In many applications, it can be difficult to measure the effect of an operations research project. For instance, my colleagues and I provide schedules for Major League Baseball. What is the value added by the operations research we do? MLB doesn’t have the time, energy or money to handle multiple schedulers in parallel: they decided [...]
I am a huge fan of the Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences (best work in operations research practice) given by INFORMS. The applications are uniformly inspiring and the presentations go way, way beyond the norm for our field. The full papers, published every January in Interfaces, are ones [...]
Laura McLay, author of Punk Rock Operations Research, has an interesting research paper out on identifying risky airline passengers in order to increase security for them. It is costly (both in money and in passenger inconvenience) to subject everyone to the highest level of screening. So who should be screened, given limited screening [...]
The Operational Research Society (the U.K. equivalent of INFORMS) has a website about operational research (the U.K. equivalent of operations research) aimed at students and teachers called Learn about OR. This makes a great adjunct to the INFORMS site, the Science of Better, aimed at business. Lots of good examples and good advice [...]
Yesterday I twittered:
Doing too much operations research. Spent more time figuring out optimal mowing pattern than mowing lawn.
Today, I came across a picture of a Roomba’s path to clean the floor of an l-shaped room (through a number of sites, but I think I am referring to the original). I think I am a [...]
Hewlett Packard, for their product portfolio management systems. As a judge, I don’t want to say anything beyond saying I think the HP team makes an outstanding Edelman Award winner. Congratulations to them and all of the other finalists.
I am one of a stable of guest bloggers for the INFORMS Practice Meeting. Rather than double post, I’ll move over to that blog for a few days (unless I have something to say that isn’t appropriate for an INFORMS blog), with pointers from here.
My first entry there: Tough Choices!, where I complain [...]
I am at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota. This brings back very fond memories. I was a postdoc here 21 years ago at the start of my career when they had a Special Year on Applied Combinatorics. As I recall there were 10 postdocs that year: nine combinatorialists [...]
The INFORMS Practice Conference is one of my favorite conferences. It is here that I get most of my stories for my classes and get inspired about the areas I work in. I also get inspired about Operations Research in general: it is a great field, and this conference shows the wonderful [...]
The January-February 2009 issue of Interfaces is now online, which means the papers from the 2008 Edelmans have now arrived. My only disappointment is that my “OR Techniques for Consultants” course was moved up 7 weeks, so this year’s students had to make due with last year’s papers.
The papers include:
The New Dutch Timetable: The OR [...]
