OR/MS Today - February 1997

February 1997 € Volume 24 € Number 1

Edelman Award Finalists Announced

Representing applications from fast food operations to railroad scheduling systems, six finalists will vie for the 1997 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences. Stephen Strauss, chair of the 1997 competition, announced the following finalists: Hewlett Packard, Nortel, Pacific Gas & Electric Company, Sabre Decision Technologies, Taco Bell Corporation and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Finalist presentations for the 1997 competition will be given May 4 during the INFORMS San Diego meeting (May 4-7) at the Town & Country Hotel.Those interested in the practice of operations research and the management sciences are encouraged to attend the day-long presentation session. The cost is $95 per person and includes lunch and a post-presentation reception.

Results will be announced at the Welcoming Session on Tuesday, May 6, from 11:30 a.m. until noon.

This is the 26th year that the prestigious $15,000 competition has been held. The award is jointly sponsored by INFORMS and CPMS, the Practice Section of INFORMS. The Edelman award recognizes outstanding implemented work that has had a significant positive impact on the performance of the client organization.

The top finalist receives a $10,000 prize. The work to be presented by this year's finalists covers a wide range of operations research applications. Finalist information follows:

Hewlett Packard
Mitchell Burman; "The Use of Operations Research Techniques to Improve the Design of a Hewlett Packard Printer Production Line."

Hewlett Packard planned to build a large automated manufacturing system for Ink Jet printers. Originally, it planned to use a flow line design with multiple subassembly cells of more than 100 processes separated by virtually no buffers.

The resulting system throughput proved to be inadequate. Since the system was already being built, individual machines could not be changed without significantly disrupting the product development cycle. It was decided, therefore, that the best way to improve the throughput was to install limited buffers at strategic points.

Within one week, recommendations were in place that promised to almost double the expected system throughput at a relatively low cost and with a minimum impact on the flow-time and work-in-progress. This work led to a savings of several million dollars per month and was also successfully applied to other projects within the division.

Nortel
Paul A. Brinkley, David E. Stepto, Kristopher Haag, Kuanlian Liou, John Folger, Kui Wang and W. David Carr; "Redefining Factory Information Technology: An OR-Driven Approach."

A team of new graduate and experienced operations researchers and engineers was recruited to implement an enterprise information system for Nortel's new PCS1900 cellular equipment manufacturing operation. This system provides real-time access to production metrics relating to quality, inventory and cycle time, along with linked analysis tools providing real-time decision support.

These tools, including a simulation environment, expert systems and statistical product design analysis system, are accessible to production workers, managers and engineers through the Nortel intranet using Netscape.Additionally, inexpensive real-time access to factory information from the desktop eliminated costly delays resulting from gathering, analyzing and transfering data.

Normally requiring costly time-consuming development by programmers and MIS specialists, this approach of using OR specialists resulted in a complete implemented network and decision support system in less than one year.

This marked a major shift from traditional shop floor systems deployment within Nortel and the industry in general and illustrates an opportunity for OR to assume a leadership role in systems implementation in manufacturing operations.

Pacific Gas & Electric Company
Raymond B. Johnson, Alva J. Svoboda, Claudia Greif, Fulin Zhuang and Alireza Vojdani; "Pacific Gas & Electric Company's Hydro-Thermal Optimization Model."

Since 1992, Pacific Gas & Electric Company's Hydro-Thermal Optimization (HTO) system has been the primary decision support tool for the short-term scheduling of its generation resources. HTO is a significant asset to PG&E in helping systems operators and energy traders adjust competitively, especially in light of the impending deregulation of the industry.

The model development group has also been able to act as an internal consulting group, quickly incorporating new operating considerations. The benefits of using the HTO model have been estimated at $1 million monthly, along with an estimated savings of $3 million annually in its specific application to the voluntary curtailment of Qualifying Facilities production during low energy cost periods.

Sabre Decision Technologies
Nejib Ben-Kheder, Josephine Kintanar, Cecile Queille and William K. Stripling; "Decision Support Scheduling Systems for SNCF."

The national railroad of France, Society Nationale des Chemins de Fer Francais (SNCF) and Sabre Decision Technologies teamed up to address the problem of train capacity allocation in SNCF's network of high-speed electric-powered Trains Grand Vitesse, which carry more than 50 million passengers per year among 140 cities in both France and Europe.

Used to develop advance schedules and published timetables, RailPlus is composed of five modules: a workset manager, a profitability module, a feasibility module, a capacity allocation module and a routing module.

The capacity allocation module utilizes a "sub gradient" algorithm to solve an integer non-linear stochastic optimization problem, while the routing module was cited as being particularly robust. RailCap also uses a similar capacity allocation model to monitor the reservation activity for all trains and add additional trains to the schedule when necessary. The implementation of these decision support systems is credited with an overall profit increase of 3-5 percent, reductions in manpower and schedule development time, and improvements in planning and scenario evaluation.

Taco Bell Corporation
Jackie Hueter and William Swart; "An Integrated Labor Management System for Fast Food Operations."

Following the introduction of the "value meal," in 1990, Taco Bell launched a major study to develop a Labor Management System in order to control labor costs.

There were three model components to their analysis: a demand forecasting model, a simulation model to determine the appropriate staffing to meet customer demand, and an optimization model to perform the staff scheduling function.Data are collected periodically to allow for updates in model parameters, as well as changes in the model structure. Labor savings of one hour per day per company owned store were achieved, yielding a savings of more than $7.6 million per year.

U.S. Department of Energy
Detlof von Winterfeldt and Eric Schweitzer; "An Assessment of Tritium Supply Alternatives in Support of the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Stockpile."

Nuclear weapons need to be serviced and maintained; and, in particular, they require the periodic replacement of tritium. Since there currently exists no tritium production facility in the United States, tritium supplies will fall below the required reserve level in 2011.To decide how to fill this projected gap, the Department of Energy conducted a major assessment of ten tritium supply alternatives, including building a new reactor, purchasing commercial reactor(s) and building an accelerator.

Each supply alternative involved risks of schedule overruns, production shortfalls, cost overruns and environmental impacts. These risks were analyzed using formal probability elicitations, event tree analyses and Monte Carlo simulations.

A dynamic production simulation model was developed that combined the results of the schedule and production risk analyses to predict the production of tritium for each alternative over a period of forty years.The analysis formed the technical basis for the decision for the secretary of energy to pursue both the commercial reactor options and the accelerator option for producing tritium.

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