The IO2021 Congress, organized by APDIO (Portuguese Association of Operations Research), took place in Figueira da Foz on November 7th and 8th. With more than 120 registered participants and around 80 submitted works, IO2021 continues it’s important mission to communicate, disseminate and address complex problems that impact our society, economy and environment. Despite the excellent research that has been carried out, major problems remain unresolved and, therefore, IO2021 challenges the community to present models, methodologies and new perspectives for analysis that indicate paths to a better world.

The IO 2021 congress had a high participation of DEG members, with 20 works among the total of 80 works received. At the conference, 25 works were selected to be presented, of which 11 are from DEG:

1. Miguel Pereira, Duarte Dinis, Diogo Ferreira, José Figueira and Rui Marques. The efficiency of nations in the fight against SARS-CoV-2: A network Data Envelopment Analysis

2. Mariana Oliveira and Daniel Santos. Defining hospital networks with centralized waiting lists for elective patients

3. Ana Torrado and Ana Póvoa. How to reach an optimized and sustainable Blood Supply Chain network?

4. Paulo Abreu, Daniel Santos and Ana Barbosa-Póvoa. Improving equity in ambulance planning at the tactical and operational level: a data-driven optimization model.

5. Daniel Santos, Steffen Heider, Inês Marques and Jens Brunner. Allocation Scheduling with Resource Synchronization and Uncertain Surgery Durations: A Two-Stage Stochastic Programming Approach

6. Maria Meneses, Ana Póvoa and Daniel Santos. An optimization approach for tactical collection and production planning in the blood supply chain

7. Maria João Santos, Bruna Mota, Tânia Ramos and Ana Póvoa. Green Reverse Logistics: exploring the Vehicle Routing Problem with Pickups and Deliveries with environmental goals

8. Ana Raquel de Aguiar, Isabel Gomes and Tânia Ramos. Planning visits of home care teams with continuity of care and synchronization – a case study

9. Fábio Coelho, Susana Relvas and Ana Barbosa-Póvoa. Cross-docking in-house operations: a simulation-optimization approach

10. Mariana Mesquita-Cunha, José Rui Figueira and Ana Paula Barbosa-Póvoa. epsilon-constraint algorithms for the Pareto front representation of multi-objective integer programming

11. Miguel Vieira, Samuel Moniz, Bruno S. Gonçalves, Tânia Pinto-Varela, Ana P. Barbosa-Povoa and Pedro Neto. The impact of uncertainty on planning and scheduling of human-robot assembly lines

Ana Raquel Aguiar, Phd Student, presented the Planning visits of home care teams with continuity of care and synchronization – a case study and was awarded with a Top5 Prize IO2021 - a distinction given to the five best posters of works submitted for presentation at the IO2021 congress.