This special issue contains selected papers of two scientific meetings: VOCAL-2016 and the XXXII. Hungarian Operations Research Conference. It is already the ninth special issue of CEJOR devoted to Hungarian conferences on operations research, and we hope that this tradition provides values for the OR community in Central Europe and beyond.

VOCAL-2016 took place in Esztergom, December 12–15, 2016. The chairman of the organizing committee was Ferenc Friedler. The number of participants was around 70. VOCAL-2016 had 5 plenary speakers, two tutorial sessions, and over 50 contributed talks in two parallel sessions. More information can be found at the home page http://vocal2016.p-graph.org/.

The XXXII. Hungarian Operations Research Conference was held in Cegléd, Hungary, June 14–16, 2017. The chairman of the organizing committee was Tibor Jordán. The primary organizer of the meeting was the János Bolyai Mathematical Society, collaborating with the Hungarian Operations Research Society and the Hungarian Society for Economic Modeling. The number of participants was around 100. The scientific program of the meeting included three plenary talks and 70 contributed presentations in two parallel sessions. The language of this conference was Hungarian. For further details see http://www.bolyai.hu/mok17.htm. The scope of the conference included several aspects of operations research: a good mixture of theoretical results and successful applications were presented.

We have received twenty seven submissions for this volume. Sorting out the best papers of the conferences, the aim of this special volume is to demonstrate the strength of the Hungarian operations research community. The manuscripts went through the usual refereeing process according to the policy of CEJOR: each manuscript was reviewed by at least two anonymous reviewers, and after some rounds of peer reviewing, fourteen papers have been accepted. Two further manuscripts are still in the reviewing process. The editors of the special issue thank the referees for their efforts with which they contributed to the quality of this volume.

The composition of the special issue reflects more or less the versatility of the conference subjects. More than half of our papers investigate methodological issues: those written by Borgulya (2018), Baumgartner et al. (2018), Bódis and Balogh (2018), Cafuta (2018), Eisenberg-Nagy et al. (2018), Fodor and Németh (2018), Leitold et al. (2018), and Molnár-Szipai and Varga (2018). The contribution by Dobos and Vörösmarty (2018), considers an economic problem. Multi criteria decision making is studied in the papers of Csató (2018), Orbán-Mihálykó et al. (2018), and Temesi (2018). We have two papers related to process network synthesis: the one by Bartos and Bertók (2018) and that of Kovács et al. (2018).

Our special issue is similar to that of the Croatian Operational Research Society, CEJOR issue 3 of volume 26 (2016). The closest papers there are those by A. Csizmadia, Zs. Csizmadia, and T. Illés on the quadratic primal simplex method Csizmadia et al. (2018), the Darvay and Takács article on an interior-point algorithm Darvay and Takács (2018), and the article of Kadoić et al. (2018) on strategic decision-making in higher education.

Veszprém, Szeged, and Budapest, December, 2018

Botond Bertók

member of the Organizing Committee of VOCAL 2016, past executive board member of the Hungarian Operations Research Society, head of the System and Process Optimization Research Laboratory, University of Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary

Tibor Csendes

co-editor of CEJOR, president of the Operations Research Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, full professor, head of the Computational Optimization Department, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary

Tibor Jordán

chair of the Organizing Committee of the XXXII. Hungarian Operations Research Conference, full professor, head of the Department of Operations Research, Eötvös Loránd University, leader of the MTA-ELTE Egerváry Research Group on Combinatorial Optimization, Budapest, Hungary