Volume 32, Number 6, December 2005

FEATURE ARTICLES

A PASSION FOR PUBLICATIONS

INFORMS President-Elect Mark Daskin, who takes over the presidential reins on Jan. 1, 2006, came up through the publications ranks of the Institute. A former editor of Transportation Science and a former vice president of publications for INFORMS, Daskin also pioneered PubsOnline, the Institute’s initiative to make its journals available electronically.
Essay: The Art and Science of ‘Better’

Borrowing a metaphor from medicine, it may be advantageous to characterize O.R. as the profession that seeks to maintain, improve or restore the “wellness” of an organized complex of operations within commerce, industry or government.
- John Lawrence Nazareth
Case Study: Fleet Manager Milks Efficiency out of Dairy Company

New Zealand dairy companies are faced with the question of how to collect milk from their supplier farms efficiently, using road milk tankers, and have it delivered to their factories for processing. The dairy companies operate one or more factories, each of which has a daily demand for milk that must be satisfied. They also operate fleets of milk tankers over two shifts per day. Each company has contracts with hundreds of farmers (suppliers) to supply milk usually (but not always) daily to the company. The amount of milk produced by each supplier has seasonal and daily variations and must be estimated. The company’s vehicle schedulers operate the tanker fleet within location, budget and other constraints attempting, among other objectives, to minimize the cost per kilogram of milk delivered to the factories.
- Chuda Basnet
- Les Foulds
‘Gaming’ Reality

SIMULATION MODELING HAS INCREASED in visibility and acceptance over the years, thanks to improvements in commercial products and particularly in the sophistication of animation. The public has been exposed to simulation through games and the media, such as the Matrix movies. The gaming industry has led the way in providing the general public with accessible and increasingly realistic simulation-based entertainment. The genre has developed far beyond simple shooter games. Action-oriented simulation includes sports, flying and combat, while other games are competitions to build and win financial or political empires, construct and operate an amusement park or zoo, not to mention the varied social simulations of the “Sims.” One of the most sophisticated action simulations is America’s Army, which depicts both training and action scenarios that can be combined in multi-player games. The Web site (americasarmy.com) boasts more than 6 million registered users. While the level of fidelity varies over these models, the pervasiveness of simulation and of role-playing games is great enough that the concept is easily accepted. We may have reached a point where the idea of simulation is taken for granted by the general public.
- James J. Swain
Maple 10 and the Global Optimization Toolbox

MAPLE (MAPLESOFT, 2005) IS AN INTEGRATED technical computing system that supports rapid prototyping, modular development and full project documentation. Maple allows the creation of documents that integrate mathematical results and their derivations with explanations, plots, and other forms of technical knowledge. One of the compelling features for O.R. professionals and students is that Maple allows gaining problem insight symbolically, numerically and visually. See Parlar (2000) for a discussion of Maple’s usefulness in modeling and solving a wide range of O.R. problems, including optimization, stochastic processes, inventory models, queueing systems and simulation.

DIGITAL EDITION

DEPARTMENTS

Inside Story

Software Survey Saga

Peter Horner

One of the more labor-intensive editorial exercises we conduct on a regular basis (besides gently arm-twisting the dozens of authors and columnists who graciously and without compensation contribute their time, expertise and writing skills to OR/MS Today) centers around software surveys. The survey process begins with the development of a suitable questionnaire authored by an experienced user with a deep understanding of the type of software to be surveyed. We also ask that same person to author a brief article that serves to both introduce the survey results and to bring our readers up to date on recent trends in the field.

President's Desk

Focus Best Minds on Most Important Problems

Richard C. Larson

The tragedy of the great tsunami of December 2004 fills our minds and hearts as we begin 2005. As your new INFORMS president, I welcome the opportunity to speak with you in these columns. But it is hard to think narrowly of our profession when there is such sadness and suffering in South and Southeast Asia. We are all thinking about how we can help. We can offer cash donations, and many of us, I am sure, have done that.

Issues in Education

The Traveling Teaching Salesperson Problem

Joel Sokol

“OK, let me ask you a few questions,” I often say to undergraduate and master’s students who come to me for advice about what type of job they might enjoy. “First, what topics interested you the most in your courses?”

Cyberspace

The Washerman’s Dog: What is O.R.’s Domain?

ManMohan Sodhi

I really enjoyed Pete Horner’s interview [1] with the new INFORMS president, Richard Larson, and Mike Rothkopf’s article [2] in the December 2004 issue of OR/MS Today, especially as my similarly motivated column, “The Science of Better What?” [3], appeared in the same issue. Larson talked about the success of O.R. being tied to the proportion of people at a random cocktail party recognizing the phrase “operations research” and that nine out of 10 people in his experience (at MIT parties?) were not able to do so. He also talked about O.R. giving birth to many fields – revenue management and [parts of] supply chain management, for instance – which never got connected with O.R. in the public eye. Rothkopf pointed out that “we are not well known.”Why don’t people recognize O.R.?

Was It Something I Said

Why Some Stop Banging the Drum

Vijay Mehrotra

When I started at San Francisco State, my old friend and new colleague Robert Saltzman advised me to treat each course as a Continuous Improvement Project. This has proven to be good advice, for I’m always amazed, in retrospect, about how little I had actually known before teaching a class for the first time. Looking forward to the new semester, I’m inspired to get back to it, to strive for success, to go deeper into the mystery of how a teacher connects with and contributes to the students’ experience (what my friend Rich Murphy has dubbed “The Calculus of Intimacy”[1]). I feel lucky to have the chance to do it all over again.

Viewpoint

Caution: Bottoms-up Work Ahead

INFORMS President Richard Larson “looks to integrate his plan to bolster INFORMS membership through nonPh.D.s” (OR/MS Today, “The Science of Better Synergy,” December 2004). With a lead-in like that, my interest was aroused immediately. Not only do I not have a Ph.D., I work in industry, have no academic or government ties, and just attended my first INFORMS annual meeting.

ORacle

Napoleon’s Parable

Doug Samuelson

The junior O.R. analyst was troubled and frustrated. “I just don’t see why this model isn’t tracking right,” he sputtered. “I’ve been over the code carefully, half a dozen times. I ran some test cases that came out right. But some of the data points we’re trying to forecast in the holdout sample are just way off. There don’t appear to be coding errors in the data, either – I’ve gone back and checked the bad points against source documents. Help, Carl! What more can I do?”