OR/MS Today - August 2000

August 2000

INFORMS News

What They're Saying About Operations Research

Compiled by Barry List

Several articles in the press examined the contributions made by INFORMS, its members and the OR field. For example:

For a transportation, manufacturing, finance or service organization to operate efficiently and profitably, coordination of people, materials and equipment is crucial. Operations research analysts, who apply mathematical principles to solve complicated organizational challenges, help make sure that coordination takes place, and that the operations run smoothly.

According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), people who hold master's or Ph.D. degrees in management science or operations research should encounter good job opportunities in operations research through the year 2008. That's because the number of new jobs opening annually and the need to replace retiring workers will exceed the number of new graduates entering the field.

John Birge, dean of the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University in Evanston and president of the Linthicum, Md.-based Institute For Operations Research and the Management Sciences, reports he's seen recent job growth. "A lot of companies are expanding in this area," he said. "Many e-commerce companies are trying to optimize the order-fulfillment process" through operations research.

- Chicago Tribune, July 2, 2000

Dr. Arnold Barnett, a management science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes that if a mid-range extrapolation of past jet-to-jet collisions on the ground were applied to traffic growth projected from 2003-2022, some 700-800 deaths and 200 injuries could result. "At towered U.S. airports, we might expect something like 15 fatal runway collisions, three of them jet-to-jet," he said.... Runway collisions could cause more U.S. domestic jet deaths over the next two decades than from all other causes combined."

While the scenario he presented is horrifying and graphic, Barnett believes the situation may not come to pass. Indeed, an FAA official said the plan to deploy ground surveillance systems at about 70 of the nation's busiest airports "should reduce Barnett's numbers by 95 percent."

"We used Barnett's analysis to identify the airports for this equipment," the official said.

- Air Safety Week, July 3, 2000

Air New Zealand's air crew scheduling system was highly commended in an international competition for practical applications of operations research techniques in business.

While the Air New Zealand, University of Auckland and Optimal Decision Technologies team that developed the system was disappointed at missing out on the Franz Edelman Award, the airline's general manager of operations, Ron Tannock, said making the final with companies like IBM and Ford was a significant achievement.

Mr. Tannock said airlines worldwide had invested heavily in research to improve staff rostering, given that air crew costs are among the largest operations costs. "With Auckland University's help we have solved this problem. We now have one of the most sophisticated crew rostering systems of any airline in the world," he said.

- New Zealand Herald, May 16, 2000

Linear programming has come a long way since those early, pre-computer days, both in terms of the sophistication of its algorithms and in performance. "We're a million times faster today — not just because of hardware, but also because of algorithmic improvements," says Irv Lustig, optimization product manager at Ilog Inc. As such, linear programming is the core technology in a lion's share of optimization software packages.

These days, the operations research field is being infused with new blood: techniques stemming from the artificial-intelligence community. The most popular of these techniques is called constraint programming, which was developed in the mid-1980s. Contrary to linear, constraint programming has everything to do with the word in its contemporary sense. It attempts to find an optimal solution that meets a set of user-defined criteria, or constraints, and is usually associated with object-oriented programming languages such as C++ and Java.

Until recently, operations research professionals tended to have strong allegiances to one of these two schools of optimization thought, with Americans tending to favor linear programming and Europeans, the artificial-intelligence techniques. The debate over linear programming vs. constraint programming can sometimes escalate into near "religious wars," says Bob Daniel, director of Dash Associations, a developer of optimization engines.

Increasingly, however, players on the two sides of the philosophical divide are beginning to recognize that linear programming and constraint programming each have a place within the optimization spectrum.

- Information Week, June 5, 2000

A massive international conference on ways to promote information and knowledge management in the 21st century was recently held at the Convention & Exhibition Center (COEX) in southern Seoul.

Some 1,200 scholars and experts, including 600 from overseas, engaged in a three-day session to discuss operations research and management science, and took part in exhibitions of related state-of-the art equipment and handsets.

The conference was jointly organized by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) of the United States and Korean Operations Research and Management Society (KORMS).

- Korea Times, June 21, 2000

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