The international conference \Operations Research 2008," the annual meeting of the German Operations Research Society (GOR), was held at the University of Augsburg on September 3-5, 2008. About 580 p- ticipants from more than 30 countries presented and listened to nearly 400 talks on a broad range of Operations Research. The general subject \Operations Research and Global Business" str- ses the important role of Operations Research in improving decisions in the increasingly complex business processes in a global environment. The plenary speakers Morris A. Cohen (Wharton School) and Bernd Liepert (Executive Board of KUKA Robotics) addressed this subject. Moreover, one of the founders of Operations Research, Saul Gass (U- versity of Maryland), gave the opening speech on the early history of Operations Research. This volume contains 93 papers presented at the conference, selected by the program committee and the section chairs, forming a representative sample of the various subjects dealt with at Operations Research 2008. The volume follows the structure of the conference, with 12 sections, grouped into six \Fields of Applications" and six \Fields of Methods and Theory." This structure in no way means a separation of theory and application, which would be detrimental in Operations Research, but displays the large spectrum of aspects in the focus of the papers. Of course, most papers present theory, methods and applications together.

For more than 35 years now, George B. Dantzig's Simplex-Method has been the most efficient mathematical tool for solving linear programming problems. It is proba bly that mathematical algorithm for which the most computation time on computers is spent. This fact explains the great interest of experts and of the public to understand the method and its efficiency. But there are linear programming problems which will not be solved by a given variant of the Simplex-Method in an acceptable time. The discrepancy between this (negative) theoretical result and the good practical behaviour of the method has caused a great fascination for many years. While the "worst-case analysis" of some variants of the method shows that this is not a "good" algorithm in the usual sense of complexity theory, it seems to be useful to apply other criteria for a judgement concerning the quality of the algorithm. One of these criteria is the average computation time, which amounts to an anal ysis of the average number of elementary arithmetic computations and of the number of pivot steps. A rigid analysis of the average behaviour may be very helpful for the decision which algorithm and which variant shall be used in practical applications. The subject and purpose of this book is to explain the great efficiency in prac tice by assuming certain distributions on the "real-world" -problems. Other stochastic models are realistic as well and so this analysis should be considered as one of many possibilities."