Introduction: 2014 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences

It is an honor for us to serve as chair and special-issue editor, respectively, of the 43rd annual international competition for the Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences. This is the fifth decade of a competition that brings together the best in operations research (OR) practice. This year’s competition was held on March 31, 2014 at the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics & Operations Research in Boston, Massachusetts. Six finalist teams, who had applied OR and business analytics to solve diverse and difficult problems in social networking, hydroelectric generation, fiber optic cable design, and three healthcare specialties (hospital management, kidney exchange, and polio elimination) presented their work.

These entries highlight not only the high-impact practical models the proponents have created, but also the remarkable and diverse ways these proponents have made OR modeling and analysis a part of their organization’s strategic thinking and operational practice. Change management is a key component of successful OR practice, and the papers in this issue show how to bring about change to achieve remarkable results. For example, although some purists may insist upon modeling many details, these entries illustrate how reasonable approximations can aid in model implementation and deployment without hindering success.

About the Edelman Award Competition

The Franz Edelman Award Competition is jointly sponsored by INFORMS and CPMS, the Practice Section of INFORMS. The purpose of the competition is to bring forward and recognize outstanding examples of OR/MS practice. The award is named in honor of Franz Edelman, who established one of the earliest industrial OR/MS groups in North America at RCA. He worked at RCA for more than 30 years and is counted among the fathers of innovation in OR/MS.

The awards are for implemented work that has had significant, verifiable, and measurable impact. INFORMS presents trophies commemorating the award to the client organizations that used the finalists’ work and presents medals and cash awards to the finalist authors. This year, the prize money totaled $15,000, with $10,000 going to the first-place winner. More important, the finalists have the honor and satisfaction of knowing their work has been recognized by their peers as the best in the profession. In addition to having their efforts described in this special issue of Interfaces, all finalists have their presentations made available at the INFORMS Video Learning Center website at http://www.informs.org/Find-Research-Publications/Multimedia-Books/Edelman-and-Wagner-Videos.

The Process

The Edelman Award process began with a call for abstracts in early September 2013. The number of people supporting the Edelman competition is large, with more than 40 participating on the finalist selection committee. To name them all would be difficult, but we thank them for making the competition a success, noting especially the hard work of the verifiers, coaches, judges, and the Edelman Award Gala Committee.

The selection committee reviews all entrants and selects a set of semifinalists. Verifiers then work behind the scenes to validate the claims made by each semifinalist and convey this information to the rest of the selection committee. The verifiers communicate directly with the entrant’s OR team, the users of the work, and client management. Verification is a crucial element of the competition because it ensures that only the highest-achieving OR work makes it to the Edelman Award finals. All verifiers are provided with written guidelines and sample verification reports, and novice verifiers are paired with experienced verifiers. The verifiers this year were Susan Albin, Carrie Beam, John Birge, Andrew Boyd, Bruce Bukiet, Antonio Carbajal, Luz Caudillo Fuentes, Yonghong Chen, Alfred Degbotse, Pooja Dewan, Chris Fry, Sid Hess, Mingguo Hong, Shailendra Jain, Peter Kolesar, Qingwei Li, Irv Lustig, Yanni Papadakis, Pelin Pekgun, Anne Robinson, Randall Robinson, Mark Squillante, Mike Trick, and Andres Weintraub.

The selection committee studies and discusses the verification reports to select the six finalists. Coaches are assigned to each finalist team; these coaches help the finalists improve their papers and presentations for the competition. The coaches this year were Carrie Beam, John Birge, Antonio Carbajal, Yonghong Chen, Ken Fordyce, Chris Fry, Sid Hess, Peter Kolesar, Irv Lustig, Pelin Pekgun, Randall Robinson, and Don Rosenfeld.

Judges study the papers, listen to the presentations, and then discuss the finalists’ accomplishments until they reach a decision on which finalist best exemplifies the ideals and standards of the Franz Edelman Award. Relevant factors include the overall impact and value of the application, the level of technical innovation, the difficulty of the obstacles surmounted, and the work’s portability to other application contexts. The judging panel consisted of Peter Bell (chair), Srinivas Bollapragada, Debra Elkins, Don Kleinmuntz, Russ Labe, John Milne, Patricia Neri, Leon Schwartz, and Mike Trick. Judge Debra Elkins helped with editing one of the papers following the competition.

The Banquet

This was the ninth year that the Edelman finalists were honored at a gala banquet on the evening of the competition. The Edelman Gala Committee comprised Jeff Alden, Peter Bell, Ann Bixby, Allen Butler (chair), Antonio Carbajal, Pooja Dewan, Russ Labe, Ranganath Nuggehalli, Jon Owen, Randall Robinson, Jeff Winters, and INFORMS staff members Gary Bennett, Courtney Biefeld, Cheryl Clark, Terry Cryan, Jonathan Gonzalez, Mary Leszczynski, Barry List, Melissa Moore, and Laura Payne. Glenn Wegryn was the master of ceremonies.

At the banquet, authors of the Edelman finalist papers were designated as Franz Edelman Laureates and presented with medals in recognition of their achievements. Organizations that were significantly involved in the OR development and application were inducted into the Franz Edelman Academy, and high-ranking representatives from these organizations were honored on stage. The culmination of the evening was the announcement of the 2014 first-place team from U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Finalists and the Papers in This Issue

Here is a brief summary of the finalists listed in the sequence that their papers appear in this special issue.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for Polio Eradicators Use Integrated Analytical Models to Make Better Decisions.

Eradicating a terrible disease such as polio from the globe is a massive undertaking that requires the cooperation of many countries, and many organizations and donors. In 2001, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched a collaboration with Kid Risk, Inc. to facilitate evidence-based decision making through the use of OR, including decision trees, stochastic simulation, systems dynamics, and differential equation-based transmission models. These OR models reveal both the health and economic impacts of polio eradication to stakeholders with varying points of view. Among the resulting impacts are a 192-country resolution to agree to ultimate termination of one of the two polio vaccines; the realization that speed trumps coverage in the event of a polio outbreak; and scientific evidence that the long-term economic costs are lower by eliminating polio completely than by trying to keep the number of polio cases under control. Billions of dollars have been raised to support the elimination of this dreadful disease.

The Alliance for Paired Donations for Kidney Exchange and the Alliance for Paired Donation: Operations Research Changes the Way Kidneys Are Transplanted.

Many people who require a kidney transplant have a relative or friend who is willing to donate a kidney, but whose kidney is incompatible with the intended recipient. Some incompatibilities can be solved through simultaneous kidney exchanges with other patient-donor pairs. The Alliance for Paired Donation (APD) introduced nonsimultaneous chains, which greatly expand the possible combinations of patient-donor kidney exchanges. The APD uses integer programming techniques to determine the best matches for these large-scale problems. Since 2006, the APD has saved more than 220 lives, with more than 75 percent of these saved through nonsimultaneous exchanges. Other kidney exchanges also use these concepts and software. The faster algorithm used is based on solving a prize-collecting traveling-salesman problem with cutting planes. Kidney exchange was one of the topics that contributed to co-author Al Roth being awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics.

The Energy Authority for The Energy Authority Optimizes Water Routing and Hydroelectric Generation on the Columbia River.

The Energy Authority developed a software optimization application to enable 13 electricity utilities to manage their “slices” of six dams on the Columbia River. This decision making involves many factors; in addition, the utilities must plan for their hydroelectric needs for the forthcoming 10 days each hour (with hourly granularity). To deal with the complexity, they (1) consolidate all variables into the most important decision variables on how much water to discharge through turbines and spill; (2) dynamically translate other variables and constraints into terms related to the water variables; (3) make piecewise linear approximations; (4) use Taylor series; (5) add minimum- and maximum-generation variables and user-specified constraints; and (6) apply lazy constraints. This modeling enables the Energy Authority to solve the optimization for all 13 utilities within a few minutes. The application, which has been operational since October 2012, provides annual benefits of about $50 million.

The Grady Health System for Transforming Hospital Emergency Department Workflow and Patient Care.

The Grady Health System application was named as a second-place winner of the 2013 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice, in addition to being named a finalist in the 2014 Edelman Award competition. The article described in this issue represents a combined paper reflecting characteristics of both competitions; thus, it is longer than some of the other articles. A special thanks to the Wagner Prize special issue editor, Randall Robinson, who helped edit this article. Extensive data collection was done in the hospital’s emergency department (ED). Machine learning, with discriminant analysis combined with a nonlinear mixed-integer programming model, predicts which patients will require readmission to the ED. This analysis led to repurposing existing resources to create a clinical decision unit where patients are observed following their ED treatment; as a result, ED readmissions decreased by 28 percent. Simulation (with imbedded nonlinear mixed-integer program optimization of staffing) enabled the testing of different policy options (e.g., combined registration and triage, reduced lab and X-ray turnaround time). The implementation of many of these revised policies resulted in productivity improvements of more than 16 percent and a length-of-stay reduction from more than 10 hours to about seven hours.

The National Broadcast Network Company for Optimizing Network Designs for the World’s Largest Broadband Project.

The National Broadcast Network Company is a government-owned company charged with providing a national broadband network for Australia. In late 2009, it contacted a mathematics consulting company, Biarri, who developed a suite of mixed-integer programming models for optimizing the cable network designs. This software has been used to create designs for 650 fiber-serving area modules and will be used to design an additional several thousand modules, providing broadband coverage to approximately eight million premises. Design time per module has been reduced from 145 working days to 16. Savings to date have been over $300 million, and anticipated total savings are estimated at about $1.7 billion.

Twitter for The Who-to-Follow System at Twitter: Strategy, Algorithms, and Revenue Impact.

Twitter uses analytics to recommend to its users who they should follow (i.e., receive tweets from these recommended users). The general concept is to sift through its 240-million-user social network to make recommendations based on other users with related connections. The authors describe several heuristic algorithms they tested, including the SALSA method (now used for most recommendations) and Cosine similarity (now used for promoted accounts and tweets). More than one-eighth of new Twitter connections stem from its who-to-follow feature, and its promoted-products revenue is an important contributor to Twitter’s $30 billion market capitalization.

Conclusion

The Edelman finalist papers make this issue of Interfaces truly special for both practitioners and academics. Practitioners can benefit in at least four ways. First, they will find better ways of doing things using OR/MS models in a diverse group of organizations in both the private and public sectors. Second, they will find better ways to sell their ideas to others in their organizations by pointing out the impact from adopting OR/MS modeling. Third, they will learn how to bring about change in an organization to make OR-based modeling and analysis an integral part of the culture. Finally, they can be inspired to tackle challenging problems and make the modeling choices necessary for their effective solution and deployment.

Academics will find validation of the advanced models they teach and will be able to demonstrate what can be achieved with OR/MS. They can discuss with their students the specific change management issues that make all the difference between an application that is potentially useful and one that has realized benefits. The change management issues can include how an application (or a series of applications) was sold, how potential users were convinced, and how the application(s) were deployed in multiple locations and with people from multiple functions.