The Norsk Operasjonsanalyseforening or Norwegian Operations Research Society (NORS) comprises a community of researchers based in Norway, whose discipline -Operations Research (OR)- deals with the application of advanced analytical methods to help make better decisions.

NORS exists formally since 2014 and it is the official member representing Norway in the International Federation of Operational Research (IFORS) since 2015. Although these recent facts, our community has been active since many years ago.

On the academic side, Norwegian OR was primarily found in Trondheim and Bergen, but also developed in Molde. The founding fathers of OR in Trondheim and Bergen were Bjørn Nygreen and Sverre Storøy. The main institutions are The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, The Norwegian School of Economics, The University of Bergen and Molde University College. These four institutions – an engineering school, a business school, an informatics department and a school specialized in logistics – give OR a wide exposure in Norway.

The other flavor of OR in Norway is found in the applied research setting, with a major focus on SINTEF and MARINTEK, based in Oslo, Trondheim and Bergen. A founder of applied OR in Norway was Ralph Lorentzen, who initiated early work in telecommunications. SINTEF and MARINTEK, based in Oslo, Trondheim and Bergen are the centers of applied research in a wide range of areas, to wit: transportation, logistics and shipping, fisheries, and energy systems (electricity, oil and gas, wind; planning, production and bidding). In transportation and logistics, we find important applications in food processing, upstream petroleum logistics, distribution and routing. For sure, also the academic institutions are active in these areas, both in theory and practice.

The new OR society has around 150 members from across the country, covering universities, applied research institutions, government and industry. It is a tightly knit society with a lot of cooperation both on research and PhD education. We commonly co-supervise PhDs in other institutions, and we organize PhD courses at a national level, realizing that we are all too small to set up complete PhD course programs individually. By pooling our resources, we are able to focus on what we are good at, and the number of students in a course increases substantially. It is also worth noting that the Norwegian OR community is very open to a wide range of international cooperation in terms of research, PhD co-supervision and the delivery of PhD courses.

Bylaws

The Pdf with the updated version from November 15, 2017, is available here.