SOAF was founded in 1959 with the dual purpose of promoting the development within the different branches of operations research, and work for its application within different problem domains.
Ten of the member organizations are companies, eight are academic institutes, and four are governmental authorities.
The majority of the organizations are active in the domain of transportation and logistics, but other areas such as, e.g., maintenance, health care and military defense, are represented as well.
Together with the Danish Operations Research Society, SOAF publishes the ORbit magazine twice a year.
In 2013, the conference was organized in co-operation with the Danish OR Society and the Norwegian OR Society as the joint conference SOAK (Svenska OperationsanalysKonferensen in Swedish) and NOS6 (The 6th Nordic Optimization Symposium) at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg.