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Beyond the Waiver

When disaster disrupts fuel supplies, a Jones Act waiver may help, but only if the real bottlenecks are understood. Operations research offers a clearer way to test options, coordinate scarce resources, and keep essential goods moving.

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FEATURE ARTICLES

  • The Missing Triad

    Why do so many GenAI initiatives fail to deliver lasting value? The answer may lie less in the technology itself than in the missing foundation of science, service design, and meaningful metrics.

  • Not All Time Is Created Equal

    Firefighters know that not every call takes the same toll. A new workload model shows how nighttime wake-ups, back-to-back calls, high-volume shifts, and incident severity can reveal hidden burdens that standard utilization metrics miss.

  • Beyond the Charge

    Electric batteries can power cleaner transportation, but their environmental story does not end when the vehicle stops moving. A comprehensive view of the life cycle of these batteries in developing countries reveals hidden environmental and public health costs and show why smarter policy, safer recycling, and better traceability are vital.

  • From Data to Marketing Strategies

    Machine learning is helping healthcare marketers move beyond one-size-fits-all outreach by identifying which fertility patients are likely to begin or switch treatments and which providers are most likely to prescribe them.

  • Beyond the Waiver

    When disaster disrupts fuel supplies, a Jones Act waiver may help, but only if the real bottlenecks are understood. Operations research offers a clearer way to test options, coordinate scarce resources, and keep essential goods moving.

What's Your StORy?

Les Servi

How would you describe an INFORMS meeting to someone who's never attended one?

Overwhelming. There's a lot of things happening; it's important to be prepared. It's important to have reasonable expectations. I think a good expectation is to leave the meeting with a few meaningful conversations, a few nuggets – something that's valuable. Also, to both deepen your knowledge as well as broaden your knowledge.

For more from Les, click here.

MOST READ

  • Shooting your age in golf

    There are many memorable moments in a golfer’s life. Breaking 90, 80 or 70 for the first time, striking a hole-in-one or scoring an eagle on a par-5 hole are some examples most golfers never forget.

  • THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE FATHER OF LINEAR PROGRAMMING

    DR. GEORGE B. DANTZIG, THE “FATHER OF LINEAR PROGRAMMING” and a founding member of The Institute of Management Sciences, died May 13, 2005 in Stanford, Calif. His formal education was as a mathematician which reflected his early interest in the subject and the influence of his father, Tobias Dantzig, a mathematics professor who studied under Henri Poincaré. George’s seminal work can be summed up succinctly as the recognition and definition of the broad class of practical problems that can be studied as linear programs and the development of the simplex algorithm for solving them. These developments came after the beginnings of the emerging field of operations research, as developed by British scientists during World War II. Early books and reports on operations research (O.R.) had little or nothing to say about linear programming. But, before long, George’s work became a central and mainstay feature of O.R. methods and their application.

  • ‘ORION’ delivers success for UPS

    UPS was faced with what amounted to the Mother of all Traveling Salesman Problems in its Small Package Operations: how to optimally deploy 55,000 drivers based across the United States, each of whom makes on average more than a hundred deliveries a day. To make the problem even more interesting, UPS added a largely safety-driven constraint: minimize the number of left-hand turns on each driver’s route.

  • AI²: Escaping the AI Shallows with Aristotle’s Insight Loop

    Is generative AI helping us make smarter decisions or just more decisions, faster? This article explores that question and introduces AI² – Aristotelian Insight amplified by Artificial Intelligence – as a constructive alternative: a way to use generative AI as a recursive thinking partner instead of a shortcut. We’ll explore how this model builds on centuries of structured reasoning, aligns with INFORMS’ mission, and transforms how we question, model, test, teach and communicate in the age of AI.

  • Beyond the Bounds

    For decades, the O.R. community has lamented its lack of impact in the C-suite, blaming poor communication or a lack of data literacy. But the real problem is our obsession with solving the same old problems a fraction faster, rather than augmenting our capabilities to solve entirely new problems.