INFORMS Computing Society Conference

The INFORMS Computing Society Conference will hold their annual meeting in Miami from January 3-5, 2007. While ICS has a large contingent at the INFORMS Annual Meeting, this conference has a much different feel. Rather than being part of a 3500 person conference, the ICS Conference aims for around 100-150 participants, all interested in the interaction between OR and computer science. A highlight of this conference will be the presentation by Robert Atlas, director of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Labs. AOML looks at things like hurricanes, climate change (or stability, for this politically charged issue!), and coastal effects. This area is a great one for OR: there are lots of policy issues that can use an analytical input.

The deadline for abstract submission for this conference is October 1, 2006.

President Clinton, AIDS and Operations Research

Clinton FoundationIt is heartening to see former President Clinton talk about “Operations Research” and even better to see outside groups see the promise of our field. At an address at the 16th Annual International AIDS Conference, President Clinton announced a new Consortium for Strategic HIV Operations Research. From the transcript (page 13/14):

Second point I want to make is while more money is necessary, it is nowhere near sufficient. It is our moral obligation to ensure that the enormous contributions already made and those that will be made are used most efficiently. Every single wasted dollar puts a life at risk.
A few days ago, my foundation unveiled our consortium for strategic operation research here in Toronto. It’s an initiative designed to help ensure that this huge investment of resources results in the highest quality care, most efficiently delivered for as many HIV infected people as possible. We want to apply the same planning methods that Fortune 500 companies use to manage their operations, so that we can make the most effective use of what will always be scarce resources until the number of people who are HIV positive begins to drop dramatically. Using simple open-source computer models, we’ll be able to help governments save more lives with the same human and financial resources.

Wow! An obvious reference to operations research and open source in the same paragraph!

A few months ago, I talked to some researchers at the Clinton Foundation. Often “Operations Research” in AIDS/HIV research is what we would call “Statistical Experimental Design”: how to best measure the effect of certain treatments. For instance, there is a book available online entitled: “Designing HIV/AIDS Intervention Studies: An Operations Research Handbook” that will not be recognizable as operations research as our field defines it.

While important, this approach ignores 99% of operations research. Issues like optimal resource allocation, stochastic models of disease spread, simulation and so on are equally or more important, but are under-studied in this area.The Clinton Foundation people seem to understand this, and want to bring the full power of OR to this field. The CSHOR has in place a simulation model of clinics that can be modified to fit local costs/resource availability to determine, for instance, the effect of having another nurse. The Q&A directly addresses the role of OR:

Why was CSHOR created?

The emerging field of operations research offers a practical and strategic approach to future planning for developing countries. Operations research can be performed on the ground, in real-time, to guide decision making at a single clinic or a regional or national HIV treatment program. Local data and best practices from programs around the world can be combined to help ensure consistency and quality of care.

Operations research is increasingly critical; as ever-vaster resources are poured into national HIV treatment programs, it is crucial to be sure they are used as efficiently to provide high-quality treatment and care for as many people as possible.

CSHOR was launched in response to direct appeals from CHAI’s partner countries for assistance with resource planning and allocation.

I am not sure “emerging field” is appropriate for a 60 year old field, but the rest is very encouraging.

OR has a huge amount to offer this area, and I am absolutely thrilled that the Clinton Foundation is using the skills of our field

The Blue Ball Production Problem

It’s course preparation time again. For those of you teaching production or scheduling, if you are looking for a graphic to show the need for split-second planning in certain production processes, I highly recommend the Blue Ball Machine. Hypnotic!

From Wired Magazine:

A Rube Goldberg machine made of animated tiles, with hundreds of blue balls moving in time to music from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.
Max [of http://www.ytmnd.com]says: This is our most viewed title ever. It was created by the Web site Something Awful – they had 100 people make 1-inch tiles, and the only rule was that a ball had to enter at a certain place and exit at another. It came out awesome.

More on Air Taxis

My friend and business partner (in sports scheduling), George Nemhauser, read my post on air taxis and wrote to remind me that Georgia Tech worked with DayJet on the optimization issues that are key to the efficient running of their operation. This led me to an USA Today article by Kevin Maney that I had missed on the subject. The article covers the optimization issues very well:

Tech industry veteran Ed Iacobucci seems an improbable guy to start a new kind of airline. It’s like Donald Trump starting a chain of Laundromats, or Tom Cruise marketing an anti-depression drug.

Pretty jarring, in other words.

But he isn’t really starting an airline, much as eBay didn’t start a flea market. Iacobucci is a one-time IBM tech whiz and founder of software maker Citrix Systems. Over the past four years, he and his team have built a breakthrough computer system for solving highly complex optimization problems.

An optimization problem is like when a mom has to pick up one kid at soccer, one at dance, buy groceries, walk the dog and volunteer at church, and has to figure out the most efficient way to do them all. Now try that for hundreds of moms and hundreds of tasks all at once.

“This is hard stuff,” Iacobucci says. “There’s a lot of new science involved.”

His team is using this system to launch DayJet, the first true on-demand air service. Such a service could not exist without the new computer system. Basically, Iacobucci has started a technology company that will make its money by flying people around.

I love the phrase “a technology company that will make its money by flying people around”. I would like the phrase “an operations research company that will make its money by flying people around” even better, because that is what DayJet really is. Just like Amazon is an operations research company that makes its money by selling books and more, and FedEx is an operations research company …

The article goes on and makes a very clear point about the scale of the optimization, and the need for timely schedules:

If you have a bunch of little jets and a bunch of people in different cities who want a ride, Iacobucci thought, software should be able to figure out the most efficient way to scatter the planes so they can transport the people — while charging enough to make a profit but not nearly as much as a traditional charter plane service.

Good idea, until you start considering all the variables involved. Matching people, cities and aircraft seats is tough enough, but add in crew schedules, maintenance, fuel costs and the uncertainties of weather — plus the need to quote ticket prices before all the variables are in place — and you’ve got a computational mountain no one had yet climbed.

“When I told our team what we wanted to do, they went like this,” Iacobucci says as he makes a cross with his fingers — the way you’d ward off vampires. That’s serious, considering his team includes a couple of former Soviet rocket scientists and the complexity theory department at Georgia Tech, which helped DayJet crack the problem.

As customers put in their requests, the system continually crunches all the departure and arrival requests, plane availability, weather patterns and so on, coming up with a new best answer for schedules and prices every five seconds, always trying — as the DayJet folks say — to get the solution “within 2% of optimality.”

You have to appreciate how remarkable that is. When you’re making everyday, multi-faceted decisions — What should I make for dinner? Should I finish this report or see my kid’s soccer game? — it’s pretty unlikely you ever get within 2% of optimality. I think Donna Reed used to, but I’m sure that’s escaped every other human since.

The DayJet system crunches answers and ranges of probability until a couple of hours before jets would have to take off. “Then the schedule starts to gelatinize,” says Brad Noe, DayJet’s VP of engineering. “And it comes up with a plan.”

This is a great example of academia/business interaction in operations research to come up with businesses that could not exist twenty years ago.