German Working Group "Decision Theory and Practice"

Walter Habenicht

University of Hohenheim

Department of Business Administration

Stuttgart

The working group was founded in the former German Democratic Republic. After the reunification of Germany, it was integrated into the "Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Operations Research (DGOR)", which became the "Gesellschaft fuer Operations Research (GOR)" after the unification with the "Gesellschaft fuer Mathematik, Oekonomie und Operations Research (GMÖOR)", the other former German OR- Society.

The character of this working group remained essentially the same over all the organizational changes concerning the sponsorship of the group. Its main topics are:

To provide a basis for exchanging experiences for those people interested in decision theory, especially in multicriteria problems and problems with incomplete information.
To bring together people working in the field from different disciplines, especially from Mathematics, Economics, Business Administration, Physics, and Engineering.
To bridge the gap between scientists and practitioners.

From the very beginning of the group, multicriteria decision making played a central role in its work. There was a very fruitful cooperation between mathematicians like Alfred Goepfert and Reinhard Nehse, who did a lot of work in vector optimization and engineers like Jochen Ester and others, who applied vector optimization techniques as well as outranking methods to different problems in engineering.

Today the work of the group is based on different groups of researchers capturing a wide range of areas of decision making. The group of Bruno Brosowski is working on non-linear vector optimization problems for various industrial applications. Walter Habenicht and his group are working on discrete vector optimization problems with applications in logistics and scheduling. Applications of vector optimization approaches in physics and engineering are treated by Johannes Jahn, while Heinrich Rommelfanger and his group apply fuzzy approaches to multicriteria decision making. The group of Dieter Schweigert is working on multicriteria combinatorial problems, and Rudolf Vetschera works on multicriteria approaches in group decision making and principal agent theory. Finally, the groups of Gert Wanka and Christiane Tammer do a lot of theoretical work on non-linear vector optimization, especially on duality and control theory.

Every year the group organizes a three-days workshop with a rather intimate atmosphere. The next workshop will be organized by Walter Habenicht at Stuttgart-Hohenheim. It will take place on march 21^st ? 23^rd . Those, who are interested in the workshop, may contact the group by the following e-mail address: mjgeiger@uni-hohenheim.de or they may visit the homepage of the group: http://www.ibl.uni-hohenheim.de/decision/ .

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