Title of Presentation: Location Science, Once More: New Challenges for a Mature Area

Abstract:

Location Science is a well-established field that has evolved from its origins in geometry and economics into a broad spectrum of problems, many of them motivated by real-world applications. Operations Research provides an ideal framework for addressing location problems by combining theoretical, modeling, and algorithmic perspectives, thereby offering a comprehensive view of these problems.

While the final decades of the twentieth century laid the foundations of modern Location Science, particularly in the context of discrete and network-based models, recent decades have witnessed a significant expansion of the field. New developments include hybrid models that integrate different types of decisions, as well as multi-level problems that capture the objectives of multiple stakeholders, often with conflicting interests, among many other advances.

Although this broadening of the field is clearly reflected in the growing number of publications devoted to these challenging new models, the sense of community among researchers in the area appears to be gradually weakening.

In this talk, I will explore some possible reasons behind this trend. I will also discuss several emerging challenges facing the field and outline potential directions for addressing them.

Bio

Elena Fernandez is full professor in Operations Research since 2007. She has spent much of her academic career at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona; since 2019 she is affiliated to the University of Cádiz.

Her research interest focuses on mathematical optimization models for discrete optimization, mainly on applications for transportation and logistics involving discrete location, network design and vehicle routing. She has published scientific papers in the flagship OR journals, including Operations Research, Transportation Science, and INFORMS Journal of Computing, with about 70 co-authors from a dozen of different countries.

Elena has been plenary speaker at several international conferences and was the Chair of the Scientific Committee of the Royal Spanish Mathematical Society (RSME). In 2021 she received the Lifetime Achievement in Location Analysis Award 2021 of the Section on Locational Analysis (SOLA) of INFORMS.