Call and Registration

We invite all AIROYoung members, Ph.D. students, and early-stage Researchers (Ph.D. degree <= 5 years) in Operations Research and related topics, or anyone with a strong interest in OR under 35 years old, to attend the 10AYW and the Ph.D. School and to submit an abstract to be presented during the workshop or a short paper to be published in a volume in the AIRO Springer Series. We report all the details below.

Registration – Deadline: January 28, 2026

• One of AIROYoung’s missions is to involve everyone in its events, regardless of their funds. For this reason, our events are free for everyone, and we work hard to secure some funding to help with accommodation.
• Participants submitting an abstract and simple attendees are required to fill in the Workshop Registration Form (link to the form will be available on November 3rd, at 17:00 CET).
• Please note that you can first register and later submit an abstract, even after days or weeks. We kindly ask you to register as soon as possible to get an estimate of the number of participants (and also, if you want to apply for an accommodation grant, the sooner, the better – see below).

Abstract Submission – Deadline: December 10, 2025

• Authors can submit an abstract to give a short presentation of their work by filling out the Abstract Registration Form (link to the form will be available on November 3rd, at 17:00 CET).
• Submitted abstracts must be limited to one page in length (including references). Please use the LaTeX or the Word template available here and upload a ZIP file containing all source files and a PDF version of your abstract. Please name your PDF file SURNAME_NAME_10AYW and the ZIP archive SURNAME_NAME_10AYW.zip.
• The author will be notified of the contribution’s acceptance by email by December 23, 2025.
• Please note that each author can give at most one talk during the event.

Accommodation grants

Thanks to the financial support offered by AIRO and our sponsors, we are able to provide several accommodation grants to cover accommodation expenses for the entire event (i.e., hotel check-in on February 8, Sunday afternoon, and check-out on February 13, Friday morning).

• Grants will be awarded on a first-come, first-served basis to participants who indicate their interest in applying for the grant during the registration process and are (willing to become) AIRO members.
• Note that you are already an AIRO member if you have registered for The International Conference on Optimization and Decision Science (ODS) 2025 or if you have paid the AIRO registration fee for the year 2026. Otherwise, to become an AIRO member, please follow the instructions here.

Grants availability:

• 12 grants for those who, regardless of their career stage, submit an abstract to hold a presentation and whose abstract is accepted.
• 4 grants for those who do not submit an abstract, but must be master’s or first-year Ph.D. students (in this case, a certificate from a supervisor is required to confirm this).

Participants who will be awarded an accommodation grant will receive a notification by December 23, 2025, with all the instructions to follow to confirm the grant. Only after this message, should you obtain the accommodation grant, you will be asked to prove your AIRO membership or become an AIRO member.

If you have further questions, you can send an email to airoyoungworkshop2026@gmail.com and airo.young.researchers@gmail.com.

Short Paper Submission – Deadline: February 14, 2026

• Besides abstracts, young researchers and practitioners can submit a short paper as a book chapter of a future volume in the AIRO Springer Series.
• Attending the workshop is not mandatory for submitting a short paper.
• For guidelines and templates for submitting a short paper, please visit the related Springer page.
• For submissions, please visit the dedicated Meteor platform.

Awards

Authors presenting during the workshop or submitting a short paper to our Volume in the AIRO Springer Series will have the opportunity to get their work recognized as outstanding. More precisely, there will be the following two awards:

• Optit Best Presentation Award – You can indicate your interest in participating in the Abstract Submission form; prize: €500.
• Cargoful Best Paper Award – Participation is automatic and limited to authors submitting a paper to the Springer volume; prize: €300.

More details will be available soon.

Main Theme and Topics

“Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.” – Galileo Galilei.

The primary theme of the 10AYW is “Optimization between determinism and uncertainty”, offering the opportunity to reflect on the degree of abstraction of the mathematical models we formulate and solve, on their adherence to the original problems under our study, and therefore on the corresponding gaps that remain to be closed, at least ideally. Indeed, reality is stochastic and dynamic by nature, and, as it is continuously evolving and changing, always representing it exactly is impossible. Nonetheless, the discipline of Operations Research has reached such a maturity that it can dedicate itself not only to problems in deterministic-static contexts. This does not imply stopping studying these well-defined and reassuring (yet sometimes NP-hard) problems or putting them aside. On the contrary, in all the most widespread paradigms to address and integrate uncertain information (i.e., from Stochastic Programming to Robust Optimization, passing through Distributionally Robust Optimization, Chance Constrained Programming, and Bilevel Optimization), the “ex-post” versions and single-level reformulations are always used as benchmarks and as a base to build sharper and sharper approximations of the unknown.

By following, in a certain sense, Galileo’s suggestion, what is generally done is re-exploiting the knowledge, skills, and competences developed for something known and “measurable” to solve something probable or a worst case under some assumptions, thus making “measurable what is not so”. Handling all this in both static and multi-stage settings is not easy. Still, Operations Research is not alone but naturally joins forces with other branches of Mathematics and Computer Science that have established themselves in recent decades, such as Machine Learning and Data Science: prescription meets prediction. Among the main challenges to tackle, we find the following: how to overcome drawbacks of uncertainty paradigms such as the critical number of scenarios in Stochastic Programming or the over conservatism of static Robust Optimization; how to reduce the distance between nice theoretical results and expensive runtimes needed to solve more than just numerical examples; and, in this regard, we cannot ignore data availability and quality. Therefore, there is plenty of research work from both the methodological and computational sides.

We invite any interested young researchers and practitioners to contribute to the discussion of this relevant and actual theme by submitting an abstract or a short paper (8-10 pages) on a variety of topics, including but not limited to the following ones (in alphabetical order):

• Artificial Intelligence
• Big Data Analytics and Optimization
• Bilevel Optimization
• Chance-constrained Programming
• City Logistics
• Control Theory and System Dynamics
• Covering and Location
• Cutting and Packing
• Data Mining and Classification
• Data-driven Optimization
• Decision-making under Uncertainty
• Decision Support Systems
• Disaster Management
• Discrete and Combinatorial Optimization
• Emergency and Humanitarian Logistics
• Energy, Environment, and Natural Resources
• Exact Methods
• Financial Modeling and Risk Management
• Game Theory
• Global Optimization
• Graph Theory and Network Optimization
• Health Care and Outbreak Management
• Homeland Security and Infrastructure Protection
• Heuristics and Metaheuristics
• ICT and Computer and Mobile Networks
• Industrial Production
• Linear and Nonlinear Programming
• Logistics and Supply Chain Management
• Machine Learning
• Mathematical Programming
• Multi-objective Optimization
• Multiple-Criteria Decision Making
• Network Analytics
• Optimization Software
• OR Teaching
• Planning and Project Management
• Railway and Air Traffic Problems
• Robust and Distributionally Robust Optimization
• Routing and Transportation
• Scheduling and Timetabling
• Simulation and Queuing Theory
• Soft OR
• Stochastic Programming