What do liquor stores and folk festivals have in common besides a bunch of customers looking for a good time? If you said complicated personnel scheduling problems, you're either an operations researcher, a Canadian or both.

What could be complicated about scheduling employees at a liquor store? On the surface, it seems pretty simple. Joe, you work from noon to 8 p.m., Monday through Friday. Jan, you're scheduled for 4 p.m. to midnight. Jim, you've got the weekend shift, plus 4 to 8 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday. That should just about cover it, right?

Wrong. When you're a public corporation in Quebec Province and you're scheduling employees for 400 liquor stores and warehouses and you have to comply with enough union rules and regulations to make the IRS green with envy, you've got problems. Big problems. Operations research-type problems.

OK, but surely it doesn't take a rocket scientist to schedule volunteers at the Edmonton Folk Festival? Wrong again, propeller-head. Without volunteers, the festival is finito, so you have to keep them happy so they don't walk away. How do you keep volunteers happy? By scheduling them when they want to work, with crews they like to work with, and on assignments they perceive as valuable. Enter O.R.

Welcome to the annual Special International Issue of OR/MS Today, the eighth in a series aimed at giving readers a taste of the wide world of operations wherever it happens to be practiced or preached. While scheduling is familiar ground for operations researchers, we think you'll find that the liquor store and folk festival applications put an interesting new spin on an old O.R. problem. For more, check out "Sobering Thought: Can IP Solve Liquor Store Scheduling Woes?" (page 24) and "The 'Sound' Science of Scheduling" (page 32).

Speaking of scheduling, does any industry have more complex operations than airlines? From flight crew scheduling to aircraft allocation, the airline industry represents a target-rich environment for O.R. To find out how O.R. is hard at work at SAS and other international carriers, see "Problem Solving in Airline Operations" (page 36).

"Pulp Fact, Not Fiction" (page 42) provides a peek at O.R.-based process control at a Swedish paper mill. Our international tour concludes, appropriately enough, with a behind-the-scenes view of the Edelman Prize Competition, a showcase of the best applications of O.R. from around the world ("Inside the Edelman Competition," page 48).

Along with all of the contributing authors, we thank Jeff Camm, editor of Interfaces, for granting us permission to give OR/MS Today readers a sneak preview of some upcoming papers in that journal. Last but not least, we want to acknowledge Andres Weintraub of Chile, a past president of the International Federation of Operational Researchers (IFORS), who was instrumental in bringing much of this work to our attention, just as he has done with our previous international O.R. expeditions.

IFORS is an umbrella organization representing 48 national societies and several kindred societies (www.ifors.org). INFORMS will host the Triennial Conference of IFORS July 11-15 in Honolulu (page 59).

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