Good morning! It’s so nice to see you all here in Melbourne. First of all, I would like to thank our host Business School, Monash University, the great work they did organizing this event. I would like to give a big welcome to Prof. Russell Smyth.Also,I would like to thank Prof. Fang Lee Cooke, Prof. Greg Bamber and Prof. George Rivers in particular for their contributions to this conference. Many thanks to our distinguished guests for attending this conference!

Eleven conferences have now been consecutively held over the past eleven years in Asia, America, and Europe in order to promote state-of-the-art research in the field of MSEM.More and more scholars are now attending the conference and presenting their compelling work in this field. Thanks to their hard work, we all get the opportunity to work together, learn, and share ideas which can contribute to the development of MSEM.

Although many achievements have been recognized, new developments and challenges never stop. That we are in the midst of change is now well understood. For example, the era of “Big Data” calls for the better integration of optimization, statistics and data analysis.These changes provide tremendous opportunities for us to solve new MSEM problems. New methodologies and technologies are needed for addressing the new challenges in MSEM.

This year, we chose “Sustainability” as the theme of the conference and invite eightkeynote speakers to give us excellent reports in the following two days. Welcome all of you, we all look forward to your great presentations. Also welcome our guests from different countries in the world. Thanks for your efforts and support that make our conference a success. We hope you enjoy a great time in Melbourne. Of course, ISMSEM Advancement Prize will also be awarded for theexcellent papers to furtherencourage state-of-the-art research. Besides, in the last two years, our researches have been working on an in-depth study of the journalsin the fields of management science and engineering management. We are preparing to publish a book to present our research findings.

After all, this conference will be a feast of academic and cultural interactions in Melbourne. We aim to foster more research collaboration in a relaxed atmosphere, and I do hope you will all enjoy it! Thank you again for joining usand wish you have a great stay in Melbourne.

Prof. Dr. Dr. Jiuping Xu

General Chair

President of the International Society of Management Science and Engineering Management

Academician of International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences

Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry

August 2, 2018