Auckland 2008
Business Meeting, Report of the Proceedings
January 10, 2008, Auckland, New Zealand
Theodor Stewart chaired the meeting. (The number of members of the Society attending the meeting was about 40.)
To begin with, Prof. Theodor Stewart, the President of the Society, reminded that the Society has no membership fees and wished new members welcome. Those who are interested in becoming a member of the Society are asked to contact the secretary of the Society, Prof. Kaisa Miettinen.
For Report
Elections related to open offices: President-Elect and four positions in the Executive Committee
Prof. Jyrki Wallenius has chaired the Elections Committee. Besides the candidates nominated by the Committee, the members of the Society were able to nominate candidates.
There are four candidates as President-Elect: (Matthias Ehrgott, Murat M. Köksalan, Kaisa Miettinen and Constantin Zopounidis). There are seven candidates for the four vacancies in the Executive Committee (James Corner, Kalyanmoy Deb, Xavier Gandibleux, Gilberto Montibeller, Jose Maria Moreno, Serpil Sayin and Tetsuzo Tanino).
The voting will be electronic (Jyrki Wallenius and Kaisa Miettinen will take care of practical arrangements). The members of the Society will receive further information about the voting procedure by email in February 2008. All those who were members of the Society before the conference or joined before the end of January 2008, can vote. The voting will be an approval voting, as before.
The President of the Society also announced the following: - Prof. Birsen Karpak has agreed to continue as the Vice-President of Finance because the Society has had no finances up to now. - Dr. Martin Josef Geiger has agreed to continue as the Newsletter Editor. - The Executive Committee appointed Prof. Kaisa Miettinen to continue as the secretary in its meeting on Wednesday, January 9, 2008.
On-going conference
Matthias Ehrgott presented outlines of the on-going conference including statistics indicating that participants from 46 countries had registered for the conference, 21 of them from New Zealand, 12 from Taiwan, 11 from Australia, 9 from Finland etc. Proceedings will be published by Springer in the series Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems. The deadline for submitting papers of maximum 10 pages is the end of March, 2008. In particular, papers related to the conference theme are most welcome. The editors will be Matthias Ehrgott, Boris Naujoks, Theodor Stewart and Jyrki Wallenius. Formatting instructions will be announced shortly. The referee process should be finished by the end of 2008. Further instructions will be sent by email to all conference participants. 8 papers in the EMO track have already been refereed before the conference and they will be included in the proceedings.
The next MCDM conference
In its meeting on Wednesday 9, 2008, the Executive Committee (conditionally) accepted the proposal to organize the next MCDM conference in the northern summer 2009 in Chengdu, China by Yong Shi and Shouyang Wang. Details (including exact dates, venue etc.) will be worked through later by Jyrki Wallenius and the conference organizers. Yong Shi gave a brief presentation of the conference arrangements and location.
Electronic newsletter
The major functions of the Society are conferences every two years. Another important activity is the electronic newsletter which is published three times a year. Dr. Martin Josef Geiger, the Newsletter Editor, pointed out that the newsletter has concentrated on announcements of news. However, it would be good to start collecting reports on interesting projects or activities including results of practical applications. It could be beneficial to collect short reports (which are not scientifically written) about where MCDM/MCDA has been used and what has been achieved. He welcomed such reports.
Wiley prize
Prof. Valerie Belton gave information about the Wiley prize. The procedure will be the same as in the previous conference in Chania. The Wiley prize (USD 1000) is presented at each conference of the Society. The criteria (partly established by Wiley) include quality of application, quality of presentation, innovation as well as reflection on learning from application. Everyone who has presented an application-oriented paper in the conference is invited to submit a paper. Matthias Ehrgott has agreed to edit a special issue for the Journal of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis consisting of Wiley prize finalists. The deadline is the same as for the conference proceedings. The winner will be announced before the next MCDM conference. The papers will be published in 12-15 months.
Journal of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis
All registered participants of the MCDM2008 Conference will get an electronic access to the Journal of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (JMCDA) for 2 years.
Valerie Belton, editor of JMCDA, told that there has been some struggle with the journal for a number of years because there have not been submissions enough. Tentative discussions have been started with the EMO community of forming a joint issue of some kind. The name of the journal should be reconsidered. The aim is to bring MCDM and EMO communities together. The goal is that the journal in a new form could initiate in 2009. Valerie Belton will first contact Wiley and discussions will be continued jointly with Jyrki Wallenius (who will represent the Society). Valerie Belton welcomed submissions as well as proposals to edit special issues on any aspect of multiple criteria decision analysis, including tutorials and review papers.
Membership directory and web site
Kaisa Miettinen forwarder information from Prof. Rudolf Vetschera that the server of the website http://orgwww.bwl.univie.ac.at/mcdm, where the members of the Society can update their membership information has been broken. Members are asked to send updated contact information to Kaisa Miettinen until a new server is set up. She reminded members to update their contact information to make sure that they will receive email from the Society.
Kaisa Miettinen also asked members to send ideas and suggestions of how to improve the website of the Society. Furthermore, Xavier Gandibleux announced that the application repository (which he has maintained) has been unavailable for some time but will become active soon.
International Summer Schools
Three recognizable societies, EURO Working Group (EWG) on MCDA, International Society on MCDM and ESIGMA initiated a system of organizing International Summer Schools every 2 or 3 years. They had an agreement to have a steering committee with 2 members from each. Now ESIGMA has deceased. In its meeting yesterday, the Executive Committee designated Theodor Stewart and Benedetto Matarazzo as the representatives of the Society. They will contact EWG and try to activate the summer schools tradition. Yong Shi mentioned in his talk that there will be a 2-day workshop preceding the actual MCDM conference in 2009 (but this will not be called a summer school).
Finally
Theodor Stewart expressed his thanks to the Executive Committee and then called Jyrki Wallenius to take over as the President of the Society.
The new President of the Society, Jyrki Wallenius, thanked Theodor Stewart for his efforts for the Society. He promised to try to be an active president. The field has experienced tremendous growth: 800 ISI-cited publications are published every year that fit keywords multiattribute and multiobjective. The problem of growth is the fragmentation of the field: there are different schools that do not necessarily sufficiently interact. As a new President, Jyrki Wallenius sees his role in building bridges between the schools. He would also like to attract younger people to the Society and involve them in its activities. He welcomed input and ideas from others.