Location Science (PDF)

Gilbert Laporte obtained his Ph.D. in Operations Research from the London School of Economics in 1975. He is Professor of Operations Research at HEC Montréal, Canada Research Chair in Distribution Management. He has been Editor of Transportation Science, Computers & Operations Research and INFOR. He has authored or coauthored 19 books, as well as more than 550 scientific articles in combinatorial optimization, mostly in the areas of vehicle routing, location and timetabling. He has received many scientific awards including the Pergamon Prize (United Kingdom) in 1987, the 1994 Merit Award of the Canadian Operational Research Society, and the CORS Practice Prize on four occasions. He has been a member of the Royal Society of Canada since 1998, Fellow of INFORMS since 2005, and foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering (United States) since 2019. In 2009, he received the Robert M. Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science from the Transportation Science and Logistics Society of INFORMS. In 2014, he obtained the Lifetime Achievement in Location Analysis Award from the Section on Location Analysis of INFORMS. In 2018 he became a member of the Order of Canada.


Stefan Nickel is a full professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology - KIT (Germany) and one of the directors of the Institute of Operations Research. He obtained his PhD in mathematics at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern (Germany) in 1995. From 2014-2016 he was the dean of the Department of Economics and Management at the KIT. He was also member of the scientific advisory board as well as of the management board of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Mathematics (ITWM) in Kaiserslautern from 2004-2016. Since 2011 he additionally holds the positions of one of the directors of the Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI) and of the FZI Research Center for Information Technology. From 2006-2015 he was editor-in-chief of Computers & Operations Research. Since