Volume 34, Number 2, April 2007

British Airways (BA) is a major international airline, operating 750 flights per day to 130 destinations worldwide, using a fleet of 230 aircraft. This large, complex network, coupled with a very complex, constrained operating environment, particularly at the BA main base at London Heathrow Airport (LHR), makes planning and delivering a punctual operation very challenging. Further factors such as asset utilization, commercial priorities and operational logistics clearly add to the challenge.

• Alex Ross
• Alison Swain

Logistics planning has always been an important area for operations research. For the distribution function, the traditional approach has been to make inventory replenishment decisions and vehicle routing decisions separately. Inventory routing is, however, a newer development that seeks to optimize these functions simultaneously. Here, we summarize an inventory-routing project that was one of last year’s finalists in the Franz Edelman Award for achievement in the practice of operations research and the management sciences [1]. The results of the project demonstrate how such integration of logistics activities can create a major competitive advantage for a company.

• Stéphane Dauzère-Pérès
• Atle Nordli

If one looks in the Oxford Dictionary for “ports,” one will find the definition: “a town or city with a harbor”; and under “harbor,” one will find: “ a place on the coast where ships may moor in shelter.” Today, however, the word “port” includes a large variety of notions, which have some similarities and many differences: “seaports” are distinguished from “inland ports” and “dry ports,” “airports” from “container terminals” and “hubs” from “single terminals.” From a logistic point of view one can also find the distinction between “multi-modal terminals” and “single-modal terminals,” where “modal” points to the means of transportation that meet at a terminal.

• Ulrich Dorndorf
• Hans-Jürgen Zimmermann
• Jörg Herbers
• Enrico Panascia

The National Personnel Authority (NPA) is in charge of the recruitment of government officials in Japan. There are three types of recruitment examinations: types I and II are for university and college graduates, while type III is for high school graduates. Those who pass the type I examination and are employed by a ministry are referred to as “career officials,” while others are called “non-career officials.”

• Tatsuo Oyama

Somehow Arnold Barnett manages to massage the subject of airline accidents into a breezy and sometimes comforting talk on statistical probabilities. In decades of research, he has taken firm hold of the metrics of measuring mortality in flight. While there are many ways of looking at the grim numbers, Barnett has developed his own preferred ratio, which looks at “death risk per randomly chosen flight.” Applying this approach, Barnett has come up with very reassuring statistics: The death risk per flight on first world domestic jet services, for the period of 1990-1999, was 1 in 13 million.” [1]

• Richard C. Larson
• Laurie Everett

Over the past year, the Latin American Ibero Association on Operations Research (ALIO: www.dc.uba.ar/alio/index-en.htm) and INFORMS have been working together to organize a teaching workshop modeled after the annual Teaching Effectiveness Colloquium that is organized by INFORM-ED (the Education Forum of INFORMS: http://education.forum.informs.org/). With the support of ALIO, INFORMS and the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS: www.ifors.org/), the 1st ALIO/INFORMS Workshop on O.R. Education took place last November in conjunction with the 2006 Latin-Ibero-American Conference on Operations Research (XIII CLAIO) in Montevideo, Uruguay.

• James J. Cochran
• Héctor Cancela