IJAHP News and Events: Ferretti/Highlights of the INFORMS 2018 meeting International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process 502 Vol. 10 Issue 3 2018 ISSN 1936-6744 https://doi.org/10.13033/ijahp.v10i3.624 Highlights of the INFORMS 2018 meeting Valentina Ferretti Department of Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering Politecnico di Milano V.Ferretti@lse.ac.uk This year, the INFORMS annual meeting took place in sunny Phoenix from November 4 - 7. The theme of the meeting was Smart City and Sustainable Communities, which represents a growing and stimulating domain of both research and application for Operational Research and Management Science. Smart cities and sustainable communities indeed bring new and interesting challenges for OR and MS, which translate into high relevance of the potential societal impact that both disciplines can have in the field. The topicality of the theme together with the welcoming atmosphere of Phoenix’s conference venue allowed this annual meeting to achieve record attendance. The total number of attendees soared to 6,195, while the total number of paid attendees reached 5,885. Both numbers were all-time records. The program featured 1,320 sessions spread over 79 tracks and four days. Among these sessions, the AHP/ANP community shared the latest developments of the techniques across different application domains. Here are a few highlights from the AHP/ANP community from the conference. The joint session MCDM/ Practice on the theory and application of the ANP chaired by Orrin Cooper featured the following talks: “Coherency and Reducing Comparisons in the ANP” by Orrin Cooper; “The Added Value of a Team-based Model in Preventive Healthcare Services” by Gabriela Sava, Luis Vargas, Jerrold May, Jennifer Shang, and James Dolan; “Analogical Evaluation of the Urban Function Combination Mode of the Integrated Transportation Hub Based on AHP Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation Method” by Siyu Tao, Feng Tao, Xinmei Chen, Anjun Li, Lisha Wang. Gabriela Sava, Luis Vargas, and Jerrold May also contributed a paper titled “Multi-dimensional Sensitivity Analysis in Operations Research, and its IJAHP News and Events: Ferretti/Highlights of the INFORMS 2018 meeting International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process 503 Vol. 10 Issue 3 2018 ISSN 1936-6744 https://doi.org/10.13033/ijahp.v10i3.624 Importance for Preventive Healthcare Services” in the joint session MCDM/Practice: MCDM Methodology in Emerging Applications, chaired by Serpil Sayin. The joint session MCDM/Practice: MCDM in Practice chaired by Lorraine Gardiner featured the following AHP/ANP related talks: “Blockchain's Impact on Digital Supply Chain: Contributions from MCDM” by Birsen Karpak and Valerio Salomon, and “Weighting Criteria for Agriculture Planning: An Application of the Analytical Hierarchy Process” by Jay Parsons and Kathleen Brooks. Jesse Pietz presented a contribution titled “Tradespace Analytics for Air Force Acquisition Programs” in the session that he chaired on Development, Acquisition, and Maintenance. Gazi Duman and Elif Kongar presented a paper titled “A Balanced Scorecard-based Approach to Integrate Sustainability Into the Operational Performance: A Food Industry Case Study” during the session on sustainability chaired by Gulver Karamemis. Abdulhadi Nasser Al-Marri, Salem Nechi, and Omar Ben-Ayed presented a talk titled “Factors Affecting Labor Productivity in Turnaround Maintenance Projects: Case of the Oil and Gas Sector in Qatar” in the session titled Product and Project Development and Management 1 chaired by Barbaros Yet. Finally, Valentina Ferretti presented a talk titled “Cognitive Biases in Spatial Decision Analysis” in the session that she chaired on spatial decision analysis. The panorama offered by the AHP/ANP related talks during this year’s INFORMS meeting thus provided a stimulating balance between theoretical contributions and real applications, across a variety of domains ranging from healthcare services, transportation, food industry, supply chain, agriculture planning and labour productivity. Let’s start planning for the next INFORMS meeting which will take place in Seattle next year!