The goal of the workshop is to gather industry representatives, academic researchers, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to work on concrete problems proposed by the industry. The workshop is organized by the Centre de recherches mathématiques, along with GERAD, the CIRRELT (Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation), and ncm2, and is sponsored by the Mprime network of centres of excellence. The participants will work in teams, and each team will analyze a problem supplied by a company or a public sector institution. The workshop will provide companies and institutions with mathematical tools for solving problems, and will enable academic researchers and students in applied mathematics to work on real-world problems.

The 2013 workshop will feature all kinds of problems, as usual, but will also include a series of problems arising in the physiology of connective tissues. Dr. Svetlana V. Komarova, from the McGill University Faculty of Dentistry, will coordinate this section of the workshop.

The Montreal workshop is part of a Canadian tradition, since the PIMS Institute, based in Vancouver, started organizing Industrial Problem Solving Workshops around fifteen years ago. Information on these may be found at http://www.pims.math.ca/industrial.

In Toronto the Fields Institute is now organizing similar workshops; more information on the 2010 workshop may be found at www.fields.utoronto.ca/programs/scientific/10-11/FMIPW10/.

The Canadian workshops are modelled on the "study groups" created at the University of Oxford (cf. the site www.maths-in-industry.org and click here for general considerations on study groups).