Health Systems

50 years of ORAHS and EURO – Advancements, achievements and current challenges in healthcare ORMS

In 2025, we celebrate 50 years of EURO and 50 years since the EWG ORAHS was founded and the first ORAHS conference was organised in Exeter, UK. That is, for 50 years, healthcare ORMS researchers have met at both conferences and presented and discussed their approaches for all kinds of application cases in healthcare. While the ORAHS community acknowledged the links to healthcare practice from the very beginning, in recent years, we experienced a shift within ORAHS towards strengthening and improving the impact we make in practice and discussing how impact can be achieved. More and more researchers focus on addressing more realistic and impactful settings and planning problems, including integrated planning problems, targeting patient-centred care and systems perspectives. They start interdisciplinary research projects together with medical experts, as well as machine learning or information systems researchers to design decision support systems that can be transferred to and applied in practice. As healthcare systems face increasing challenges including a rise in demand, shortage of staff, continuing cost pressure, but also systematic or legislative changes, new medical guidelines and a need for digitalisation, the shift we can observe is crucial to address these challenges and help improving healthcare services and logistics in practice. Doing so, new ideas for ORMS models and approaches arise that can also lead to significant contributions in the literature.

With this special issue, we want to celebrate the occasion and showcase recent developments made within healthcare ORMS. Matching the topic of the ORAHS2025 conference “Enabling Healthcare Innovation through Operations Research”, we are interested in innovative ORMS approaches, innovative use cases, and examples as well as models for innovation in practice.

For this special issue, we explicitly invite authors and researchers from the ORAHS stream at the EURO 2025 conference in Leeds as well as from the ORAHS 2025 conference in Trondheim, to submit their recent work showcasing recent advancements, achievements and current challenges in healthcare ORMS, preferably with an integrated and / or interdisciplinary perspective.

Therefore, topics of interest for this SI include, but are not limited to:

• Integrated planning approaches in healthcare logistics and management
• Interdisciplinary perspectives on healthcare services and logistics
• Systemwide analysis and improvement of healthcare services
• Comparison of healthcare systems regarding healthcare delivery and / or healthcare logistics
• Implementation studies of OR-based approaches in healthcare practice
• Healthcare logistics approaches to enable patient-centred care
• Application areas include, but are not limited to:
• Appointment planning
• Emergency medical services and ambulance management
• Healthcare policy modelling
• Home care and Long-Term Care
• Primary care
• Virtual care
• Radiotherapy
• Humanitarian logistics
• Capacity and network planning
• Care pathways
• Operating room planning and scheduling
• Patient flow
• Disaster management
• e-Health
• Resource scheduling
• Emergency department
• ICU / PACU
• Screening and prevention
• Staffing and capacity planning
• Epidemiology and disease modelling
• Workforce planning and scheduling

Guest Editor Biographies

Anders Gullhav is Associate Professor at the Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management at NTNU, Norway. Since 2015, he has been working together with the healthcare sector on projects related to resource planning of imaging equipment (MRI and CT), surgery scheduling, personnel scheduling, and planning of activities in outpatient clinics. His research focus lies on methods and models for resource planning and control.

Joe Viana is a Postdoctoral Fellow on the HARMONI project (Comprehensive Advanced Resource Management for sustainable health and CARE services) at NTNU, Norway. He holds a PhD in Operational Research and an MSc in Management Science from University of Southampton, UK. In his research, he applies operational research and other analytical methods to improve the understanding and operation of systems, particularly within healthcare. He is particularly interested in the application of discrete-event simulation, agent-based simulation, system dynamics simulation and the combination of simulation methods together and with other methods, to identify system wide improvements and unintended consequences.

Henrik Andersson is a professor of Optimization at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). In 2006, he defended his doctoral thesis in Infra Informatics, entitled “Coordinated routing – applications in location and inventory management”. Three different applications within waste management, pulp distribution, and school relocation were analysed. He joined NTNU in 2007 as a postdoctoral fellow and is since 2014 full professor. Andersson has a diverse research background and has worked in maritime and road-based transportation, micromobility, emergency response, and healthcare among other areas. Within healthcare, he has for example worked on rostering of nurses and surgeons focusing on cyclic scheduling, reactive/proactive strategies and integrating master surgery and outpatient clinic scheduling. He has collaborated closely with St Olavs hospital in Trondheim where he also has had a position as Researcher working with nurse rostering.

Aina Goday has a background in Opeartions Research. She is currently working at the Central Norway Regional Healthcare Authority and at St. Olavs Hospital in Trondheim. She is the coordinator of the regional healthcare logistics network and at the hospital she works mainly with projects related to nurse staffing and scheduling. She was one of the organisers of ORAHS 2025 in Trondheim.

Nikolaus Furian is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Engineering and Business Informatics, TU Graz. His research interests mainly focus on the design and development of simulation models, optimization algorithms for operations planning, and the integrated use of classical OR methods with Machine Learning models. His work in healthcare includes emergency department modelling, nursing staff demand forecasting, and hospital logistics. Beyond healthcare his areas of interest include transportation, manufacturing, and logistics.

Laura Boyle is a Lecturer in Data Analytics at the Queen’s University Belfast and an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Adelaide. Her research interests include simulation and data science applied in healthcare. She is also the Chair of Operational Research Society Early Career Researchers Network. Laura Boyle acts as AE for Simulation Modelling at Health Systems.
Roberto Aringhieri is Professor of Operations Research and Management Science at Computer Science Department of the University of Torino. He is a member of the committee for the Ph.D. Program in Computer Science, University of Torino. Roberto is health care systems Area Editor for the Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal and Associate Editor for Operations Research for Health Care. He is a co-coordinator of the European Working group on Operational Research Applied to Health Services (ORAHS) and member of the ORAHS board and acted as Conference Chair of the ORAHS 2024 conference “Making an impact. Reflecting on 50 years of healthcare operational research”.

Melanie Reuter-Oppermann is a Senior Research Fellow at Maastricht University and ILS Mannheim gGmbH. In 2017, she received her PhD in Operations Research from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) on the analysis and optimization of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) systems. At KIT, she established the HealthCareLab at the Karlsruhe Service Research Institute. She is a joint coordinator of the GI Digital Health Group and the European Working Group on Operational Research Applied to Health Services (ORAHS). She also acts as the Speaker of the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Society of Paramedic Sciences. In her research, she applies Information Systems and Operations Research methods to support decision making in healthcare. In 2020, she received the Julius von Haast Fellowship from the Royal Society of New Zealand. Melanie Reuter-Oppermann is an Associate Editor at the Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal and has been a co-editor of multiple SIs at various journals in the past.