to behold. New friendships were made and established relationships further cemented. The sessions were excellent and the University of Firenze a great venue.

It was fabulous that all 5 co-authors of our paper on UAVs, 5G, and Disaster Management showed up! Below are: Yours truly, Daniele Sciacca, Professor Patrizia Daniele, Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney, and Dr. Gabriela Colajanni.

I very much enjoyed listening to the other keynote talks of Professors Bertsimas (virtual presentation), Dick den Hertog, and Paola Scaparra. It was very cool that both the opening and closing keynoters were female!

Below is a photo of the female keynoters.

The social dinner was a banquet at a farm with majestic views of the landscapes in Tuscany. 

It was truly special to see Professor Ivana Ljubic and her postdoc Martina Cerulli at the banquet and to meet colleagues even from the Czech Republic!

I leave you with some views of beautiful Firenze, Italy! 

All the conferees had a fabulous time scientifically and socially.  The great discipline of Operations Research, because of the creativity and dedication of its researchers, educators, and practitioners, is making laudable positive impact globally. Working together we can achieve so much good.

Thanks to the organizers of the great Optimization and Decision Science 2022 conference for bringing many of us together again, in person!