Death of Mike Rothkopf

Mike Rothkopf, former president of INFORMS, died while swimming on the campus of Penn State.

A regular natatorium patron, the 68-year-old supply chain information systems professor appeared to be “just relaxing” — floating on his back — when concerned lifeguards tapped him on the shoulder at about 8 a.m. yesterday, said Tom Griffiths, manager of aquatic facilities.

Three student lifeguards and three professional staff members attempted to revive the unresponsive Rothkopf using an automated external defibrillator and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Griffiths said. Rothkopf was pronounced dead at Mount Nittany Medical Center at about 9:15 a.m. His cause of death was unknown by press time yesterday, the hospital’s nurse supervisor said.

Mike had recently moved to Penn State after a long career at Rutgers. A former editor of Interfaces, Mike was passionate about the need for academics and practitioners in our field to communicate more and have more (and better) interactions. He was a tremendous force in our field, and will be sorely missed for his insights, his common-sense, and the wisdom he gained throughout his career.

 

Edelman Finalists Announced

The finalists for the 2008 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences have been announced. The Edelman Awards are a big thing in OR. The prize is given to the best use of operations research in practice. Even getting to be a finalist is a lot of work: this is not just a matter of submitting a paper and seeing how it goes. The finalists have to work even harder. They need to prepare a highly professional presentation, with the best presentations getting the support of a firm’s very top management (one year, the South African defense department was a finalist, and President Mandela provided a letter of support). Each finalists is assigned a coach to help them prepare their presentation (the late Rick Rosenthal was proud of the role he played as a coach, and I think finalists working with him may have had a bit of an advantage). And the projects have to be real, not hypothetical. Without verifiable and significant effect, a project cannot be a finalist, let alone a winner.

INFORMS has jazzed up the competition quite a bit in the last years, with fancy presentations at the Practice Meeting. I think this is great: these projects save, often, hundreds of millions of dollars, or improve many lives. They deserve a celebration.

This year’s finalists are an interesting bunch:

1. Federal Aviation Administration, for a project entitled “Airspace Flow Programs,” which gives the FAA greater ability to control the nation’s skies at times of peak consumer usage and flight congestion.

2. Netherlands Railways, for “The New Dutch Timetable: The O.R. Revolution,” a solution that improved on-time performance and capacity for more than a million daily train passengers.

3. StatoilHydro, one of the world’s largest gas producers, and Gassco, the independent Norwegian network operator, for “Optimizing the Offshore Pipeline System for Natural Gas in the North Sea.”

4. The City of Stockholm, Sweden for “Operations Research (O.R.) Improves Quality and Efficiency in Social Care and Home Help,” a program that has brought improvements to the complex scheduling of more than 4,000 providers who help the sick and the elderly.

5. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for “Reducing Security Risks in American Drinking Water Systems.”

6. Xerox, for “LDP Lean Document Production® – Dramatic Productivity Improvements for the Printing Industry,” which has bettered production and reduced costs for print shops and document manufacturers. The total impact to date on Xerox profits from the utilization of the LDP is about $200M. Xerox has filed 48 patents on this methodology and so far 11 have issued.

That’s three international organizations and only one traditional manufacturing finalist. The Swedish finalist in particular represents a strong trend in OR: using OR in the service sector.

I am looking forward to seeing the presentations at the Practice Meeting.

A Good List to be On

Sandy Holt of Systems Analysis and Planning, Inc. (and one of my contacts on LinkedIn) wrote to let me know that “operations research analyst” was one of the careers on MSN’s list of “Ten Jobs that pay more than $30/hour”, albeit on the list at number 10 with a median salary of $31.08/hour ($64,650/year). The description of OR analyst isn’t bad:

Operations research analysts are brought into businesses and organizations to identify, investigate and solve logistics problems through the use of statistical analysis and computer programs. The type of problems can vary depending on the nature of the business, whether it’s a production factory or the military.

I find “logistics problems” and the misleading phrase “computer programs” a bit problematical, but it is not the worse description I have seen.

Feb 10:  Did I really not include a pointer to the article?  It is here.

Andy Boyd, Pricing, and “The Engines of Our Ingenuity”

Andy Boyd, formerly chief scientist of PROS (he is actually still on their scientific board, but is not an active employee) visited CMU today as part of our CART (Center for Analytical Research in Technology) seminar series. He talked about the challenges those in pricing research face. The main point he made is that it is very difficult to figure out demand curves (hence elasticity of demand) through data. Having even lots and lots of transaction level data doesn’t help much in generating demand curves. This is not a new insight (economists refer to these sorts of issues as “identification problems”) but it was interesting to hear this from someone who has made a living doing pricing for the last decade. Without demand curves, how can pricing be done? Airlines have enough separate flights (for which you can assume no substitution) to do a fair amount of experimentation. How can other areas get similar data? Further, Andy makes the point that without understanding the sales process, it is impossible to interpret any data. For instance, for a given kind of car, there will be a few sales at a low value, lots of sales at a medium value, and a few sales at a high value. This does not mean that the demand for cars goes up then down as a function of price! Since car prices are generally negotiated, only a few of the best negotiators will get the lowest price.

Andy makes a strong case that operations research needs to be applied more in the entire sales domain, from customer segmentation through pricing to negotiation. The lack of underpinning in something as fundamental as a demand curve is a little disconcerting, but he stressed for many markets (those without “posted prices”), demand curves may be the wrong modeling approach in the first place.

Andy is now “semi-retired” (I guess he did well when PROS went public) but certainly seems to have lots going on. Once a week, he does a radio show on the Houston public radio radio station. The show is called Engines of Our Ingenuity and Andy does his version on Thursdays. The transcripts are available for the shows. Andy is normally referred to as “guest scientist” but he is sometimes called “operations researcher”, which makes me happy. A recent show of his was on operations research legend George Dantzig, concentrating on his development of the simplex algorithm and his lack of Nobel Prize. Other episodes involve the four color theorem, mathematical models, parallel computing, and operations research itself, along with much, much more. John Lienard is the driving force behind The Engines of Our Ingenuity.

Also, Andy has a new book out on pricing entitled The Future of Pricing: How Airline Ticket Pricing has Inspired a Revolution. Andy and I go back more than twenty years: it was great to see him and see all the amazing things he is doing, even if he is “semi-retired”.

Call for Short Papers, CP-AI-OR 2008

I am co-program chair for CP-AI-OR 2008 to be held in May in Paris.  This year, we decided to allow “short papers” primarily to encourage presentation of preliminary work or work that might have appeared in another outlet but would still be of interest to the CP-AI/OR community.  If you aren’t familiar with CP-AI/OR, it is a small (roughly 100 person) conference that brings together people in constraint programming and operations research to discuss issues in common in the two field (I actually put constraint programming as part of operations research, but most constraint programmers don’t agree with me).

The deadline for short papers is February 15.  You can check out more details at the conference web site.

Dice, Games, and ORStat

Last year, I received a paper from Prof. Henk Tijms of the Vrije University Amsterdam on using stochastic dynamic programming to analyze some simple dice games (pdf version available). A few years ago, I tried to do something similar with an analysis of a game I called Flip, but which is more commonly known as “Close the Box” (the paper appeared in INFORMS Transactions on Education). Both Tijms’ work and mine spend a fair amount of time discussing how well certain easy heuristics do relative to optimal decision making in simple games. Ideally, heuristics would get good, but not optimal solutions: that would make the game challenging as players tried to come up with better and better heuristics. For “Close the Box”, while the optimal decision was quite subtle, some simple heuristics got pretty close (perhaps too close to discern the difference). These games make good classroom demonstrations and even better mini-projects for summer schools and the like. Tijms’ paper was written for a journal aimed at students.

Tijms has also done the field a great service by making his software for applied probability available, which are good tools for education. Check it out at his web page.

Operations Research to Decide the Election?

Brian Borchers wrote me to comment on an article in the New York Times on how the US primaries are moving into a phase characterized by complicated resource allocation problems.  Up until now, it was easy:  candidates could spend their time in Iowa and New Hampshire (then Nevada and South Carolina) and not feel overstretched.   But with those primaries and caucuses now past, it gets more complicated.  Tuesday February 5 is “Super Tuesday” when 24 states are to choose their delegates to the national convention.  No candidate can reasonably campaign in all parts in all of these states.  But the rules on how delegates are chose make it necessary:

…the delegate rules for Democrats and for Republicans are different and, within each party, often vary from state to state. For example, the Republicans have some states where the statewide winner gets all the delegates, providing an obvious target for a candidate who might seem strong there. Among them are Missouri, New Jersey, New York and Utah.

But there are other states where the delegates are allocated by Congressional district, sometimes winner-take-all, and sometimes proportionally.

By contrast, Democrats eliminated the so-called winner-take-all rules. Instead, delegates are allocated depending on the percentage of vote each candidate gets in a Congressional district, under very expansive rules that, generally speaking, mean the candidates divide the trove evenly assuming they get more than 30 percent of the vote. There are also some delegates allocated statewide, again proportionately.

As Brian summarizes:

The various political campaigns have been building statistical models to predict voting outcomes in different congressional districts and using these as the basis for game theoretic decisions about how best to spend their limited funds and limited candidate time. The more traditional polling approach isn’t adequate, because it would be too expensive to do separate polls for every congressional district…

This is an interesting game involving things like parity (if there are 2 delegates for a district, then it is enough to get 34% of the vote to get 1;  with 3 candidates, 51% can earn you 2 delegates), resource allocation, timing (Rudy Giuliani chose to skip the initial rounds to concentrate on Florida and the Super Tuesday states, perhaps losing too much “momentum” in the process) and so on.  Since it has been a while since both the Democratic and Republican races have been this open, this should spur interest in this sort of modeling.  Punk Rock Operations Research has a posting on forecasting and polling, but that should only be the data for making better decisions. I would love to hear of any real operations research being used by the campaigns.

Simulation and the NHL playoffs

Growing up in Winnipeg, Canada (city motto: “At least it is a dry cold”), I had a short and rather forgettable hockey career (though getting a shutout as a goalie at 12 years old remains one of my favorite memories). I have been greatly outdone by my nephew Mathieu, who actually looks like he knows what he is doing when facing a shot. Since then, I follow hockey mainly through my local team, the Pittsburgh Penguins. I have been lucky to see a number of amazing players on the Penguins: Lemieux, Jagr, and “Sid the Kid” Crosby perhaps best of all. I keep hoping to provide the schedule for the NHL, which I think is the only thing that would impress my buddies back in Winnipeg.

Armann Ingolfsson of the University of Alberta has appeared in an article in the Toronto Sun on using simulation to predict who will make the playoffs this year. You can read a more detailed description of what he does in an article published in the INFORMS Transactions on Education in 2004. The main idea is to use simulation to generate 500 possible continuations of the regular season and to determine how often every team makes the playoffs. A critical feature of this is the ability to assign probabilities of wins for every game.

I am very happy to see that the Penguins currently have a 92% chance of making the playoffs. But the system doesn’t take into account that Crosby has a “high ankle sprain” keeping him out for two months.  That might knock off a percentage point or two.

Dash Optimization is acquired by Fair Isaac

Dash Optimization, makers of Xpress-MP (one of the two leading linear and integer programming solvers, along with ILOG’s CPLEX), has been acquired by Fair Isaac. Fair Isaac is an anaytical application company, known best for their credit rating systems (they do the FICO scores that companies use to determine whether to extend credit). This is an interesting move. On one hand, we have a premier OR company being acquired by a company that is not particularly known in the OR world (despite their analytical focus). Will Xpress-MP be forgotten, particularly as the credit market is troubled? Will Xpress-MP continue to be a available and supported for the broader world?

On the other hand, a very well-known company now has operations research software as a key aspect of their offerings. Will they be able to leverage this to extend the reach of OR to more firms? One nice line of their press release:

We will showcase the Dash products and introduce our clients to these capabilities at the forthcoming InterACT conferences in Vienna and San Francisco.

Having OR methods showcased by Fair Isaac could be a huge boon to the field. If companies think “Fair Isaac is investing in OR, maybe we should find out more about the field”, that would be great! But one potentially worrisome aspect of the press release:

With Dash part of Fair Isaac, we can do more to:

  • Incorporate an additional layer of analytic power into our industry-standard solutions
  • Create advanced custom solutions based on specific client needs
  • Develop innovative new solutions for large and complex business problems

How much will Fair Isaac keep within itself rather than provide core optimization products to the wider world?  The longer press release calms fears about the role Dash software will play:

Fair Isaac’s acquisition of Dash builds upon a longstanding partnership between the two firms.  Dash optimization technology is currently embedded in Fair Isaac’s Decision Optimizer, a software tool for achieving the smartest decision strategies given operational complexities, resource constraints and market uncertainties.

“Demand for sophisticated decision management tools is growing rapidly, and the addition of Dash optimization technology to our portfolio helps us to remain the market leader,” said Mark Greene, CEO of Fair Isaac.  “With their optimization capabilities and our own business rules management and predictive analytic solutions, Fair Isaac now has the industry’s most comprehensive decision management suite.”

Being part of a “decision management suite” seems good!

There is a discussion of this on the USENET group sci.opresearch. In the discussion, Bob Daniels, one of the founders of Dash Optimization, talks about the change:

The good news for Xpress-MP and its users is that ALL the Dash employees are
moving enthusiastically to Fair Isaac and the development budget is
considerably enhanced.

For those of you who don’t know, the name “Dash” comes from (Bob) Daniel and
(Robert) ASHford. Robert and I, and the team we have recruited, have been
developing Xpress-MP for over two decades and we weren’t about to sell our
“baby” to people who weren’t dedicated to Math Programming and Xpress-MP. Of
course, we the founders have moved to Fair Isaac too.

Best wishes to Bob Daniels and the rest of the Dash Optimization team in making this transition from a stand-alone company to part of a much bigger operation. And let’s hope that Xpress-MP continues to get better and better (and not just for the use of Fair Isaac!).

IFORS 2008: Time to get your abstracts in!

I just posted this in sci.op-research and comp.constraints

There is still time to get your abstracts in for IFORS 2008. IFORS
(International Federation of Operational Research Societies) is an
umbrella organization for national OR societies. Every three years,
IFORS holds a conference. Recent past conferences have been in
Edinburgh and Hawaii. In 2008, the conference will be held in
Sandton, South Africa. Sandton is a suburb of Johannesburg, and has
outstanding conference facilities (I am a VP of IFORS, so I visited
the site two years ago). The conference is shaping up to be a very
interesting one, with an emphasis on how OR enhances and links
communities. The dates of the conference are July 13-18 and all the
info you need is at http://www.ifors2008.org

In addition to a top-notch scientific program, Sandton offers some
great outings, before, after, or during (IFORS conferences have a
traditional Wednesday outing) the conference. I particularly enjoyed
visiting Soweto as well as the “Cradle of Humankind”. I also highly
recommend visiting Cape Town (though winter weather there can be a
little dicey: there is a reason all those ships are sunk at the
Cape!). Right now, I am checking out safaris (winter is a great
time, since the animals are easier both to find and to see).

Due to restrictions at the convention center in Sandton, we won’t be
able to keep accepting abstracts after January 31, so get your
abstracts in!

If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to write
me.

I really did enjoy the trip two years ago and am very much looking forward to this year’s conference.