New Ad Hoc Committee on Energy and Sustainability

Attend any program of any recent INFORMS Annual Meeting, and you’ll see that energy and sustainability work is everywhere. This work is real, deep, and growing.

Energy and sustainability analytics work is being applied to a vast number of efforts that impact everyday life across a wide swath of industries. This work contributes to:

• Stochastic models for renewable integration
• Optimization for grid resilience under wildfire and storm risk
• Location-inventory models for EV battery infrastructure
• Sustainable supply chain and circular-economy work in manufacturing and service operations management (MSOM)
• Food rescue and waste-reduction logistics
• Climate-aware capacity planning
• Fast-emerging questions about AI compute and the power grid 

Trace where these efforts reside in society, and the picture is scattered. The Section on Energy, Natural Resources, and the Environment (ENRE) remains the long-standing intellectual home of energy and sustainability efforts. People doing sustainable operations work are part of a vibrant community that cross-pollinates with the Production and Operations Management Society (POMS), market design, optimization, public sector O.R., and applied probability. 

INFORMS created an ad hoc committee this spring to bring together a small group of international academic leaders to better consider the role of OR/MS in the energy and sustainability sectors. INFORMS president Mark Lewis asked the committee to address whether INFORMS is organized to make the most of this important work.  

The new committee held its first meeting in May. This article is a short account of what we have been asked to do and why this moment seems to call for it. We ask the broader INFORMS community to make our inventory of the field as complete as it can be.

What the Committee Is and Is Not

ENRE predates INFORMS itself. It began as a special interest group of the Operations Research Society of America, and it remains the intellectual core of much of the best O.R. work in this space. INFORMS’ ad hoc committee is not an attempt to duplicate, displace, or absorb any of that activity. It is also not a research group; we are not here to write papers under a committee banner. What we are is a temporary body cutting across sectors asked to take stock of where energy and sustainability questions have moved within the OR/MS and analytics community, map where INFORMS members are already at work, and recommend what steps INFORMS should take next.

The committee is deliberately small and intentionally international: 

• Eddie Anderson (Imperial College London)
• Nicole DeHoratius (Columbia)
• Ben Hobbs (Johns Hopkins)
• Jacob Mays (Cornell)
• Ramteen Sioshansi (Carnegie Mellon)
• Pascal Van Hentenryck (Georgia Tech)
• Adam Wierman (Caltech)
• Golbon Zakeri (UMass Amherst)

Mark Lewis is serving ex officio, and Jeff Cohen is the INFORMS staff lead. I (Michael Ferris, University of Wisconsin–Madison) am the chair of the committee.

The reason for creating an ad hoc committee to consider the role of the analytics community in energy and sustainability efforts rather than refer that question to an existing INFORMS group is that the most consequential energy-related considerations are landing at the intersections of varying efforts. They are between application areas inside INFORMS, between subfields of O.R., and between O.R. and adjacent communities in computer science, civil and environmental engineering, economics, and policy. 

A single example makes the point. Recent O.R. research on EV battery swapping increasingly points toward joint location-inventory-grid models that simultaneously handle station siting, charged- and discharged-pack inventories, low-voltage distribution constraints, and frequency-regulation revenue. Adequately addressing this issue requires facility location, approximation, queueing, market design, and power-systems engineering all at once. No single section, and arguably no single discipline, owns all of it. Variations on this pattern – problems whose mathematical structure pulls in expertise from across INFORMS – keep recurring.

Why Now?

The application landscape is moving quickly and worldwide, illustrated by the following examples:

• Data center load growth is reshaping regional grids and reviving interest in nuclear capacity in the United States and beyond.
• Offshore wind is at industrial scale in Europe and ramping up elsewhere.
• Storms and wildfire risks are changing the planning problem for utilities on several continents.
• Corporate decarbonization commitments, sharpened by mechanisms such as the EU’s carbon border adjustment and scope-3 accounting, have pushed circular-economy logistics into the mainstream of global supply-chain practice.
• Food systems and retail are running serious sustainable-operations programs at scale.

The methodological landscape is moving too. The largest of these problems are now being tackled with combinations of large-scale stochastic optimization, machine learning, market design, and high-performance computing that did not exist in mature form even a decade ago.

Public priorities are shifting as well. In a number of countries, including the United States, government attention and funding are being redirected, in some places away from climate research, in others toward grid investment, nuclear deployment, and AI infrastructure. None of this redirection changes the underlying decision problems, but it does change where OR/MS expertise can be most useful. 

Where public modeling capacity is being withdrawn, our expertise becomes more important, not less. Where public investment is flowing, the planning, market design, and reliability problems at stake are exactly the kind INFORMS members work on for a living. The committee’s view is that this is the right moment to take stock and organize ourselves to deliver the work these issues demand.

Our Charge

The committee will deliver a report in March 2027. We are organizing the work around four goals: 

• Lay out a research agenda that identifies where OR/MS and analytics methods can have meaningful long-term impact on energy and sustainability problems and where the gaps are.
• Build an inventory of what INFORMS members and adjacent communities are already doing in this space.
• Recommend concrete activities INFORMS could take on, such as a special journal issue, thematic awards, recurring academic/practitioner forums, or dedicated tracks at meetings.
• Propose visioning activities that outlast the committee itself.

Two principles came out of our first meeting and are worth flagging. First, our scope is genuinely global. INFORMS membership is international, and the most interesting questions on the table, such as offshore wind, AI data center siting, EV battery infrastructure, sustainable supply chains, and climate adaptation, do not respect national boundaries. We will work to avoid framing that quietly assumes any single national context. 

Second, our time horizon is long, and our ambition is not incremental. The O.R. success stories worth learning from, such as SABRE in airlines, mixed-integer programming in electricity markets, and linear programming in refining, each took roughly a decade or more to fully reshape their industries. Decadal is the right horizon for thinking about what our community can contribute to the energy transition. Quarterly news cycles and annual budget fights will move; our job is to think past them and take on problems whose solution could transform an industry.

What You Can Do

The single most useful thing you can do for the committee right now is to tell us what you are working on. The committee is small by design, and our inventory of activity will only ever be as good as the network we can reach. We know we are missing things, such as work happening in adjacent fields, in industry, in regulatory and policy shops, in countries and institutions not directly represented on the committee, and in pockets of our own society we have not yet thought to look in.

If you are doing OR/MS or analytics work that touches energy or sustainability, broadly construed, please share it through our short intake form. We are particularly interested in:

• Active research projects, especially those that cross subfield boundaries (e.g., optimization-and-CS, O.R.-and-economics, O.R.-and-engineering, analytics-and-policy)
• Industries, utilities, independent system operator/regional transmission organizations (ISO/RTOs), NGOs, or government collaborations in which OR/MS and analytics methods are being applied at scale
• Educational programs and curricula training the next generation in this space
• Activity by adjacent professional societies and initiatives, such as the Computing Research Association (CRA), the IEEE Power & Energy Society, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Climate Change AI, the energy economics community,
• POMS, and others, that we should know about and potentially coordinate with
• Problems you think belong on a research agenda for our community but that are not getting the attention they deserve

Because our inventory phase runs through the fall, input is most valuable to us by October 23, 2026. We are also planning a session at the INFORMS Annual Meeting this fall to gather input in person, and parallel discussion threads will be open on the ENRE section forum and the broader INFORMS online community. If a form is not your style, you are welcome to write to me directly at [email protected].

We would much rather hear from you now, with a half-formed thought, a project we should know about, or a problem we are missing, than discover the gap after the report is written. We look forward to hearing from you!