Volume 36, Number 4, August 2009

Money, Money, Money

• Peter Horner

As Liza Minnelli and Joel Gray so famously sang in “Cabaret,” the 1972 movie classic,“Money makes the world go around.”Why should academia be any different? Given the “Great Recession” and all of its ramifications on education funding, proving your worth as a teacher and researcher has never been more important. Clearly, these are the times that test a college professor’s soul, especially if that professor is the untenured type teaching an ineffective O.R. course to an unappreciative audience of business students in an underperforming department.

Thinking Globally

I recently returned from a delightful trip to Germany to participate in the 23rd European Conference on Operational Research, the major meeting sponsored by EURO, the Association of European Operational Research Societies (http://www.euro-online.org). Last month, I spent an equally delightful four days in Toronto, at the Joint International Meeting cosponsored by INFORMS and CORS/SCRO, the Canadian Operational Research Society/Société Canadienne de Recherché Opérationalle (www.cors.ca). Both meetings were excellent opportunities to learn about OR/MS work from all over the world. They also provided valuable insights into challenges faced by sister societies in Canada, Europe and elsewhere.

Making Decision Analysis More Accessible

• Robert Bordley

Like many fields of operations research, decision analysis is concerned with identifying that decision – from a constrained set of possible decisions – which optimizes the expected value of a client’s objective function. Two recent innovations make it possible for a course instructor’s introductory lecture on decision analysis to be both thorough and rigorous (in the sense of “hard” O.R.) while being completely nontechnical (analogous to “soft” O.R). These innovations are discussed in detail below.

Traffic, Homeland Security, Health Care

• Barry List

Operations research and analytics have been showing up in higher profile in recent months: Anna Nagurney’s presentation on relieving traffic bottlenecks at the World Science Foundation, Larry Wein’s most recent op/ed about the threat of terrorist attack and INFORMS Past President Brenda Dietrich’s selection as one of the Fast Company 100.

Education Under Siege

• Vijay Mehrotra

After six years, I have left San Francisco State University. In fact, I am writing this column from my new office at the University of San Francisco. I have a new job as an associate professor at USF’s School of Business and Professional Studies, and I consider myself extremely lucky to be here.

Bridges to Somewhere

• John Toczek

The five residents of Hometown live in houses represented by the letters “A” through “E” as shown on the left side of Figure 1. The offices where they will be working are represented by their matching letters on the island of Worktown.

The Emerging Role of Operations Research at McDonald’s

With 32,000 restaurants in 118 countries, McDonald’s is the largest franchise-owned restaurant chain within the quick service industry. After 50-plus years, McDonald’s continues to make tremendous strides within its brand.Whether it’s global re-imaging, new bold tastes added to the menu or increasing the efficiency of service, the change is dramatic and the customers are “lovin’ it”. It is under these “large enterprise” operating conditions that McDonald’s continues to thrive. A large part of this can be attributed to McDonald’s Restaurant Innovation, a global function housed in a non-descript warehouse in the suburbs of Chicago.

The Builder’s Parable

The house remodeling crew was taking a break. The OR/MS analyst, welcoming the temporary respite from the noise of hammers and power saws, took the opportunity to stroll over and ask the builder, “How’s it going?”