Volume 33, Number 4, August 2006

We need more operations researchers; there are far too many issues and problems out there for the current inventory of professional operations researchers to be able to address. One solution to this problem is to train more people to actually do operations research. Some of these trainees should have degrees in O.R. and be trained as O.R. generalists, but there is a second possibility: Perhaps we could train well-educated people to think like O.R. practitioners and apply some of the basic tools of O.R. under limited circumstances? If these “amateur” O.R. practitioners could demonstrate the benefits of O.R., this might encourage their employers to hire professional O.R. people, thereby promoting the profession.

• Peter C. Bell

For very good reasons, O.R. often indulges in a convenient fiction. In order to focus on precise analytical and mathematical challenges, we need to assume away many messy inconveniences that bedevil managers in the working world. We often assume that we start with a “problem” that is well-defined and which does not change over time. We assume that data exists, is accurate, complete and usable without cost. We assume that there is a decision-maker who is rational, knows clearly what he wants and has the ability to cause an organization to flawlessly execute the decisions that he makes. These assumptions are eminently sensible, because they greatly facilitate the development of important and powerful O.R. algorithms.

• Thomas Grossman

This article may contain a relief prescription for academic schizophrenia. “What is academic schizophrenia?” you ask. For faculty, it can be an occupational hazard. A professor is likely to experience an outbreak several times in the course of a semester. I speak of the day you are particularly consumed with your research on rendezvous-evasion search. You are thinking hard about a theorem that should be, but at the moment it isn’t quite obvious. You are where you want to be, alone in your office, with your computer, a pile of articles and a hot cup of coffee. You are not at all distracted by the sound of Robert Cray playing softly in the background. All of a sudden you get up, leave your office, walk to the building across campus, find the room with the captive audience, and proceed to deliver an hour and fifteen minute lecture on project management.

• Salwa Ammar

As my year as a 2005-2006 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University draws to a close, I thought that I would offer some of my reflections on this unique experience as it relates to the operations research/ management science community. I was one of a dozen Science Fellows, with 51 Fellows total, from disciplines ranging from physics, biology, medicine, material science, computer science and mathematics in the sciences, to historians, economists, philosophers, independent writers, playwrights, literary scholars, film-makers, political scientists, an anthropologist, a sociologist, a lawyer, a composer, a choreographer and a linguist, among the “non-scientists.”

Agent-based simulation is establishing itself as a serious, useful area of study. On Aug. 21- 26, the first World Congress on Social Simulation will be held in Kyoto, Japan, jointly sponsored by the three major international professional societies in the subject: the Pacific Asian Association for Agent-based Approach in Social Systems Sciences (PAAA), the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA) and the North American Association for Computational Social and rganization Sciences (NAACSOS).

• Doug Samuelson
• Charles M. Macal

The role of forecasting in business, medicine or life is demanding and elusive. Executives at Warner Brothers had boxoffice figures in mind for “Superman Returns,” but some “Pirates” may have hijacked a few of those dollars. ABC-Disney may have been pleasantly surprised by the ratings of the recent Mavericks-Heat NBA finals based on previous numbers and the host markets. Monitoring my own LDL values is much more than just an academic exercise. The examples can go on and on. When the results are found, the practitioner does an investigation of what went wrong or right. The methodology varies, from a “seat-of-the-pants”judgment guess, to an analysis of historical data using some forecasting software. If you are doing the latter, this sixth biennial edition of OR/MS Today’s forecasting product survey may help you choose that software.

• Jack Yurkiewicz