Proceedings of the 6th international conference of applied operational research

Operational Research is an important scientific discipline with many new theoretical developments and practical applications. The International Conference on Applied Operational Research (ICAOR) is an annual forum bringing together academics and practitioners from around the world to discuss the most recent developments in operational research and management science (OR/MS). The conference covers all aspects of our subject, but with a particular emphasis on applications. This year, the sixth event in our planned series of conferences – ICAOR 2014 takes place in the city of Vancouver, Canada. We received quality submissions from approximately 21 countries around the world and finally could accept 28 papers for presentation at the conference and publication in these proceedings. The papers that appear in this volume were carefully and thoroughly refereed. Our sincere thanks go to the members of the scientific programme committee who gave a significant amount of their valuable time to this task. We are also very grateful to all those who have helped in organising the conference. We are sure that their contributions will add significantly to the success of the conference. We very much hope that you will enjoy the conference programme and the planned social events. We wish you all a very pleasant stay in Vancouver and trust that you will find the conference to be of value and leave us having made many new friends.