Month: May 2007

Major League Baseball Scheduling

Peter Theis and Jeremy Hastings, MBA students at my home base, the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon, have independently reminded me that I have been getting some press about the baseball schedule that I should be pointing to. Not all of it has been positive, but most of it talks about how difficult creating satisfying schedules is. For those who don’t know, some colleagues (Doug Bureman, George Nemhauser and Kelly Easton) and I, through our company the Sports Scheduling Group, created the 2005 and 2007 Major League Baseball Schedule. ESPN.com has an article on the 2007 schedule. They talk about some of the rough parts of the schedule:

For baseball players, grousing about the schedule is as routine as chewing sunflower seeds or making rookies wear cocktail dresses and high heels to the airport during the obligatory hazing trip. The average fan might regard it as just another case of millionaires whining, but fans don’t have to step in the box in front of 50,000 people and produce while bleary-eyed and jet-lagged.

Listen closely, and you’ll hear the Pittsburgh Pirates groaning en masse as they look at their schedule and contemplate that geographically challenged Houston-to-San Diego-to-Chicago trip in late September.

Or consider how thrilled the Texas Rangers must be looking forward to a nine-game Detroit-to-Oakland-to-Minnesota jaunt (with no day off) in the final month.

But ESPN.com also talks about the challenges:

Each team has its own unique circumstances. Cincinnati is always home on Opening Day, while Boston plays at Fenway Park each Patriots Day. The Mets have potential traffic and parking concerns when the U.S. Open tennis tournament is in town, and the Minnesota Twins share the Metrodome with the NFL’s Vikings.

And lest we forget, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area and Baltimore-Washington are all two-team markets. In a perfect world, one team will be at home while the other is on the road.

Throw in six pages of whys and wherefores governing scheduling in the collective bargaining agreement, and you have an extremely complicated jigsaw puzzle.

“You can take any short part of a team’s schedule and say, ‘That’s awful. Why would anybody schedule that?'” Feeney said. “But you can’t look at it that way. It’s not a two-week schedule. It’s a 26-week, 30-team schedule.'”

There have also been articles in the San Jose Mercury News and the Seattle Times. The News has the most depressing line (at least to me):

Starting next season, MLB will create the schedule within its offices. In other words, no more outside consultants.

Not happy news for the Sports Scheduling Group!

And another OR Blog

I realize have have neglected pointing to one of the oldest OR blogs, “FM Waves” by Francesco Marco-Serrano, which started in February 2005. With the subtitle of “The dark side of an operations researcher. Or how operations research can be a funny subject. Wanna join me?”, this is an eclectic, wide-ranging blog. Fracesco has taken up the Netflix challenge that I wrote about.

Laura McLay Blog

Looks like we are getting a few more operations research blogs. Laura McLay of Virginia Commonwealth has a “Punk Rock Operations Research” blog. I particularly like her post on “Humanitarian Logistics“, based on the work of Dave Goldsman of Georgia Tech. Here is an excerpt:

The talk summarized some of Dr. Goldman’s experiences in applying simulation to problems in health clinic management/flow and the spread of Guinea worms in Africa. Guinea worms are particularly interesting. Guinea worms are parasites that are contracted by drinking contaminated water. Once contracted, they eat their way out of the body and reproduce. Breaking the chain results in extermination. This can be easily accomplished by filtering water. However, because of the civil war in Sudan, many soldiers walk home, contracting Guinea worms along the way. Finding a strategy for targeting resources is important for completely eradicating the Guinea worm. The research was funded by the Carter Center, and apparently, Jimmy Carter’s work has nearly eradicated the Guinea worm already.

There was a series of articles in the New York Times a few months ago on the various parasites that plague the world: the pictures ruined a number of breakfasts at the Trick house. I am glad to see that OR may be helping with this problem.

Good to see the blog, and into the “blogroll” it goes!

American Idol Voting is Flawed

Just to prove that operations research is relevant everywhere, Ed Kaplan of Yale University has pointed out a fundamental flaw in the voting process for American Idol. It appears that lots of people get busy signals when trying to vote for “their” idol. This may appear to be simply a frustration but actually gets to the heart of the fairness of the voting system. As Ed argues in an op-ed at the Hartford Courant, if votes are limited due to phone capacity, and each candidate has a separate line (each with the same capacity), then the votes will by necessity be much more evenly spread than the electorate. So a runaway winner can turn into a coin-toss.

In the best OR tradition, Ed not only identifies the problem but solves it:

There is a simple solution to this problem that does not require “American Idol” to install additional phone capacity. Instead of assigning each contestant a personal phone number, use a single number for all voting, and have voters select their favorite by pushing a button after the call has gone through. This simple fix would equalize the chance of encountering a busy signal for all callers.

Many votes would still be lost. In fact, if the total phone capacity was left unchanged, more calls would be lost due to the increase in processing time per call necessitated by button-pushing. But, since all calls would have the same chance of getting through, the total votes received would be a representative sample of votes cast.

If only OR people ran the world, even American Idol would run better.

Sloan-Kettering wins 2007 Edelman Award

The Franz Edelman award is the most prestigious award for the practice of operations research, and each year’s competition is hotly contested. Nominees need to spend significant time preparing their presentations and almost all of them end up involving CEOs or other top executives in the firm.

This year, the winner of the Edelman Award is Sloan-Kettering for work entitled “Operations Research Answers to Cancer Therapeutics.” From the announcement

Yesterday was the first time that the association awarded the Edelman prize for a medical treatment. The Sloan-Kettering win demonstrates how operations research and mathematics are increasingly bringing improvements to health care, not only in the areas of policy, finance, and public health but in diagnosis and treatment, as well.

Dr. Marco Zaider, Attending Physicist in Medical Physics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center received the award together with Professor Eva K. Lee, Director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology.

The 2007 Franz Edelman Award winner was announced at a special awards banquet during The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) Conference on O.R. Practice in Vancouver. http://meetings.informs.org/Practice07/ The finalists included Coca-Cola Enterprises, Hewlett-Packard, DaimlerChrysler, and the U.S. Coast Guard.

Dr. Lee and Dr. Zaider devised sophisticated optimization modeling and computational techniques to implement an intra-operative 3D treatment planning system for brachytherapy (the placement of radioactive “seeds” inside a tumor) that offers a safer and more reliable treatment.

The real-time intra-operative planning system eliminates pre-operation simulation and post-implant imaging analysis. Based on the range of costs of these procedures, Prof. Lee estimated conservatively that their elimination nationwide could save $450 million a year for prostate cancer care alone.

I am hoping for some press coverage for this (the winning work is very important, as are the contributions of the other finalists), but not much so far (just a couple pickups from health-oriented web sites). Reporters: great opportunity here!

Papers associated with the Edelman finalists will appear in the January-February issue of Interfaces.

Conference Listing Software

One of the things I did with INFORMS Online was put in a system for conference listings.  The system began with some commercial software but I ended up modifying it so much that it is almost unrecognizable.  The system has been very successful (a few hundred OR/MS conferences get added every year, and the upkeep is relatively low).  But the system is buggy (people “losing” their conferences is the most common problem) and I cannot keep reminding myself on how it works in order to debug it.  Further, there are some things we would like (RSS feeds and ical compatibility) that this cannot do.

So I would like a new system.  There is an add on for word-press blogs (like this one) that allows event entry, but it is pretty darn clunky.  I am now experimenting with it on this page (see the right hand column), but I am not crazy about it.  Has anyone seen systems like the one at INFORMS that they like and (even better) have experience with?