Tab. No. 10f

Report to
 IFIP GA Natal 2001
IFIP TC-7: System Modelling and Optimization

 Part I: General Assembly

The

 20st IFIP Conference on System Modelling and Optimization

took place at Trier, DE, 23-27 July 2001, and was organized by Proff. R. Horst, E. Sachs (Chair), R. Tichatschke, and their coworkers. The number of participants of this conference was less than that of its predecessors; nevertheless the spectrum of the 10 plenary lectures and the 94 contributed papers covered to a rather great extent the topics listed in TC 7's Aims and Scope. TC 7 had its business meeting during the conference and elected Prof. Irena Lasiecka, Charlottesville, US, as TC 7 Chairwoman (successor of P. Kall, CH), Dr. Jacques Henry, INRIA Rocqencourt, FR, as Vice-Chairman (successor of Irena Lasiecka, US), and Prof. Peter Hammer, Rutgers, US, as the new WG 7.4 Chairman (successor of Uwe Zimmermann, DE).

The 21st conference in this series will be organized by Prof. Jean-Paul ZolJsio and Dr. John Cagnol at Sophia Antipolis, FR.

From our working groups we can report the following activities:

Events before Sept. 1, 2001

(a) 3 special sessions co-sponsored by WG 7.2 and entitled "Wellposedness and qualitative behaviour in nonlinear shell theory" within IMACS Congress, Lausanne, CH, August 21-25, 2000.
(b) Special session on "Control of interactive structures" organized by WG 7.2 (J. Cagnol and I. Lasiecka) within the Annual SIAM Conference in San Diego, US, July 11-14, 2001.
(c) WG 7.2 Workshop on Optimization of Nonlinear Materials and Structures, Poznan, PL, 27-29 August 2001, organized by the Polish Academy of Sciences (J. Sokolowski, WG 7.2 member, University of Nancy, FR, and Pol. Acad. Sci.).

Events planned after Sept. 1, 2001

(a) Conference on Control Problems in PDE's. Organized by Institute of Mathematics, Romanian Academy of Sciences. To be held in Constanza (Ovidius University) September 10-14, 2002. Local organizers: D. Tiba (WG 7.2 member) and V. Barbu from University of Iasi, Bucarest, Romania.
(b) International conference on Nonlinear Promblems in Aerospace. Organized by Embry Riddle University and co-sponsored by IEEE and IFIP WG 7.2. To be held in Daytona Beach, Fla, May 15-17, 2002. Main organizer: S. Sivasundaram (WG 7.2 member).

(a) Proceedings covering the WG 7.2 Special Sessions organized within the 19-th IFIP TC7 Conference in Cambridge. Published by Marcel Dekker, vol 216, 2001. Editors: J. Cagnol, M. Polis and J. P. ZolJsio.
(b) Proceedings covering the WG 7.2 Conference on "Nonlinear Problems in Aviation and Aerospace," Daytona, Fla, May 10-12, 2000 to be published by Embry Riddle University Press.
(c) Proceedings covering WG 7.2 sponsored Conference on Distributed Systems: "Optimization and Economic-Environmental Applications," Ekaterinburg, Russia, May 23-26, 2000, published by Scientific Publications of Ural Branch Academy of Sciences.

WG 7.5:

The new leaders of this WG are Hitoshi Furuta, JP, as Chairman, and M. Maes, CDN, as Vice-Chairman.

Past and future events

The 9th Working Conference took place during Sept. 25-27, 2000, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA; the organizing committee was chaired by the former WG 7.5 Chairman Andy Nowak. This meeting was attended by 50 participants from 15 countries.

The 10th Working conference will be organized in spring 2002 in Japan.

Publications

The proceedings of the 9th Working Conference contain 37 papers and were published in April 2001 by The University of Michigan Press.

WG 7.6:

The WG elected as new Vice-Chairman D. Dolk, US (successor of J. Dolezal, CZ).

Past and future events

There was a workshop called VEAM (Virtual Environments for Advanced Modeling) at Monterey, California, August 2-4, 2000, organized by D. Dolk, with about 25 participants. A next VEAM workshop is planned for March 25-27, 2001, at JAIST, Ishikawa, JP, organized by Y. Nakamori.

Publications

WG 7.6 plans to publish a feature issue of EJOR with selected papers from the two VEAM workshops mentioned above.

WG 7.7:

The working group has now its own homepage under URL: http://www.unibw-muenchen.de/campus/LRT/LRT1/MARTI/IFIP/wg7_7.html 

Future event

IFIP/IIASA/GAMM-Workshop on "Stochastic Dynamic Optimization," IIASA Laxenburg, March 11-14, 2002, Laxenburg/Vienna, Austria, sponsored by IFIP, GAMM, Federal Armed Forces University Munich, and University of Vienna; organized by K. Marti and Y. Ermoliev. Homepage of the workshop under URL: http://www.unibw-muenchen.de/campus/LRT/LRT1/MARTI/WS_2/workshop.html 

Publication

The reviewing process of the papers presented at the 4^th GAMM/IFIP-Workshop, 17-20 June 2000, and submitted for publication is finished and resulted in accepting 18 papers, which shortly will be published in a Springer Lecture Notes volume (LNEMS series).

 Part II: Technical Assembly

Early this year, TC 7 was informed by the former WG 7.4 Chairman, Uwe Zimmermann, that he and a majority of the WG members voted (7:4 out of 49 members!) in favour to cancel this WG and that, in consequence, he wanted to step down, due to the fact that there are plenty of other possibilities for THIS community to meet and to exchange information.

The subsequent discussion within TC 7 revealed the following facts: In connection with computer science (or IT) there are plenty of applications of discrete mathematics and in particular discrete optimization which need to be investigated. Although WG 7.4 had well renowned experts in discrete optimization among its members, the scientific interests of many of them did apparently not reflect this link very strongly. Hence, an attempt to restructure the WG aiming at strengthening the link between discrete mathematics/optimization and IT appeared to be meaningful, and Peter Hammer, one of the internationally best known experts in the field, agreed to check out the readiness of experts in the corresponding fields to cooperate in WG 7.4 and activate the group again. In a first attempt he got quite a promising number of positive reactions, and at present he continues to address himself to further experts to get their support for this project.

Given this situation, TC 7 decided unanimously

- to restructure WG 7.4 completely following the above aims, and
- to ask Peter Hammer to continue his endeavours and to place himself at TC 7's disposal as the new WG 7.4 Chairman.

Report signed by:

Prof. Dr. Peter Kall - outgoing TC7 Chair
Prof. Irena Lasiecka - incoming TC7 Chair

 x = attended by TC-7 member
y = attended by WG chairman/representative of this country
z = attended by proxy
o = excused
- = not yet member

5 Aug 2001/KA