PERSONALIZED MEDICINE: Revolution in healthcare
October 2017
Volume 44 • Number 5 ormstoday.informs.org
Simulation software on the right track • Winter Simulation Conference turns 50 • Biennial survey of simulation software
Also Inside: • What I wish I had known then • Analytics helps agriculture grow • Remembrances of Thomas Saaty
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Contents October 2017 | Volume 44, No. 5 | ormstoday.informs.org
28 On the Cover Reality show for modelers Omnipresent simulation software provides powerful tool for model building. Simulation Image © Simio LLC
F e at ure s 18
What I wish I had known then
22
Personalized medicine
28
Weathering complexity in agriculture
32
Winter Simulation Conference turns 50
By Harrison Schramm and Brian Morgan Professional lessons learned along the way: We stand on the shoulders of giants, but you can’t get there without a ladder.
de partm e nt s
6 8 10 14 16 57 58 60 72
Inside Story President’s Desk INFORMS in the News INFORMS Initiatives Issues in Education Literature Files Industry News Classifieds ORacle
By Douglas A. Samuelson Profile of Georgia Tech’s Eva Lee, whose O.R.-based research is helping drive a revolutionary improvement in healthcare.
By Dan Dyer Why O.R. will be the key to understanding the complex genetics that go into what we eat and how we’ll feed the world.
2 | ORMS Today
By Michael C. Fu and Thomas J. Schriber A personal look at the past, present and future of venerable conference as WSC prepares to celebrate a milestone. |
October 2017
10 ormstoday.informs.org
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October 2017 | Volume 44, No. 5 | ormstoday.informs.org
38
INFORMS Board of Directors
President Brian Denton, University of Michigan
President-Elect Nicholas Hall, Ohio State University
Past President Edward H. Kaplan, Yale University
Secretary Pinar Keskinocak, Georgia Tech
Treasurer Michael Fu, University of Maryland
Vice President-Meetings Ronald G. Askin, Arizona State University Vice President-Publications Jonathan F. Bard, University of Texas at Austin
Co m puting 38
Vice President- Russell Barton, Sections and Societies Pennsylvania State University
Vice President- Marco Luebbecke, Information Technology RWTH Aachen University
Vice President- Jonathan Owen, CAP, General Motors Practice Activities Vice President- Grace Lin, Asia University International Activities
Vice President-Membership Susan E. Martonosi, Professional Recognition Harvey Mudd College
Software survey: simulation By James J. Swain Reality is for sissies: Omnipresent software provides a powerful tool for model building that is only limited by imagination.
Vice President-Education Jill Hardin Wilson, Northwestern University Vice President-Marketing, Laura Albert, Communications and Outreach University of Wisconsin-Madison Vice President-Chapters/Fora Michael Johnson, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Editors of Other INFORMS Publications Decision Analysis Rakesh K. Sarin, University of California, Los Angeles
news
51 In Memoriam: Tom Saaty
51 Election Results
53 Guide to Exhibitors
55 Roundtable Retreat
56 People
56 Meetings
Editor’s Cut Anne G. Robinson, Verizon
Information Systems Research Alok Gupta, University of Minnesota I NFORMS Journal on Computing David Woodruff, University of California, Davis
51
INFORMS Transactions Jeroen Belien, KU Leuven on Education
Interfaces Michael F. Gorman, University of Dayton Management Science Teck-Hua Ho, National University of Singapore
Manufacturing & Service Christopher S. Tang, Operations Management University of California, Los Angeles
Marketing Science K. Sudhir, Yale University
Mathematics of Operations J. G. “Jim” Dai, Cornell University Research
Operations Research Stefanos Zenios, Stanford University
Organization Science Gautam Ahuja, University of Michigan
Service Science Paul P. Maglio, University of California, Merced Strategy Science Daniel A. Levinthal, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania Transportation Science Martin Savelsbergh, Georgia Institute of Technology
Tutorials in Operations J. Cole Smith, Clemson University Research
INFORMS Office • Phone: 1-800-4INFORMS
Executive Director Melissa Moore
Headquarters
4 | ORMS Today
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October 2017
INFORMS (Maryland) 5521 Research Park Dr., Suite 200 Catonsville, MD 21228 USA Tel.: 443.757.3500 Fax: 443.757.3515 E-mail: informs@informs.org
ormstoday.informs.org
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Inside Story
Peter Horner, editor
peter.horner@mail.informs.org
We still solve problems
OR/MS Today Advertising and Editorial Office Send all advertising submissions for OR/MS Today to: Lionheart Publishing Inc. 1635 Old41 Hwy, Suite 112-361, Kennesaw, GA 30152USA Tel.: 888.303.5639 • Fax: 770.432.6969
President
In late August, Hurricane Harvey unleased a devastating assault on Houston, site of the 2017 INFORMS Annual Meeting on Oct. 22-25. For some INFORMS staffers and volunteers, Harvey brought back memor ies of Hurricane Katrina, which wreaked havoc on New Orleans two months before the Crescent City was scheduled to host the 2005 INFORMS Annual Meeting. Along with sending its thoughts and prayers to those people directly impacted by Harvey, INFORMS again had to address the obvious question:What to do if Houston is unable to recover sufficiently in time to host the conference? The INFORMS Annual Meeting is a massive event, drawing more than 5,000 attendees from all over the world. Given its size and the number of meeting rooms and hotel rooms required, there aren’t many cities and convention facilities in the country that can accommodate such a conference. For this reason, the annual meeting is booked years in advance, and even if you could find an alternative site on short notice, rerouting 5,000 people who have purchased plane tickets and booked hotel rooms presents a logistical nightmare, even for an analytics-oriented organization such as INFORMS. INFORMS knows the dr ill. As with Katrina, INFORMS staff led by Executive Director Melissa Moore and volunteer conference chairperson Bill Klimack immediately got in touch with Houston officials, including convention and hotel managers, to monitor and assess the situation. At the same time, they began searching for a possible alternative site, just in case. In 2005, after Katrina, INFORMS’ then-meetings director Terry Cryan and then-conference chair Jim Cochran quickly found an alternative site, San Francisco, and the meeting moved 2,300 miles across the country seemingly without a hitch, as big and successful as ever. 6 | ORMS Today
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This year, after several tense days of watching and working on possible alternatives, INFORMS received word that downtown Houston had escaped its battle with Harvey relatively unscathed, and the 2017 Annual Meeting would go on as scheduled at the George R. Brown Convention Center, which was home to almost 10,000 refugees immediately following the hurricane. Ironically, the original theme of this year’s conference was, “Houston, we solve problems,” a riff on the city’s NASA Space Center and the near-tragic Apollo 13 flight that was miraculously saved by engineering ingenuity. Houston itself had a catastrophic problem with Hurricane Harvey, and by all accounts the city is doing an inspiring job of solving it with local, state and national help. Meanwhile, large areas of Florida and Georgia soon felt the wrath of Hurricane Irma, and Hurricane Maria leveled Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands. Recovery from such devastation is a long-term problem that demands a coordinated, efficient, universal response. Now is the time for O.R. folks involved in humanitarian relief logistics and associated disaster health-related issues to rise to the occasion. One such person is Georgia Tech professor Eva Lee, a longtime and often-decorated (Edelman Award winner and threetime finalist) member of INFORMS, whose recent research and application of personalized medicine and postdisaster healthcare issues is the subject of a profile on page 22. Ironically, Lee worked with Harris County (Houston area) and Puerto Rico in recent years on strategies to contain the Zika virus. Now she’s concerned about another outbreak of Zika in hurricane-ravaged areas, noting that flooding and pollution provide the “perfect breeding conditions” for the virus. ORMS
John Llewellyn, ext. 209 john.llewellyn@mail.informs.org
Editor Peter R. Horner peter.horner@mail.informs.org Tel.: 770.587.3172
Assistant Editor Donna Brooks
Contributing writers/editors Douglas Samuelson, John Toczek
Art Director Alan Brubaker, ext. 218 alan.brubaker@mail.informs.org
Online Projects Manager Patton McGinley, ext. 214 patton.mcginley@mail.informs.org
Assistant Online Projects Manager Leslie Proctor, ext. 228 leslie.proctor@mail.informs.org
Advertising Sales Managers Sharon Baker sharon.baker@mail.informs.org Tel.: 813-852-9942
Reprints Kelly Millwood, ext. 215 kelly.millwood@mail.informs.org
OR/MS Today Committee James Cochran, chairman
INFORMS Online http://www.informs.org
Lionheart Publishing Online http://www.orms-today.org OR/MS Today (ISSN 1085-1038) is published bimonthly by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). Canada Post International Publications Mail (Canadian Distribution) Sales Agreement No. 1220047. Deadlines for contributions: Manuscripts and news items should arrive no later than six weeks prior to the first day of the month of publication. Address correspondence to: Editor, OR/MS Today, 1635 Old 41 Hwy, Suite 112-361, Kennesaw, GA 30152. The opinions expressed in OR/MS Today are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of INFORMS, its officers, Lionheart Publishing Inc. or the editorial staff of OR/MS Today. Membership subscriptions for OR/MS Today are included in annual dues. INFORMS offers non-member subscriptions to institutions, the rate is $62 USA, $79 Canada & Mexico and $85 all other countries. Single copies can be purchased for $10.50 plus postage. Periodicals postage paid at Catonsville, MD, and additional mailing offices. Printed in the United States of America. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to OR/MS Today, INFORMS-Maryland Office, 5521 Research Park Dr., Suite 200, Catonsville, MD 21228. OR/MS Today copyright ©2017 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.
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President’s Desk
Brian Denton
INFORMS President president@informs.org
A rose by any other name …
In my last President’s Desk article, I referenced the classic Clint Eastwood western, “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.” This time I chose a more refined title based on a well-known Shakespeare quote, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” I chose this because recently there has been a lot of debate about what terms we use to describe what we do. “Operations research” and “management science” are among the longest standing and most recognized names to people within our field, but they garner little recognition outside our field. Some people advocate for new names such as “analytics” and “data science.” One thing is for certain; few topics are more likely to start an enthusiastic discussion among INFORMS members than to suggest changes to the name of our field. Rather than fuel the discussion, in this article I focus on what I believe is the root cause, which is a broadening of our field driven by increasing availability of data and the subsequent methodological challenges that have followed this trend. When I started on the INFORMS Board in 2012 – then as secretary of INFORMS – an effort was underway to define the term “analytics.” From that effort emerged the following definition: “Analytics is the scientific process of transforming data into insights for the purpose of making better decisions.” You may or may not like the exact wording of this definition, but I believe it recognizes some important considerations that are driving a lot of 8 | ORMS Today
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October 2017
When I started on the INFORMS Board in 2012 an effort was underway to define the term “analytics.”
change in our field. Over the last decade, we have seen rapidly increasing opportunities to use “real data” to improve decision-making. I believe there are at least two fundamental reasons for this. The first reason is the increasing availability of data due to advances in data collection, storage, curation, maintenance and access. The second reason is the growing awareness of methodological challenges of using observational data to improve decisions. Both of these are presenting opportunities to extend the frontiers of our field. The increasing availability of data has led to opportunities to create models in new contexts where data were not readily available before. New devices such as sensors, smartphones and RFID tags have lowered the economic barriers to data collection. At the same time, the abundance of data is creating the need to scale standard methods to work with much larger data sets than ever before. For example, the challenges of using standard techniques such as regression or clustering in big data contexts have driven innovation in the development of fast decomposition methods that can leverage multiple computers in parallel across distributed computing platforms to solve the optimization problems at the core of these approaches. As another example, when large data sets cannot load into memory, new sequential analysis approaches are needed for optimizing online decision-making. Similarly, the availability of high-dimensional data has
created demand for new optimization methods for variable selection in the training of predictive models. The methodological challenges of using observational data have not traditionally been a priority in our field. In scientific contexts, the importance of randomized, controlled trials to mitigate bias is well recognized. However, many new applications in our field use complex models that are parameterized using observational data. Observational data suffer from many problems including missing data, measurement error and many sources of bias that can negatively affect the decisions that are derived from operations research models, degrading the value they provide, or worse, making them cause more harm than good. These problems are rarely covered in operations research classes on topics such as optimization and stochastic models. In fact, many excellent textbooks on topics like these do not address the challenges of parameterizing models at all. This barrier to using operations research models in practice presents important opportunities for new research at the intersection of statistics and operations research. The above examples of research opportunities suggest the need for more ormstoday.informs.org
These opportunities include increased demand for educational programs at universities, more job opportunities for future academics and practitioners, and opportunities to increase the impact we have on society. statistics in our field. However, there is an equally strong case to be made for better incorporating operations research methods in statistics. Many statistical techniques rely on optimization, but often heuristics are the norm because of the historical challenge of obtaining optimal solutions. Recent advances in optimization and computing technology
CALL FOR ENTRIES A $15,000 Competition with a $10,000 First Prize
Application Deadline: October 27, 2017 KEY DATES FOR THE COMPETITION Friday, October 27, 2017 Deadline to provide a single pdf document containing a three-page summary of your achievement, and a cover page with a 60-word abstract, and the name, address, phone number, and affiliation of each author.
Monday, December 11, 2017 Finalists will be selected based on the summaries and the INFORMS Practice Section verification process.
Friday, February 9, 2018 Deadline for finalists to provide a full written paper.
Monday, April 16, 2018 Each finalist group will give an oral presentation of their work in a special session at the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics & O.R. in Baltimore, Maryland, April 15−17, 2018.
have opened the door to solving these problems to optimality, and in some cases, this is exposing significant errors in the use of commonly accepted heur istics [1]. Another area in which our field is contributing is causal inference. In the context of observational data, methods that match data elements by the similarity in covariates are needed to untangle cause and effect relationships [2]. The above examples are just the tip of the iceberg in recent advances related to data-driven models that are making our field more relevant than ever in many important industr ial and scientific contexts. I believe this is causing a fundamental shift in our
REFERENCES 1. Bertsimas, D., Kind, A., Mazumder, R., 2016, “Best Subset Selection via a Modern Optimization Lens,” The Annals of Statistics, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 813–852 DOI: 10.1214/15-AOS1388. 2. Nikolaev, A. G., Jacobson, S. H., Cho, W. K. T., Sauppe, J. J., and Sewell, E. C., 2013, “Balance Optimization Subset Selection (BOSS): An alternative approach for causal inference with observational data,” Operations Research, Vol. 61, No. 2, pp. 398-412.
field that is long overdue. Whether this calls for the use of new terms to descr ibe our field is up for debate. However, what is clear is that these changes are creating new opportunities for researchers and practitioners alike. These opportunities include increased demand for educational programs at universities, more job opportunities for future academics and practitioners, and opportunities to increase the impact we have on society. ORMS
ABOUT THE COMPETITION
The purpose of the competition is to bring forward, recognize, and reward outstanding examples of operations research, the management sciences, and advanced analytics in practice. The client organization that uses the winning work receives a prize citation; the authors of the winning work receive a cash award.
ENTRY REQUIREMENTS
Visit the website www.informs.org/edelmanaward for detailed information. Entries should report on a completed practical application and must describe results that had a significant, verifiable, and preferably quantifiable impact on the performance of the client organization. Finalist work will be published in the January-February 2019 issue of Interfaces. Any work you have done in recent years is eligible, unless it has previously been described by a Franz Edelman Award finalist. Previous publications of the work does not disqualify it. Anyone is eligible for the competition except a member of the judging panel.
SUBMISSIONS INFORMATION
Please visit: www.informs.org/Recognizing-Excellence/2018-Edelman-Award for details on the competition and to submit your application.
October 2017
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ORMS Today
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INFORMS in the News
Compiled by Ashley Kilgore
Hurricanes, workplace issues, clouds & clicks, thinking aCAP & more We’re more likely to lie when in a group, study says Honesty is an important quality – we want it in our relationships, with our children and from our banks. But even if you count yourself as a truthful person, a new study has found that you are still more likely to lie when in a group. This study, published in the INFORMS journal Management Science, found that even individuals who have a proven track record of honest behavior are no match for the potentially negative influences present in a group dynamic, especially when money is at stake. - Prima.co.uk, Sept. 11
Traffic jams during hurricane evacuations are entirely preventable Hani Mahmassani, INFORMS member and director of the Transportation Center at Northwestern University, discusses solutions to the bumper-tobumper traffic associated with nearly every hurricane evacuation effort, and why these solutions are often not implemented. - Quartz, Sept. 9
Following Harvey, meetings change course to give back Hurricane Harvey severely affected residents and businesses in Houston and other areas of southeast Texas. As meetings return to the region, many are using their time there to give back to the local community. INFORMS, which will hold its 2017 Annual Meeting in Houston next month, is also in the process of developing a coordinated effort to help its members and attendees make a positive impact in the community while attending the meeting. - Associations Now, Sept. 8
The surprising connection between cloudiness and clicks A recent study published in the 10 | ORMS Today
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October 2017
INFORMS journal Marketing Science shows that the effectiveness of ad content is directly impacted by the weather: on sunny days, consumers respond to positive tone ads, while on rainy days the opposite is true.
Can game theory help improve natural disaster response? Image © Tomas Griger | 123rf.com
INFORMS recognized with 2017 Web Award for Outstanding Achievement The INFORMS newly redesigned website has been recognized by the Web Marketing Association with the Association’s Standard of Excellence award, a 2017 Web Award for Outstanding Achievement.
Response to natural disasters like Harvey could be helped with game theory Following the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey in the Houston area, Anna Nagur ney, INFORMS member and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, discusses how game theory could help improve natural disaster response, in particular, better ensuring the right supplies are getting to those in need.
- Web Marketing Association, Sept. 8
- Chicago Tribune, Aug. 29
Analytics and agriculture: New online library shares how analytics is transforming the way we feed the world To illustrate how analytics is transforming agriculture around the world, the INFORMS Editor’s Cut: Feeding the World through Analytics highlights a wide range of content cultivated from INFORMS resources, including the latest scientific research featured in a number of INFORMS’ scholarly journals and member magazines, as well as video coverage of award-winning discoveries.
Distractions in your workplace (and how to overcome them) Many employers hide behind a common misconception: If they set big goals, employees will be pushed to exceed expectations and reach peak performance. These are commonly referred to as “stretch goals,” which are set beyond current capabilities. As a June study from the INFORMS journal Organization Science found, stretch goals actually under mine perfor mance for most organizations – 80 percent of participants at the companies surveyed had failed to reach their assigned stretch goal.
- OZY, Sept. 8
- INFORMS, Sept. 5
- Entrepreneur, Aug. 29
LinkedIn is nearly useless for actually getting a job Congrats on your 1,500 LinkedIn connections. But did they help you snag a job? Weak online connections on job sites and social networking sites are no match for “strong connections” – i.e., close friends and family members with whom you communicate at least once a month – when it comes to landing a gig, according to a new study in the INFORMS journal Management Science.
Without outlet stores, profits would decline 23% According to a recent study by Donald Ngwe of the Harvard Business School, “Why Outlet Stores Exist: Averting Cannibalization in Product Line Extensions,” which was published in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, outlet stores lift the sales and profits of the flagship brand, instead of cannibalizing sales and profits.
- New York Post, Sept. 1
- Fierce Retail, Aug. 28 ormstoday.informs.org
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INFORMS in the News
Three myths that need to die about women at work A new study appear ing in the INFORMS jour nal Organization Science helps dispel the rumor that women in the workplace are emotional and catty with other women when upset. The study showed the opposite to be true, that women who have strong relationships with their female counterparts experience less conflict in the workplace. - Chicago Tribune, Aug. 16
FirstNet for emergency communications: six questions answered Anna Nagurney, Ph.D., INFORMS member, professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, discusses current plans to expand the use of First Responder Network Authority, or FirstNet, which was created in the wake of 9/11 to help first responders communicate at emergency scenes. - The Conversation, Aug. 16
Missile countermeasures: North Korea’s threat, Israel’s experience B r o c k U n i ve r s i t y p r o f e s s o r and INFORMS member Michael Armstrong discusses the current threat of a missile attack by North Korea and provides insight as to how the U.S. may respond, by looking to how Israel is currently dealing with actual rocket attacks. - The Conversation, Aug. 15
CAP listed among the top 14 big data and data analytics certifications The INFORMS Certified Analytics Professional (CAP) credential is listed among the top data analytics certifications available today. - True Viral News, Aug. 11
Mo’ data, mo’ problems: Information systems wrestle with corporate knowledge loss As businesses explore new ways to make their data more accessible and prevent data loss, Linda Argote, INFORMS Fellow and professor at 12 | ORMS Today
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Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, discusses how information management systems can help employees access data, especially in the wake of older, seasoned employees leaving a company. - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Aug. 11
How do you fix a school-bus problem? Call MIT A tr io of MIT researchers and INFORMS member s – Dimitr is Bertsimas, Arthur Delarue and Sebastien Martin – recently tackled a tricky vehiclerouting problem when they set out to improve the efficiency of the Boston Public Schools bus system. - The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 11
Rainy weather dampens online shopping Today’s consumers can shop for almost anything without ever leaving home. So it may be surprising to learn that weather can influence their buying mood even when they are indoors. It’s long been known that weather affects temperament, and that good weather tends to bring people out of the house more than bad weather. It’s one reason why when an election outcome may hinge on voter turnout – candidates hope it doesn’t rain on Election Day.Yet, new research in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science suggests that even when shoppers stay inside – and browsing through ads on their smartphones – good weather will inspire them to buy. - Nexus Media, Aug. 7
Are you a CEO who wants a raise? Try going on TV If you’re the chief executive of a publicly traded company and want a raise, what should you do? (a) Keep breathing. (b) Get yourself on CNBC. The first answer will probably work, but getting some media attention will work better, especially if your company isn’t too large and its stock has been doing well. Those are the key findings of a new study in the INFORMS journal Organization Science of CEO pay and U.S. media
exposure conducted by a pair of American-trained business professors in Asia. - The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 2
Thinking aCAP Polly Mitchell-Guthrie, INFORMS member and director of Analytical Consulting Services at the University of North Carolina, shares with analytics and operations research students the importance of standing out to potential employers, and the important role an Associate Certified Analytics Professional (aCAP) certification can play in that. - Solver International, July 31
Explaining infrastructure spending Anna Nagurney, Ph.D., INFORMS member, professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Director of the Virtual Center of Supernetworks, explains the transportation and communications network needs of the U.S., from the Internet, to road systems and our cell phones. - BYU Radio, July 26
Study provides BRCA mutation carriers guidance for when surgery has greatest impact A new study in the INFORMS journal Decision Analysis provides insight to help enable physicians and patients with BRCA 1/2 gene mutations to make better-informed choices regarding surgeries to prevent breast and ovarian cancer. - eCancer News, July 20
Career advice: This is the best person to try to be at work, according to science While there is a g reat deal of contradictory advice for success in the workplace, setting manageable objectives and avoiding stretch goals will have a greater positive outcome, according to a study in the INFORMS journal Organization Science. ORMS - Mic.com, July 18 Ashley Kilgore is the public relations manager at INFORMS.
REFERENCES For links to all of the articles mentioned above, visit: http://bit.ly/2xapBLj.
ormstoday.informs.org
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INFORMS Initiatives
Dating analytics, CAP goes digital and more The analytics behind finding true love online via dating services Looking for love online? You are not alone. Nearly 50 percent of the American public knows someone who has used an online dating site and 5 percent of Americans who are married or in committed relationships today met their significant other online. But with so many different online dating platforms, how can users know which one will best meet their needs? According to a new study in the INFORMS journal Management Science, it all depends on if you are comfortable with rejection. If not, be prepared to pay more. The study,“Competing by Restricting Choice:The Case of Search Platforms,” explains that most sites, such as Match.com, compete by building the largest user base possible, and provide users with access to unlimited profiles on the platform. Others, such as eHarmony.com, pursue user growth with the same intensity, but allow users to only view and contact a limited number of others on the platform. However, despite the limited choice, eHarmony’s customers are willing to pay an average of 25 percent more than Match’s customers. The study authors, Hanna Halaburda of the Bank of Canada and New York University, Mikolaj Piskorksi of IMD Business School and PinarYildirim of the University of Pennsylvania, created a stylized model of online, heterosexual dating which found that increasing the number of potential matches has a positive effect due to larger choice, but also a negative effect due to competition between users of the same sex. Therefore, by offering its members access to a large number of profiles, Match’s users are also more likely to experience rejection, as each of their potential matches will have access to a larger number of options, increasing the competition among members. With access to only a limited number of profiles, eHarmony users are more likely to successfully and more rapidly identify a match with an14 | ORMS Today
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other user, who because of limited choice, is less likely to reject them. Ultimately, for online dating users who can tolerate rejection and aren’t bothered by a potentially longer timeframe to identify a match, Match.com provides much greater choice of options. However, for users who are looking to more quickly identify a potential mutual match, eHarmony limits competition that may result in rejection. CAP certification goes digital By Jan paul Miller In previous articles, we noted the benefits of CAP® certification, including market differentiation and networking. Now INFORMS has announced yet another benefit:The CAP program will be converting to digital certificates as of Oct. 1. Digital certificates? Yes. INFORMS has contracted with Accredible to host its digital certificate platform. Accredible will help our program issue, manage, track and verify digital certificates and badges. What does this mean for you? Each certificant will have a unique URL landing page. On this site will reside a facsimile of each certificant’s credential.The site can also hold other certificates issued by INFORMS’s continuing education program. Is it safe? The site offers bank-level encryption and blockchain verification, meaning it’s impossible for people to fake certificates or badges. Can the information be shared? Yes, certificate recipients can share their page on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.Your LinkedIn profile will stand out with the CAP logo and a link to your unique URL. Will the site replace the CAP online registry? Yes, the site will verify the authenticity of a CAP’s credentials with a white-labeled directory on the CAP website. Data is displayed and guaranteed that it is always accurate and up-to-date. Will certificates have the ability to be printed? Yes, you can download high-resolution PDFs for printing.
Re-certificants will also be able to have automatic renewal contingent on their fulfillment of their recertification requirements. The move to digital badging is one small step to help our credentialed cohort get the good news out about their achievements. Jan paul Miller (jpmiller@informs.org) is the certification manager at INFORMS.
Latest Editor’s Cut: ‘feeding the world through analytics’ As the world’s population continues to grow, the role of analytics and O.R. in developing effective new approaches to food production is becoming increasingly important. From more efficient distribution of water resources, to better management of meat and dairy production, to smarter crop cultivation, analytics is having a significant impact in the fight against global hunger. The latest installment in the INFORMS Editor’s Cut series, Feeding the World through Analytics, highlights a wide range of content cultivated from INFORMS resources, from our journals and member magazines, to videos of INFORMS award winners.This content serves as an excellent resource for researchers, students and industry. Robin Lougee, Global Research Industry Lead of Consumer Products & Agriculture with the IBM TJ. Watson Research Center, and Saurabh Bansal, Assistant Professor of Supply Chain Management with the Smeal College of Business at The Pennsylvania State University, serve as the volume editors for INFORMS Editor’s Cut: Feeding theWorld through Analytics, which is available at http://pubsonline. informs.org/editorscut/agribusiness. INFORMS new website awarded for outstanding achievement The INFORMS newly redesigned website has been recognized by the Web Marketing Association with the Associations Standard of Excellence Award, a 2017 Web Award for Outstanding Achievement. Launched earlier this year, the new www.informs.org tells the story of analytics and O.R. to the world while delivering a rich experience to INFORMS members. ORMS ormstoday.informs.org
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Issues in Education
By Lt. Col. Jesse Pietz, Capt. Drew Ives and Capt. Mark Williams
Air Force Academy’s constantly evolving O.R. program 2017 UPS Prize-winning program, characterized by its “Quick Turn Analysis” course, emphasizes the practical application of operations research. As a military service academy, the United States Air Force Academy has the unique role of developing future officers for its nation.The Academy’s mission is to “educate, train and inspire men and women to become officers of character motivated to lead the United States Air Force in service to our nation.” In the spirit of this mission, the 2017 UPS George D. Smith Prize-winning program prepares its graduates to effectively leverage operations research that enable rational, quantitatively-based decisions for the betterment of U.S. citizens.The program strives to develop well-prepared practitioners through a focus on real-world applications woven into a deliberate and ever-evolving transdisciplinary curriculum. The U.S. Air Force, established in 1947 as the youngest military service, was born out of a culture of innovation and reliance on technology to defend the nation better. Similarly, operations research, as a discipline, was born out of a need to better allocate scarce resources during World War II.As one might expect, operations research has been important to the Air Force since its inception and continues to be in today’s increasingly complex and resource constrained environment. In fact, the U.S. Air Force Academy is one of only a handful of undergraduate institutions to offer a degree in operations research, beginning shortly after the Academy’s founding in 1954. Like all military service academies, the Air Force Academy has an extremely competitive admissions process and a rigorous four-year program for those accepted. Cadets must balance their time among their demanding academic, athletic and military responsibilities. The Academy’s academic 16 | ORMS Today
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program is designed with the institution’s mission as well as the identity and culture of the Air Force in mind.The result is a diverse academic core requiring all cadets to be exposed to the arts and humanities in addition to a focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Every cadet graduates with a Bachelor of Science degree. More than 50 percent of all cadets, regardless of major, complete an introduction to operations research course. This combination of liberal arts and STEM produces well-rounded graduates capable of thinking critically to solve complex problems.As a result, cadets are some of the most gifted and determined students in the nation. Furthermore, operations research attracts the “best of the best” as it is one of the most technically challenging programs available. The operations research program is not an independent department. Rather, it is jointly administered by the departments of Computer Science, Economics, Management and Mathematical Sciences. This intentional design enables it to be interdisciplinary and collaborative in
nature, taking advantage of the expertise of each specialty to create a custom curriculum. A member of the faculty from each of the four departments manages the program and recommends any changes to the steering group, which is composed of the deans of each department and provides consistent and thoughtful strategic oversight. However, it is the makeup of the faculty that is the key to the program’s desire to continuously improve. More than 30 dedicated civilian and military faculty members implement the program with a focus on teaching; the student-to-faculty ratio at the Academy is a surprisingly low 8:1, ensuring all cadets are able to get the personal attention so essential for enrichment.Approximately one-third of the faculty is doctorate-holding civilians who provide long-term continuity and stability in the program as well as practical research. One-third of the faculty is senior military officers who hold a doctorate degree and have served multiple operational tours and overseas deployments, providing a strategic view to ensure the program is aligned with future Air Force needs. Finally, one-third of the faculty is junior military officers, who are recent master’s graduates from a variety of leading institutions that invigorates the curriculum by bringing the latest methods and software developments from their coursework as well as current problem applications from operational tours.The program exposes cadets to a breadth of areas including optimization, statistical modeling, computation and stochastic modeling.The curriculum is grounded in real-world operations research, which permeates all courses and culminates in a yearlong capstone project.
The U.S. Air Force Academy was the 2017 recipient of the UPS George D. Smith Prize presented by INFORMS. ormstoday.informs.org
Many courses at the Academy, not exclusively in the operations research program, provide practical projects that are indicative of the work they may do after graduating. These types of projects not only motivate cadets, but they provide invaluable insight into potential Air Force careers. A prime example of this in the operations research program is the Quick Turn Analysis course. Quick Turn Analysis began as a special topics course in 2009, developed by Lt. Col. Jeremy Noel, who had recently returned from a deployment. It quickly became a permanent course based on demand from the Air Force analytic community as well as positive feedback from students.This intense course is specifically focused on building the analytical skills needed by operations research analysts who sometimes have only a few tools available to them beyond the Microsoft Office suite, the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language and Google Earth with the Keyhole Markup Language (KML), yet they must be able to efficiently analyze and synthesize complex data. Significant emphasis is placed on ensuring students are able to professionally and persuasively communicate analysis results and insights to senior decision-makers through a wide variety of data presentation techniques, informative graphics and geospatial representations. The development and success of Quick Turn Analysis is characteristic of the program as a whole. It is inherently project-based, emphasizing the practical application of operations research. In addition, its evolutionary nature is the result of the unique makeup of the faculty.A senior military officer recognized the need while on an operational tour and designed a course to meet that need while rotating back to the faculty. Furthermore, rotating faculty constantly improve the content and projects based on their experience, ensuring it continues to be relevant.While Quick Turn Analysis provides valuable experience working on projects with limited time, the senior capstone provides the opportunity for cadets to learn research techniques and work on the complete lifecycle of a project. The culmination of the operations research program is the six-semester hour capstone course during a cadet’s final year.
The capstone enables a team of cadets to work on a project from problem definition and scope through the final delivery to the customer. Customers range from government agencies and non-profit organizations to private businesses from industry. The UPS George D. Smith Prize, presented by INFORMS, was created in the spirit of strengthening ties between institutions that graduate operations research practitioners and industry; the operations research program at the Academy won this prestigious award in 2017 in part as a result of its ability to exceed this intent through its yearlong capstone. Cadets not only deliver valid results to their client, but they often present at national conferences and compete for undergraduate research awards.The capstone provides cadets valuable experience to begin their careers, and their success is evident in the client testimonials and repeat customers. The U.S. Air Force has 650,000 employees with a $140 billion annual budget and a mission set that ranges
from air super ior ity and precision engagement to humanitarian relief and the dignified transfer of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice. The U.S. Air Force Academy is the largest supplier of operations research analysts in the Air Force. The operations research program is designed specifically to graduate officers capable of tackling compelling problems now! ORMS Lt. Col. Jesse Pietz (jesse.a.pietz.mil@mail. mil) is an operations research analyst at the United States Air Force Studies, Analyses and Assessments Directorate at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and formerly an associate professor in the Department of Management at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. Capt. Drew Ives (drew.ives.1@us.af.mil) is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics and Geosciences at the Academy. Capt. Mark Williams (mark.williams.88@ us.af.mil), the lead author on this article, is an instructor in the Department of Computer Science at the Academy.
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If you find yourself doing work that is both important and challenging, congratulations! Keep at that as long as you possibly can. Image Š rawpixel | 123rf.com
Forum
What I wish I had known then Professional lessons learned along the way: We stand on the shoulders of giants, but you cannot get there without a ladder.
By Harrison Schramm and Brian Morgan
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Background: This article came about from a series of discussions culminating in a one-off lecture with the same title. After receiving several requests for slides, we decided that it would make more sense to simply write an article. We are collectively at about the 30-year point in our careers as operations research professionals.We’d like to talk about a few professional lessons learned along the way. These are what we know now that we wish we had known then. Many of us are fortunate to have mentors who provide sage guidance at decision points. Whatever the decision, at least it is an informed one. In the field of operations research, many of us stand on the shoulders of giants, but you cannot get there without a ladder. Each subsection below is, in our minds, a rung on that ladder. Doing Work That Matters We recently had dinner with friends from grad school. As we went around the table catching up about our various clients and projects, it became clear that the level of satisfaction with our careers was measured by the impact that our work ormstoday.informs.org
was having on society. Discussion about the “eaches” of our jobs – salary, time off, environment – were conspicuously absent. It was readily apparent that we were measuring our happiness by how much the problems we work on matter. It was both the dinner party and authors’ firm opinion that there is no shortage of worthy problems, and there is plenty of talent, but the “matchmaking” can be quite difficult. If you find yourself doing work that is both important and challenging, congratulations! Keep at that as long as you possibly can and be sure to enter professional competitions such as the Edelman or Barchi Prize competitions – as appropriate – when the work is complete.Also, savor that moment, because it is our experience that if you can spend 15 percent of your time in that quadrant you should count yourself blessed. Work that Doesn’t Matter: Feeding Pigeons No matter how good you are, or how hard you try, you will find yourself occasionally in the “not challenging, not important” quadrant.This is a bad place because it has the possibility of becoming an absorbing state, and one you should leave as quickly as you possibly can. However, because few of us have the flexibility to completely choose our own research, sometimes we are stuck. We offer two possibilities to get out of that “rut.” First, work that is not interesting can be made interesting by being a test bed for a new programming language or a technique that we want to try out.This is like Mr. Miyagi in “The Karate Kid” using “wax on, wax off,” turning the mundane task of polishing the car to training for competitive karate.The second possibility is more nuanced: look for a problem that is important using a similar technique to your unimportant problem, and apply what you’ve learned. You will note we have purposefully not defined “important” or “challenging.” These are of course unique to each individual.There are, to us, at least three “keys” to doing work that matters: 1. an important question, 2. quality data, and 3. a proponent. We examine each in turn as follows: 1. An important question. It turns out that no matter how elegant a statistical model of washing our socks we build, it will never be top-tier work [1].This is because it is a question that nobody cares about. Much like a “difficulty score” in competitive diving, the first, key ingredient to having important work is to work on an important question. It is not always obvious what questions are important; much insight can be gained by asking the following:“What are the units on the answer?”This one question tends to snap the problem into focus. 2. Quality data. Everybody’s data is a mess; your organization is likely no better or worse than any other. No data set is perfect; everyone has a “thread” that
Figure 1: Your professional life. If you find yourself blessed to be in the top left quadrant (challenging and important) congratulations, stay there as long as you can and be sure to enter in the Edelman Competition. If you find yourself in the lower right corner, which we will all visit from time to time, get out of there fast!
someone could pull. However, having quality data – that the people subject to the decision will respect – is necessary and time should be devoted to it. 3. A proponent. This is perhaps the most important factor, and also the most elusive.A proponent is a human being, usually not an analyst, who has the authority to take the work you have done, turn to the people who run the system under test and say,“Go do what these folks just recommended.”
There is
no shortage of worthy
problems, and there is
Collaborations and Teamwork We cannot think of any worthwhile pursuit that is done totally alone. Even individual endurance sports – like the triathlon – leverage a team of coaches, doctors and support crew.The practice of advanced analytics is the same.There is so much to know about any particular sub-discipline that very few people possess domain-wide knowledge. Furthermore, even if one were a walking O.R. encyclopedia unto themselves, they would still need internal peer review to catch mistakes and avoid the intellectual “echo chamber.” This is why good teamwork, clear and concise communications, and meeting goals are so valued in colleagues.A good teammate is, well, a good teammate.
plenty of talent, but the “matchmaking” can be
quite difficult.
“All happy families are the same; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Tolstoy, “Anna Karenina” Similarly, all productive collaborations share a characteristic; that is, they are productive. All unsuccessful ones have unique reasons for failure. How should one measure the success of a collaboration? Successful collaborations are measured by what they accomplish. It simply doesn’t matter how painful the work is, how contentious the arguments among colleagues or how long the hours were [2]. If the partnership yields quality, impactful work, then it was successful, period. Great teammates bring out the best in October 2017
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Lessons Learned meeting client demands. Focused reflection and selfstudy help prevent intellectual atrophy.We’ll close this section by directing the readers’ attention to Figure 2. Do you remember when O.R. felt like piloting your own rocket ship while dressed as Prince Charming? If you never felt this way or cannot imaging feeling this way, you should probably choose a different field. The point is, we all felt like this at one time about our lives, our professions and hopefully the practice of applied mathematics. If that feeling has gone – and it wanes for all of us from time to time – do whatever you can to get it back.
Figure 2: Because we all want to be spacemen dressed up like princes on our very own rocket ships. This is how we all felt at one point; where did that feeling go?
you; what is a good teammate for one person might be an awful one for another.As a final point on teamwork, we recommend that you work with the best people who will have you, which is not the same as the best people. Why is that? A good collaboration is one where each member of the team contributes something unique. This is a central theme of the book “High Exposure” [3]. Specifically, the best teams are not necessarily made up of the best individual performers in each area. Good collaboration is possible between people of vastly different standing, because the more distinguished one becomes, the more “good ideas” they already have, the more they need a supply of fresh ideas to keep them going. Think of musicians who move from recording to producing – the Bee Gees and Dr. Dre both come to mind.At some point in our creative lives, our value moves from having new ideas to being able to get other people’s good ideas “done.” Focusing on What’s Important Focusing on what’s important is slightly different than doing work that matters, as previously described. Focusing on what’s important to us means taking some time each day and dedicating it to the state of the practice. The payoff for dedicated study of 30 minutes per day – in any discipline of operations research – is well worth the effort. Our skills are constantly eroding, and keeping them sharp is a part of the very definition of “professional.” It is easy to “lose one’s way” in the sense that we get focused on the day-to-day of making money and NOTES & REFERENCES 1. Discounting, of course, the possibility that the sock-washing model is a 1-to-1 correspondence with some other problem that we care deeply about. 2. Provided, of course, that no laws were broken! 3. Breashears, David, 1999, “High Exposure,” Simon and Schuster, New York.
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Synthesis: How to Become Influential We’re now ready to finish our work, so how does one become influential? Start by doing the three things mentioned above: Find important work, be a good teammate and keep focused on what’s important. These are all necessary, but not sufficient. To become influential, one must bring these qualities out in others, both in person and at a distance. Bringing qualities out in a person means to project these traits, through example and encouragement, in your practice or office among your colleagues and co-workers every day. Bringing out these qualities at a distance means writing. We consider the ability to effectively communicate both for internal use and publication as one of the most important ways to do so. Conclusion We are left wondering how will these thoughts change in 20 years? What will our future selves write that we don’t know today? We think that it will focus on professional challenges that we did not have to worry about during the majority of our careers to date, such as when to quit a job, how best to get new clients and how to choose which technologies to keep up with. These are important, they are not enough. Perhaps success will best be measured by all of us “seasoned” professionals – having climbed the ladder that our generation built and looking young analysts in the eye – by seeing how well the next generation surpassed us. ORMS Harrison Schramm, CAP, PStat, is a principal operations research analyst with CANA Advisors, based in Pacific Grove, Calif. He is active in the Analytics Section of INFORMS and is a past recipient of the MORS Richard H. Barchi Prize. His current interest is the intersection of data, models and policy. Brian Morgan, captain, U.S. Navy, is a senior lecturer in the Operations Research Department at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is a former E-2C Hawkeye Squadron Commander and recipient of the 2001 Commander, U.S. Naval Air Forces Pacific Naval Flight Officer of the Year Award. His research interests are largescale simulation and the analysis of critical infrastructure.
ormstoday.informs.org
What’s Your StORy? Eric Stephens, CAP Manager, Population Health Analytics Vanderbilt University Medical Center INFORMS member since 2013 What has been your best INFORMS experience thus far? I have had several wonderful experiences in my relatively short time as an INFORMS member, but perhaps the best thus far has been the opportunity to work as part of the core team to help develop the Analytics Body of Knowledge (ABOK). I was invited by the certification manager at INFORMS to become a member of this group, and found the experience to be incredibly stimulating and extremely rewardingespecially the two-day working session we had at the beginning of the project. Other great experiences include moderating a panel at the 2015 Healthcare conference in Nashville, working with Zahir Balaporia and many others as part of the Engagement with Organizations committee, and of course playing bass with Zahir, Glenn Wegryn, and other wonderful musicians (collectively referred to as "The Algorythmics") during a reception at the 2016 Annual Meeting! Why did you become a CAP and how has it helped your career? I first learned about the CAP program about a year or so after it began, and it just so happened that at the time I discovered it, I was looking for additional credentials that I thought might help my career, so the timing was perfect. I definitely feel that it played a role in my ability to land my job at Vanderbilt, but perhaps the most interesting consequence of obtaining the certification is the number of conversations that have resulted. Upon finding out that I'm a CAP, many people are very interested to learn more about it, which has given me the opportunity to be somewhat of an ambassador for the program (which I'm always happy to be!). What is the INFORMS journal you read the most? Why? By far my favorite is Interfaces due to its focus on application. Since I also teach, INFORMS Transactions on Education is another go-to of mine, especially for project ideas. Name three uses of a stapler that has no staples. 1) A hammer, 2) a doorstop, 3) a movie prop (painted red, of course‌a reference to Office Space, one of my all-time favorite movies!).
More questions for Eric? Ask him in the Open Forum on INFORMS Connect!
http://connect.informs.org
Image © illustrator | 123rf.com
Georgia Tech Professor Eva Lee discusses
Personalized medicine How OR/MS is helping a revolutionary improvement in healthcare.
By Douglas A. Samuelson
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Imagine a way to deliver medical care that takes into account genetics, personal lifestyles, different effects of medications on different people, medication interactions, nutrition and compliance with medical directives. Such a system could radically decrease preventable deaths in the medical system, most of which result from unusual reactions to properly prescribed and administered medications or from interactions of multiple medications [4, 12]. It could also make patients’ lives more pleasant by reducing uncomfortable side effects and guiding them to more effective rehabilitation. Wouldn’t that be exciting? And wouldn’t it be even more exciting if OR/MS could help make this happen? Well, it’s actually here. It’s called “personalized medicine,” and several researchers are testing the method and the computer software in clinical settings. One of the analysts in the forefront of this revolution is Eva Lee [2], a university professor and a prominent and often-honored member of INFORMS. Lee won an Edelman Award in 2007, along with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Institute, for her work on better placement, in ormstoday.informs.org
real time, of brachytherapy (embedded radiation sources) seeds to treat prostate cancer. She was a finalist/laureate for another Edelman Award in 2012, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for work on public health and emergency preparedness, and in 2015, with Grady Health System and Emory University School of Medicine for transforming the emergency department workflow and patient care. Lee serves on the White House panel that recommends responses to pandemics and other health emergencies. In short, she’s a recognized leader in applying OR/MS to healthcare. Recently, Lee, a professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare at Georgia Tech, has been working on software to track all aspects of a patient’s data and develop integrated medical recommendations. She now has preliminary results from several studies applying her software in clinical settings. Promising Early Results In a study with Columbia University, following 2,000 women with high genetic risk of breast cancer, lifestyle changes greatly reduced the risk. Only 11 of the study subjects actually developed cancer during the 10-year study. “We can find genomic, physiological and behavioral factors that act as triggers,” she says, “and those turn out to make a big difference. “We include all the biology of the cancer,” she adds. “Knowing how it is triggered, how it spreads and what biochemicals in the body support or resist its spread can provide vital guidance. And the biology is precisely about the individual.” For instance, in prostate adenoma, the most common form of prostate cancer, “the usual treatment plan is specifically designed for the state of the tumor but assumes the prostate is homogeneous,” she says. “But the tumor is distributed unevenly. We can zoom into key places and avoid the bladder if the tumor is not close to it, concentrating more radiation (or drug) where the cancer cells are.” Cervical cancers are typically about 35 percent fatal once they spread into surrounding tissue. In a clinical trial using personalized medicine, patients had “excellent outcomes and survival rate,” Lee says, “and we might have 5 percent failure in the longer term.We couldn’t achieve this without the personalized approach” [8, 9]. “Chronic diseases are typically not entirely genetic,” Lee continues. “We’re looking at diabetes. The problem is that there are multiple comorbidities – obesity, hypertension, heart disease.The numerous types of drugs taken make patients more prone to
adverse reactions to medications. And with diabetes and obesity, we really don’t know what’s in the foods we eat. There are lots of medications and hormones in meat.” It should also be noted that high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners are present in many foods, not just desserts, with numerous, poorly identified effects. As far as obesity is concerned, “We’ve identified a gene or two, but we don’t know which came first, the gene or the other factors in the body,” Lee says. For instance, there are known changes in the composition of the large population of bacteria in the intestine that are essential to digesting food. Foods appear to influence the growth of some strains of these bacteria. At least one virus, Adenovirus 36, is apparently associated with obesity [12]. And then there are behavioral factors. “I have a colleague who lost 45 pounds just by walking 10 miles a day, with no change of diet,” Lee notes. “It’s sometimes quite easy to produce a big effect by a change of lifestyle.”
Eva Lee
describes mental health as “the
most dangerous diseases we’re facing.”
Infectious Diseases Of course, personalized medicine applies to acute infectious diseases. “We worked with a major pharmaceutical manufacturer on a malaria vaccine,” Lee recounts. “Unfortunately, it was only effective for about 23 percent of the subjects. I wouldn’t say it’s useless, just highly personalized, and we need to know more about the other factors.” Analyzing genomic information, Lee and her vaccinology colleagues identified which patients would benefit from it and how it would benefit them. The result is very important to world-wide trials set for next year [1, 5]. Now, Lee and her team are trying to design next-generation medications tailored to individuals [11]. “We had better luck advising on containing Zika,” Lee reports. “My team has had pretty good predictions for Puerto Rico on disease trend after sufficient cases were reported. We recommended some containment strategies, and they worked pretty well through the summer. But local public health declared success prematurely. It wasn’t totally contained when they thought it was. We did have a lot of pregnant women getting tested, and those numbers are reliable. It is a serious health burden.” Just having people paying attention to the threat helped, but, according to Lee, the virus maybe making a comeback around Florida and possibly Houston. “It’s hard to control because of the amount of summer travel,” Lee says. And that was before hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria devastated the Houston area, southern October 2017
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Personalized Medicine
Research indicates that 20 percent to 30 percent of college students are depressed. Image © Cathy Yeulet | 123rf.com
Florida, and Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands, respectively. Refugee movements and relocations to temporary shelter, contamination of water and breakdowns of public services are highly likely to multiply the difficulties. “The flood and the extreme damp and polluted environment make for the perfect breeding conditions.” Lee says of the virus.“We worked with Harris County (Houston area) since May 2016. They did an excellent job. Now, this is a true challenge as they race to eliminate the mosquitos and puddle of water where the eggs are laid.” Puerto Rico suffered unprecedented destruction in terms of flooding, sewage and chemical waste in the wake of Hurricane Maria. “It worries me greatly about the level of health issues, short term and long term,” Lee states. Allergies greatly complicate predictions of response to infection, Lee explains, adding that people have very different capabilities and responses, which makes diagnosis difficult. Is it an allergy? A cold? Flu? Early anthrax symptom? Allergies affect the ability of the immune system to repel infections. Sensitivities to medication vary widely. Is there a genetic component to reactions to infection? For example, the tendency to have a depressive reaction 24 | ORMS Today
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to flu is well known, and it may be because it had survival value during historic flu epidemics [12]. Mental Health Professor Lee describes mental health as “the most dangerous diseases we’re facing,” adding that 20 percent to 30 percent of college students are depressed. “These are educated, capable people,” she says. “Some of them may be able to get medical help and receive prescribed medication to control their mood. There aren’t enough psychiatrists in universities to help them.We don’t call it endemic because of social stigma, and we don’t call it pandemic because we don’t know how to treat it. “We know depression is highly heritable,” Lee continues. “The mother, in particular, affects the child both genetically and behaviorally. But the strong stigma makes it hard to get people to seek treatment. If kids can get help, they can be helped to feel better. This is why patient privacy is so important; people won’t talk about it, so they don’t get the right treatment.” Social media appears to aggravate the problem. “People make comparisons to others and feel disappointed,” Lee observes. “It’s natural for us to be affected by what others say and what they have. It ormstoday.informs.org
NATION AL TER IN
NFERENCE CO
18 INFORM 20 S
is human-nature. It’s like an advertisement.The majority of people, perhaps 70 percent, respond to ads. Maybe as few as 1 percent are never affected. What makes them resilient? We don’t know. We need to. This will be very useful to mitigate the social influences on depression.” Mental illness is also related to terrorism, as many of the attacks are “lone wolf” events, often perpetrated by people who have recently discontinued strong psychotropic medications without anyone monitoring them. Clearly, social media plays a role here, too, as many of the events involve little communication that can be detected by law enforcement. Other contributing factors are stigma and the necessity of having care available quickly for those who need it – and not just for mental illness. As detailed in Homeland Security Presidential Directive-21, community resilience and individual resilience are important elements of national health security, and, according to Lee, the topic of resilience deserves more coverage in public debate and media commentary about healthcare. Speaking of resilience, Professor Lee says she and her colleagues have had some successful results with Alzheimer’s, making comparisons of brain physical, chemistry and cognitive tasks performance between
J u ne 1 7 – 2 0
patients and people without the disease. “The content of the information they [patients] process seems to play an important role,” she says [3,7].
The absence
The Analytics Component How revolutionary is personalized medicine? “We can’t keep saying we have missing data problems,” Lee says. “Missing data remains a challenge, but we can minimize its effects by tailoring it to the specific problems at hand. Our models make good enough use of whatever data we do have to yield good predictions that indicate good or bad courses of treatment. Now the data problem is that everyone’s measurement is different. People are not homogeneous.” According to Lee, we’re still learning how to take differences among people into account in assessing which effects of treatment and lifestyle have significant effects on outcomes. “Imputation is no longer all that useful,” she says. “And in electronic medical records, we can’t worry so much about what’s missing, because assessing the quality and completeness of the information we have is all part of the data capture routine.” That is, the absence of some data can be quite informative, such as blood tests not performed
of
some data can be
quite informative, such as
blood tests not performed.
2018 INFORMS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE June 17–20 | Taipei, Taiwan
A Better World Through O.R., Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence... Join your colleagues and INFORMS in this vibrant setting where academic & industry leaders from Asia, Europe, the U.S., and across the globe will gather to share their latest research & advances in the growing relationship between analytics and operations research (O.R.) and artificial intelligence (AI). About the Conference: Among the hottest topics in the world today is O.R., Analytics, and AI. With the rapid adoption of new technologies including mobile computing, cloud computing, social networks, and the Internet of Things, vast amounts of various types of data are being generated rapidly, and are being tightly integrated with the industry decision-making processes. Why You Should Attend: The 2018 INFORMS International Conference in Taipei offers participants a full range of presentations, panels, and interactive sessions that explore emerging technology and applications in AI including agriculture, industry, healthcare, and retail.
Abstract Submission Deadline: February 28, 2018
http://meetings.informs.org/2018international
October 2017
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Personalized Medicine because the patient was unconscious and could not give consent. Unconsciousness is very different than choosing not to comply. Professor Lee and her team are now testing out their first “personalized” models integrating pharmacokinetics (the way in which medications travel through the body and affect it) and pharmacodynamics (the way the body affects the medications). In medical-speak short form, such models are called “PK-PD” models. “This model is really powerful in terms of prediction. It connects the individual’s response to the actual dosage of drug taken,” Lee explains. “Testing out behavior and compliance or noncompliance alone is not sufficient; the model tells us so much more. The response (of the body) is actually reflecting and capturing the behavior of how the patient takes his or her drug. The model is forgiving and gives good estimates.” Using the PK-PD relationship she establishes for each patient, Lee optimizes the treatment plan specifically to the individual.The results, implemented at REFERENCES 1. Jen Christensen, CNN report, 2017, “First malaria vaccine to be widely tested in Africa next year,” www.cnn.com/2017/04/24/health/malaria-vaccine-trial-who/index.html, April 24. 2. Peter Horner, 2015, “The Most Interesting Person in the (O.R.) World,” OR/MS Today, April. 3. W.T. Hu, K. Watts, P. Tailor, T. Nguyen, J. Howell, R. Lee, N. Seyfried, M. Gearing, C, Hales, A. Levey, J. Lah and E.K. Lee, 2016,” CSF complement 3 and factor H are staging biomarkers in Alzheimer’s disease,” Alzheimer’s Disease Neuro-Imaging Initiative, Acta Neuropathologica Communications, Vol. 4, No. 1:14. doi: 10.1186/s40478-016-0277-8. 4. Brent James and Douglas A. Samuelson, 2013, “Change We Can Live With: Building the Data Capabilities and Analytics to Make Critical Improvements in Patient Safety and Wellness,” OR/MS Today, June. 5. Dmitri Kazmin, Helder I. Nakaya, Eva K. Lee, et al., 2017, “Systems analysis of protective immune responses to RTS, S malaria vaccination in humans,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 114, No.9, pp. 2,425–2,430. 6. Eva K. Lee, Amanda F. Mejia, Tal Senior and James Jose, 2010, “Improving patient safety through medical alert management: an automated decision tool to reduce alert fatigue,” American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium Proceedings, pp. 417-421. 7. Eva K. Lee, T.L. Wu, F. Goldstein and A. Levey, 2012, “Predictive model for early detection of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease,” Optimization and Data Analysis in Biomedical Informatics, Fields Institute Communications, Vol. 63, pp. 83-97. 8. Eva K. Lee, Fan Yuan, Alistair Templeton, Rui Yao, Krystyna Kiel and James C.H. Chu, 2013, “Biological planning for high-dose rate brachytherapy: Application to cervical cancer treatment,” Interfaces, The Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice, No. 43, No. 5, pp. 462-476. 9. Eva K. Lee, Yu Cao, Fan Yuan, Alistair Templeton, Rui Yao, James C.H. Chu, 2016, “Optimizing tumor control probability in PET-guided radiation therapy treatment – Application to HDR cervical cancer,” 58th annual meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine. 10. Eva K. Lee, Xin Wei, Fran Baker, Michael Wright and Alexander Quarshie, 2017, “OutcomeDriven Personalized Treatment Design for Managing Diabetes,” to appear in Interfaces Wagner Prize Issue 2018. 11. Helder I. Nakaya, Thomas Hagan, M. Kwissad, E.K. Lee, et al., 2015, “Systems analysis of immunity to influenza vaccination across multiple years and in diverse populations reveals shared molecular signatures,” Immunity, Vol. 43, No. 6, pp.1186-1198, December. 12. Douglas A. Samuelson, 2008, “Can We Detect ‘The Coming Plague’?: How Emerging Health Threats Are Sneaking Up on Us,” OR/MS Today, June. 13. fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/hspd-21.htm, 2007. 14. www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/ISC-PPD-21-Implementation-WhitePaper-2015-508.pdf.
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Grady Health Systems based in Atlanta, are remarkable. “Doctors spend less time experimenting with which drug type and dosing should be used,” Lee says.“The method also enables doctors to use higher doses early without great concern about adverse effects, thereby getting better outcomes, shortening the course of treatment and lowering the overall dose of medication.The patients maintain good, healthy blood glucose level.As an extra bonus, the cost and amount of drug used is lower. Cost is not in our equation, but we always use less resource when we optimize.” She adds that, as far as she and her colleagues know, this was the first successful incorporation of personalized patient data into a mathematical predictive model directing treatment [10]. “This kind of predictive analytics, integrating PK and PD on a patient-by-patient level, has been an aspiration of medical practice for nearly a century,” she stresses. “But now we’re actually doing it, with real patients, with good results.This is a major breakthrough.” As their work continues, Lee and her colleagues are eagerly awaiting the response of the medical practice community. “OR/MS supports this personalized medicine approach because we’re used to taking advantage of whatever data streams we have,” Lee adds.“O.R. is not the same as data science. O.R. people are not used to collecting data. Some of us do, but we don’t just collect data. Collecting data and data management are part of data science, but we do more.We build (mathematical) models from data and reach solutions.We influence decisions, policies, strategies, many layers of impact.The key is to implement O.R. on actual patients in the clinical setting, with the O.R. analysts embedded within the medical care team.” Conclusion Personalized medicine, using OR/MS models to tailor medical guidance and treatment to highly specific individual characteristics of patients, is a revolutionary improvement in medical and preventive care. Models can now integrate effects of medications, interactions, patients’ behavior, genetics, diet and other factors to develop recommendations for the most effective course of action. There is a tremendous potential benefit here for all of mankind, and a major opportunity for OR/MS analysts who can work closely within medical teams in clinical settings. ORMS Douglas A. Samuelson, D.Sc., is president and chief scientist of InfoLogix, Inc., a small R&D and consulting company in Annandale, Va. In recent years, he has specialized mostly in healthcare outcomes and policy, emergency preparedness and response, and various defense and national security issues, especially cybersecurity. He is a contributing editor and columnist for OR/MS Today.
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Weathering complexity in agriculture O.R. will be the key to understanding the complex genetics that go into what we eat.
By Dan Dyer
The weather has certainly been on everyone’s mind recently. When you are in farming, the weather is on your mind all the time. Farmers don’t take a break from thinking about it, honestly. That’s because a late spring freeze can kill an emerging crop. If that happens, the replanting cost could reach $100,000 on an average-sized farm. Or, an extended mid-summer dry period can rob 20 percent or more from the yield potential for a crop. For a farmer, that loss can easily be the difference between profit and loss for the entire year. We all know local weather is a complex system, and our best predictive abilities have wide margins of error. In agriculture, the situation is even more challenging. This is because crop performance is the result of the interaction of two complex systems: environment and genetics. Consider for a moment the complexity of modern medicine.The advances that have been made in understanding disease processes, and then being able to manage disease treatment, prevention and health maintenance, is among the great accomplishments of our lifetime. Much of these advances in diagnostics, biology, molecular biology and biochemistry can be leveraged directly into agriculture. But, in fact, humans are relatively simple.The genetic diversity in the corn crop alone is more than the genetic diversity among all humans. And that is only one of the crops we work with and certainly not the most complex.The real difference is we humans control the environment we live in.We can adapt our behavior.We
When you are in farming, the weather is on your mind all the time.
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put on a coat when it is cold.We have air conditioning when it is too hot. Crops, however, live in the ambient environment. And they have evolved elaborate mechanisms to alter their physiology and biochemistry in response to environmental cues. We are all familiar with the complexity of the environment. We can understand the engines of weather variation such as ocean currents, interacting air masses, solar flux and reflectivity. But the interactions among these components are so complex that the system retains a significant degree of chaos, which we can only deal with in probabilities, even within a single day. In agriculture, we are concerned with the pattern of weather throughout the growing season. Extremes in temperature or rainfall – too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet – cause critical fluctuations in crop yields. Until recently, we thought the nature of genetics was pretty simple: four nucleotides, arranged in each species in a fixed order, grouped into a fixed number of chromosomes. Changes in the sequence happened occasionally – called mutations – that sometimes changed the characteristic of the individual. These were passed along from each parent to their child. Wonderful, predictable, clear and relatively simple. Boy, were we wrong. There are four nucleotides. Most species have a fixed number of chromosomes, but not all. In a sugarcane field, you can find individuals that vary widely in the number of chromosomes. Genes don’t act on their own.There are genes that control groups
Source: Sygenta
Figure 1: Just how important is the impact of environment on agriculture? Figure 1 shows the corn grain production variation over the last five years in North America. Acreage remained roughly constant – the primary source of variation was weather. The production drop in 2012 was valued at $15 billion. One crop, one region, one year with an impact of $15 billion. Chart Source: www.FAO.org/statistics
of other genes.There are mutations. But there are also systems that fix them. And, sometimes, those systems cause new mutations. And the genes aren’t all in the same order. In fact, different individuals of the same species don’t always have the same number of genes at all. Some are missing or duplicated or moved to another place on the chromosome, or even a different chromosome. Fascinating and complex. You can start to imagine the complexity when these two systems, each complex on their own, interact. Until recently, understanding this has been beyond the limits of technology. We didn’t have the necessary data or the computing scale. But now we are entering the age of exploration for agricultural data analytics. The data streams are massive. We have weather data collected at hundreds of locations, with nearly continuous monitoring of temperate, solar flux, wind speed and rainfall. Harvest machines record yields as they progress through the field. We have digital measurements and images from drones and satellites. We produce the molecular genetic fingerprint for hundreds of thousands of new crop varieties every year. It is a data resource that was only a dream a decade ago. And now, we have engaged a wide global community of collaborators to explore novel approaches to deriving the critical insights from this extraordinary data resource. Figure 2 shows a simple example. Being more accurate in matching the genetics to the environment brings enormous social and economic benefits, even in this simple example of datadriven product placement decisions. But this example October 2017
Genes don’t act on
their own. There are
genes that control groups of other genes. There are
mutations. But there
are also systems that
fix them.
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Analytics & Agriculture
IMPROVED SOYBEAN YIELD FROM PRECISION PLACEMENT
12%
YIELD IMPROVEMENT from precision placement
>$4.4B potential INCREMENTAL PROFIT for the US soybean farmer based on precision placement Source: ENGage v2.0 R&D Performance Database –S32-L8 performance vs. All checks, 5 year data from 2012-16
S32-L8 6 4 2 0 -2
National Data
<50 Bu./Ac Yield Environments
With Low AWC Soils
Low Precipitation or High Drought
Product placement based on soil, genetics, environment, management practices
CLASSIFICATION:CONFIDENTIAL Photos are either the property of Syngentaor used under agreement. ©2017 Syngenta. The Alliance Frame, the Purpose Icon and the Syngenta logo are trademarks of a Syngenta Group Company.
Figure 2: In ordinary conditions, this soybean variety is comparable to all others in general. When rainfall is scarce, however, it really stands out. Placing the variety in more drought prone soils and locations will really benefit the grower. How much does this really matter? A five bushel/ acre increase in soybean yield in the United States could serve the protein needs of 35 million people. A 5 percent increase in corn yield in the United States could meet the calorie requirements of 50 million people. Given that there will be an additional 5 billion people to feed in 50 years, maximizing the efficiency of production is essential. Source: Syngenta
only touches the surface. Now we are exploring the mechanisms of differential responses at the genetic level, asking such questions as:What are the genes in this soybean variety which enable it to perform better under drought than others? What do those genes do, and how are they controlled? We all know that different plants flower at different times during the season. Gardeners will recognize that different varieties of the same species also flower at different times.You can arrange a tulip garden, for instance, with varieties that will flower in succession for a long season of blooms. This is actually an important characteristic in agriculture. In most seasons, it gets hotter and drier as the season progresses. Hot, dry weather at flowering can be very detrimental to yield. For vegetable growers, predictable time to flowering is especially important, as they target plantings to specific market periods. But why do different varieties flower differently? In most plants, temperature triggers flowering – both the accumulated heat during the growth of the plant, and extreme high or low temperatures. For many plants, day length also triggers flowering. But, different varieties respond differently. One variety may be induced to flowering when the day length is less than 14 hours, but for another it may have to be shorter 30 | ORMS Today
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than 13 hours, and for a third, day length may not be a trigger at all.As we begin to understand the molecular biology that controls these responses, we can develop varieties with more stable and predictable flowering, despite environmental variation, and develop varieties better tuned to flower under the most ideal conditions for crop productivity. Application of operations research and advanced data analytics have already had a profound impact on the efficiency of our breeding and product development programs. Now those same disciplines are being used to build models of how genes and environment interact. This is completely changing the way the crops of the future will be designed and developed, with data-driven insights forming a foundation to feed the future population in an environmentally sustainable way. ORMS Dan Dyer, head of seeds development at Syngenta, holds a Ph.D. in agronomy and crop science. His Syngenta group develops new crop genetics to promote sustainable agricultural productivity. Throughout his 35-year career, Dyer has been responsible for leading highly dispersed, global innovation teams. Beyond the application of technology to meeting the global need for food security, his interests lie within how the mind works, how ideas are formed and innovation evolves, the nature of effective communication, and why people come to believe what they do.
ormstoday.informs.org
Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Your StORy? Trilce Encarnacion PhD Candidate in Transportation Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute INFORMS member since 2015 What prompted you to enter this field? Why? I have always loved math, and while I was in high school I learned to code, so I naturally enrolled in a systems engineering program. In college, I took a data mining class and I fell in love with the challenge and the amazing and sometimes surprising results that you could discover from almost any data set. Now in a PhD program, I have been able to combine my research to solve transportation problems. What do you think are the most significant barriers for women/minorities in OR/MS careers? How could they be remedied? This is such a complex topic, one that I feel very passionate about, but cannot do justice in just one paragraph. Studies exploring the obstacles to female leadership abound, many citing biases from current leaders and higher standards. In my personal experience, I can attest to the effect that a lack of role models can have in forming a young person's idea of what professional life looks like. It took me longer than my peers to realize that I wanted to pursue a PhD, because growing up in the Dominican Republic, there were not many PhDs that I could look up to. When I was an undergraduate, getting an MS seemed like the highest reasonable degree. I think that my experience can be translated to many women and minorities who do not have access to role models growing up. I think that one way we can improve things is to redouble efforts to engage these groups in middle and high school, and show students all the possibilities that these careers can offer. What advice do you have for new students entering this field? The key advice would be to become involved in the professional society/section that best matches your interests, and raise your hand at meetings to volunteer. Attend business meetings at the INFORMS Annual Meeting and get involved. You get to meet amazing people and make a difference. If we were sitting here a year from now celebrating what a great year it's been for you, what would we be celebrating? I would have a couple of papers accepted that are currently under review, and I would be preparing to defend my dissertation very soon! More questions for Trilce? Ask her in the Open Forum on INFORMS Connect!
http://connect.informs.org
DECEMBER 3–6, 2017
The Winter Simulation Conference turns 50 A personal look at the past, present and future of the venerable conference as WSC prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary in Las Vegas on Dec. 3-6. By Michael C. Fu and Thomas J. Schriber 32 | ORMS Today
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October 2017
The Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) is an annual conference that promotes itself as “the premier international forum for disseminating recent advances in the field of system simulation.” WSC’s main focus has been on stochastic discrete-event simulation, but continuous (possibly deterministic, driven by differential equations, e.g., system dynamics) and combined discrete-continuous simulation can also be found, and the past decade has seen agent-based simulation take a regular and prominent role. For the authors, it is by far our favorite professional conference, a meeting we look forward to each year and would not want to miss (with a couple of exotic exceptions for one of us, soon to be revealed). It is held annually in the month of December (hence the “Winter” name, although technically it no longer actually takes place in winter, i.e., after the winter solstice or the official first day of winter; and the very first conference actually took place in mid-November, but more on that shortly), and it has ormstoday.informs.org
the following interesting characteristics, many of which are quite unique to WSC: 1. The composition of attendees is split fairly evenly among academics, practitioners and government (mainly military), giving the meeting a flavor not found in many other conferences. This diversity also is reflected in the papers presented, which are split between methodology and application, as well as between research theory and industry (including government) practice. 2. The location of the meeting rotates in a three-year cycle from the Washington, D.C., area to the South and to the West. Because it is held in December, the north is avoided, even though four of the first five meetings were held in New York City, to which it has never returned since. In fact, the first WSC actually using the “winter” moniker was the last one held in New York. This three-year cycle began in 1981, but like every good tradition was temporarily broken in 2012 to allow for the first international venue in Berlin (where the attendees were treated to a truly winter white blanket), to be encored in 2018 when WSC goes to Sweden (and to Singapore several years after that). Also, in 2010, the “D.C.” turn was held in Baltimore, ostensibly due to an attempt at cost savings, since D.C. had gotten quite expensive in terms of hotel rates. In any case, the return to the D.C. area allows some of us (and especially those in the federal government/military) to save on travel funds every third year. 3. A refereed proceedings is published every year. Starting in 2000, it became freely available on the WSC website (wintersim.org), and issues are now available all the way back to 1968 (the first meeting that had actual papers), although the proceedings articles prior to 1996 are scanned PDF files and not text searchable. Best paper awards are now given annually by both the INFORMS and ACM simulation specialty subgroups.
Winter Simulation Conference 2017 The Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) has been the premier international forum for disseminating recent advances in the field of systems simulation for 50 years. The longest-running conference devoted to simulation as a discipline, this year’s WSC will be held in Las Vegas at the Red Rock Casino Resort & Spa from Dec. 3-6. The theme for WSC 2017 is “WSC Turns 50: Simulation Everywhere!” WSC is designed for professionals and academics from all backgrounds and across a broad range of interests. Academic tracks include analysis methodology, modeling methodology, simulation optimization, agent-based simulation and hybrid simulations. Applied uses of simulation include social and behavioral simulation, defense and security, modeling and analysis of semiconductor manufacturing (MASM), healthcare applications, logistics, manufacturing applications, gaming, project management, and environmental and sustainability applications. Additionally, WSC features introductory and advanced tutorials, simulation education, case studies, Ph.D. colloquia, poster sessions, and an extensive group of exhibitors and vendor tutorials. In addition to the normal lineup of great tracks and speakers, WSC 2017 will also have a special history of simulation track. WSC 2017 is sponsored by ACM/SIGSIM, IISE, INFORMS-SIM and SCS, with Technical Co-Sponsorship from ASA, ASIM, IEEE/ SMC and NIST. Early registration ends Nov. 3. Register now at w w w. wintersim.org. ORMS
Las Vegas will play host to WSC 2017 in December. Source: Thinkstock October 2017
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WSC Turns 50 4. Three regular tutorial tracks – one at an introductory level, another at an advanced level and a third focusing on specific software (including vendor workshops all day on the Sunday immediately preceding the start of the conference). The first and last are targeted at those new to the field, and thus are ideal both for practitioners wishing to apply the modeling and analysis techniques and software implementations to their real-world problems and for graduate students wishing to do the same in their research. The second track is aimed primarily at more seasoned researchers, including graduate students. Tutorials have been an integral feature of WSC from its early days, and their success led to the adoption of tutorials into the INFORMS Annual Meeting program. 5. A Ph.D. colloquium is held the Sunday afternoon immediately preceding the start of
the conference on Monday. A best paper award also is given here. 6. A popular lunchtime special session called the “Titans of Simulation,” which features nuggets of wisdom from leaders with vast experience in the simulation research community. This year’s two Titans are pioneers of the field who have also experienced all five decades of WSC: Robert G. Sargent, professor emeritus, Syracuse University; and Bernard P. Zeigler, professor emeritus, electrical and computer engineering, University of Arizona. 7. A vendor exhibit area, offering demos of stateof-the-art products, began in 1984. 8. Conference sponsors come from a diverse set of societies: INFORMS Simulation Society, ASA, ACM Special Interest Group on Simulation (ACM/SIGSIM), IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society (IEEE/SMCS), IISE, NIST,The Society for Modeling and
Reminiscences from the early years What is now called the Winter Simulation Conference was the creation of Julian Reitman, Arnold Ockene and Harold G. Hixson. At the time, 1967, Reitman was a major user of GPSS in the Norden Division of United Aircraft. At IBM, Ockene was responsible for the marketing and support of GPSS. Hixson, an active GPSS user himself, was with the Air Force Logistics Command and was also the System Simulation Project Manager of SHARE (the IBM Scientific Users Group). As Ockene later stated, “Julian was both a prolific model builder and a demanding advocate for ever more functions in GPSS.” During frequent ReitmanOckene interactions, quoting Ockene further, “the topic of a conference devoted to applications of GPSS arose. We had little doubt that the time was appropriate for such a conference.” Hixson arranged for SHARE to be a conference sponsor, and he became the general chair. The two-day conference took place in New York City, with Reitman as program chair and Ockene as publicity chair. There were 401 fullhouse attendees, and others had to be turned away. Thirty-four presentations took place. The conference was a resounding success, both technically and financially, triggering a plan to follow it with a successor in 1968. The 1968 conference, which also took place in New York City, was named “The Second 34 | ORMS Today
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Conference on Applications of Simulation.” The scope of the conference was expanded to include applications based on any simulation language, not just GPSS, and also to include simulation material other than just applications. Reitman was the general chair, while Ockene served as the program chair. The attendees numbered 857. The stage had been set to continue with annual conferences, which, with a 1975 interruption (see below), have continued to this day. The “Origins and Early Years” of the WSC span the 1967-74 interval. WSC, or “Winter Simulation Conference,” first became the complete name in 1973. During these early years, the WSC had no bylaws, no formal Board of Directors and no formal long-range planning procedures. The early years came to an end with the 1974 WSC, which, although successful in and of itself, was not then mapped into a 1975 WSC by those expected to do so. This could have been the death knell for the WSCs, but thanks to action taken by Robert G. Sargent, Paul Roth, Harold Joseph Highland and Thomas J. Schriber, a bootstrapped 1976 WSC did take place at the National Bureau of Standards in Maryland. This marked the beginning of what is now called the “Renaissance Period (1975-1982)” of the WSCs, characterized by the formation of bylaws, a Board of Directors, and long-range, multi-year planning procedures. ORMS ormstoday.informs.org
Simulation International (SCS), and the most recently added sponsor, Arbeitsgemeinschaft Simulation (ASIM). Welcoming WSC Community The second author attended his first WSC in 1968 and, incredibly, has never missed it since, whereas his younger co-author started attending the WSC two decades later in 1988, and has missed the conference only twice in the nearly three decades since (both times when another competing conference took place on a faraway tropical U.S. island state). The WSC community is incredibly open and welcoming, ready to incorporate new ideas into research and practice. This year’s general chair is Ernest H. Page, while Gabriel Wainer serves as program chair. The conference theme is “Simulation Everywhere!” In addition to the main conference keynote and two Titan talks, the conference features two other regular keynotes dedicated to the military and manufacturing areas, this year being given by Stéphane Dauzère-Pérès (“Achievements and Lessons Learned from a Long-term AcademicIndustrial Collaboration”) and Douglas Hodson
The
(“Military Simulation: A Ubiquitous Future”), respectively. As part of this year’s 50-year celebration, a special history track (see below) with its own keynote speaker (Brian Hollocks) has been added to the program. This year’s WSC, which enjoys regular participation from the international simulation community, will be held Dec. 3-6 at the Las Vegas Red Rock Casino Resort.
WSC community is incredibly
open and welcoming, ready to
Vision into the Future Bar r y Nelson, professor, Depar tment of Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences, Northwestern University, will deliver this year’s 50th Anniversary Keynote on Dec. 4. His topic: “WSC 2067:What are the Chances?” Based on his abstract, Professor Nelson’s remarks will span a full century of WSC, from its founding in 1967 to a prediction for its future 50 years hence, in 2067. Here’s an abstract of his talk: “At the November 1967 ‘Conference on the Applications of Simulation Using GPSS’ it seems unlikely that anyone was wondering if the conference would still be occupying a big hotel in 2017. Conferences persist for many reasons, but
incorporate new ideas into
research and practice.
Apply for this INFORMS competition that provides workplace experience for undergraduate and master’s level students. Teams use O.R. and Analytics to make decisions and solve a real-world business problem. Finalists will present solutions live to an expert panel at the 2018 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research in Baltimore, Maryland. Monetary awards will be granted to all finalist teams, as well as award certificates for each team member and school. Finalists will also receive a travel stipend and complimentary registration to the Analytics Conference. TITLE SPONSOR:
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October 2017
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WSC Turns 50 “I boldly
a technical conference like WSC has to remain relevant to users, vendors, researchers and consumers (not just hotels) to survive. If our kind of simulation vanished, then so (eventually) would WSC. What is required for simulation to “remain relevant” for the next 50 years? “Without fear of having to answer for my cr imes in 2067, I boldly speculate on what SHOULD matter for the next 10-20 years, if not the next 50, with a focus on our strength: dealing with uncertainty.” Although not mentioned in the abstract, Professor Nelson has been a proponent of a new paradigm called “Simulation Analytics” that is sure to be a part of his vision. As anyone who has ever heard Barry give a lecture knows, he’s a great speaker, provocative and able to reach every level of audience expertise.
speculate on
what SHOULD matter for the
next 10-20 years, with a
focus on our strength:
dealing with uncertainty.” - Barry Nelson
A Special 50-Year History Celebration The special History of Simulation track mentioned earlier will be coordinated by Bob Sargent and will be comprised of nine sessions covering the history of WSC, methodology, applications, international aspects and the computer simulation archive founded by Bob Sargent and Jim Wilson. Separate from the official proceedings, the WSC is producing a special 50th anniversary celebration volume dedicated to the state of the art in simulation research. Entitled “Advances in Modeling and Simulation: Seminal Research from 50 Years of Winter Simulation Conferences,” the volume is edited by Andreas Tolk, John Fowler, Guodong Shao and Enver Yucesan. In the WSC history track, the half-century is divided into the following periods: Origins and Early
ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors thank Robert Sargent for his comments and suggestions.
REFERENCES & READINGS 1. Wilson, J.R., 1996, “Winter Simulation Conference,” OR/MS Today, August, pp.68-70; also available at http://www.orms-today.org/orms-8-96/winter.html.
More Readings More details about the WSC can be found on the website wintersim.org, which includes: (i) an in-depth updated description of the various aspects of WSC, including its history, program scope and administration, based on an OR/MS Today article by James R. Wilson in the August 1996 issue, and (ii) a listing of all of the previous WSC conferences held to date, with registered attendance stats, conference chairs, and proceedings co-editors: http://meetings2.informs.org/wordpress/ wsc2017/past-conferences/ (iii) in the 1992 Proceedings, a 25th anniversary keynote address and panel discussion. Also of interest is the Computer Simulation Archive Website: https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/computer-simulation/
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Barry Nelson, professor, Department of Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences, Northwestern University, will deliver this year’s 50th Anniversary WSC keynote on Dec. 4. Source: William Browning
Years (1967-1974), Renaissance Period (1975-1982), Coming-of-Age Period (1983-1992), Period of Growth, Consolidation and Innovation (1993-2007) and Modern Period (2008-2017). For a preview of the very early years, see “Some Reminiscences from the Early Years” (see sidebar on page 34), as well as Wilson (1996 [1]). Back to the Near Future To find out more about WSC’s 50-year history and to see and hear what Barry Nelson, Robert Sargent, Bernard Zeigler and the other keynote speakers have to say about the past, present and future of simulation and the WSC, be sure to book your ticket to Vegas soon and be a part of the 50th anniversary celebration from Dec. 3-6. To get a flavor of the present state of the art in the capabilities of simulation in its commercial form, see the biennial simulation software survey in this issue of OR/MS Today, faithfully conducted by Jim Swain, another longtime WSC veteran. ORMS Michael C. Fu (mfu@umd.edu) holds the Smith Chair of Management Science in the Robert H. Smith School of Business (with a joint appointment in the Institute for Systems Research, A. James Clark School of Engineering) at the University of Maryland, College Park, and served as Program Chair for WSC in 2011. Thomas J. Schriber (schriber@umich.edu) is a professor emeritus in the Technology and Operations Department of the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He served on the WSC Board of Directors, starting in 1978 and chaired the Board in 1982-83. He received The Lifetime Professional Achievement award from the INFORMS Simulation Society in 2001, was given a Landmark Paper Award at the 40th WSC in 2007, spoke as a Titan of Simulation at the 2009 WSC, and has presented one or more times at each of the 49 WSCs from 1968 through 2017. He also has been named a Pioneer of Simulation (http://d.lib.ncsu.edu/computer-simulation).
ormstoday.informs.org
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S I M U L AT I O N SOFTWARE SURVEY
Omnipresent software provides a costeffective, powerful tool for model building that is only limited by imagination.
Photo courtesy of Simio LLC
By James J. Swain
Simulation takes over: reality is for sissies The idea of simulation is now a part of our culture. For example, the popular “Matrix” movies had it that our perceived reality was actually a simulation, while a recent episode of the British series “Dr. Who” imagined that the world we knew was a simulation being used by an alien race to fully study our planet and to map out its weaknesses for conquest. Plots could incorporate simulation because the viewers were already familiar with the concept. In fact, this seems to have spawned a recurring question on the Quora website about the possibility that we are, in fact, living in a simulation. Movies are not the only exposure that we have to simulation in popular culture. Surely everyone is familiar with various computer games in which some world is experienced through simulation. The gaming industry is on track to surpass music and movies in monetary value which is further evidence of their importance in media and our shared cultural experience. 38 | ORMS Today
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Clearly, most people are both familiar and comfortable with the notion of simulation, accepting that we can use computer software to make a sufficiently realistic rendering of the world as it is or as it might be (zombies!) to explore, to manipulate or simply to entertain.The boundaries to that world will continue to blur, since VR technology may soon allow us to walk around within a simulated world rather than view it from a stationary game or computer screen. At that point, we may have to provide ourselves with a cue to remind ourselves when we are in reality and when in a simulation. The products that we survey here are designed for a more mundane but critical purpose – to provide business, industry and government agencies the tools to explore, quantify and optimize systems of all kinds. Whether the application is a factory or a port, data center or hospital, local or worldwide logistics system, or military operations, simulation provides the ability to realistically represent and then experiment with myriad systems. An examination of ormstoday.informs.org
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the vendor websites provides a wide catalog of applications for these and other applications. Of course, computer-based simulation is an immense field that spans continuous simulations such as missile flight or fluid flow, the cosmically large or the microscopically small. Our focus in this survey is restricted to the realm of discrete-event simulation models that are particularly suited to the operation of discrete parts, patients, vehicles and such in widely divergent fields as manufacturing, healthcare and other services settings, as well as logistics, transportation or military operations to name a few areas of application. This survey provides a snapshot of a vital and robust area of simulation analysis software. The vendors document both the growth and sophistication of their tools. Of perhaps greater interest is to examine the case studies and the white papers that many provide, demonstrating how the tools were successfully applied and the benefits that were obtained from the effort. These materials are available on their respective websites. The Value of Simulation For over half a century, simulation has grown as a tool because it provides us with a cost-effective and immensely powerful instrument for model building that is only limited by imagination. Simulation has grown with the capability of computers, programming tools, graphical representation and algorithms to support these areas. It was recognized quite early that computers would be ideal for implementing simulations. Of course, what began as a tool for analysis has morphed into a vehicle for entertainment through gaming, and the explosive (and lucrative) growth in that area has propelled further developments in simulation generally. Beside the growth in simulation tools, we have witnessed a steady growth in the body of knowledge about simulation and the organization of simulations. Data is more accessible and more readily incorporated into models and increasing the level of detail that can be represented. And, of course, simulation tools incorporate the lessons of the experience in the field. Meanwhile, enabling technologies, such as random number generation, have steadily improved over the decades. The state of the art in random number generation provides virtually unlimited, high-quality random numbers. Another reason that simulation is so valuable is that experimentation with the real world is rarely feasible.This is especially true both for the military operations and in aircraft trainers â&#x20AC;&#x201C; you can walk away from both a lost simulated battle and a simulated crash, after all. But even in a real system, there are economic and practical limitations to the amount of experimentation that is tolerable. Plant managers have their quotas and deadlines, for instance. Most of all, simulation can be applied to systems that have not yet been fielded. Simulation has been successful because it is possible to build simulation models that are sufficiently valid and credible for an analysis to be useful in all of these cases. One of the primary advantages of simulation is that it is a constructive tool. Simulation models attempt to reproduce the states and trajectories of the actual system, using the procedures that the real system would use.This has many advantages. First, it means that
Simulation models attempt to reproduce the states and trajectories of the actual system, using the procedures that the real system would use. model building is based upon a description of the process that is already available or would be a part of any design. Second, it can be efficient, since many modeling languages have evolved generalized constructs or modules such as servers or workstations that fit many modeling situations, or have evolved specialized instances applicable to particular fields such as manufacturing or healthcare, with specialized logic and animation built in. Constructive models are certainly easier to understand and to explain.While a queueing formula may provide a prediction of the mean waiting time in a queue, its derivation is opaque to most clients and its application is limited.A simulation model provides a statistical estimate, but in most cases, it is feasible to obtain precise estimates (as well as estimates of the precision). Having a flexible tool that can be applied in a wide variety of modeling scenarios is worth the loss of having an exact solution. Another critical advantage of constructive models is that they generate the states of the system as they would evolve.This state information can be used to drive the animation and permits detailed analysis, including detailed statistical observations about the system. Of course, the former provides a powerful starting point for both validation and user credence. Providing a visually accurate portrayal of the system in question gives increased confidence in any analysis derived from the model. It also can be used to give snapshots about specific examples of typical or worst-case behavior that can be examined in detail. Animation also can be useful as a tool to facilitate communication and understanding among team members, who often come from different disciplines and backgrounds. Given the widespread familiarity with simulation games, it is likely that simulation tools cannot afford to be without animation output for any model. Many of the tools in this survey provide libraries of images that allow the realistic portrayal of equipment, parts or people to make the visualization accurate. Most now provide 3-D animation that can be examined from different viewpoints and at various levels of detail. Here simulation benefits from the great strides made in the gaming industry for representation and perhaps the growth of graphics processors on home computers for gamers. Improvements in programming increasingly allow models to include increased decision-making within the model. For instance, models can incorporate externally linked software for dynamic scheduling. Likewise, simulations increasingly include the ability to provide customers (and other objects) with decision capabilities or to interact with each other. As an example, for simulations that include pedestrian flow, more realistic routes can be plotted. And in a simulation in which an emergency evacuation is to be studied, being able to portray crowding or panic would be an important part of the model. October 2017
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S I M U L AT I O N SOFTWARE SURVEY
It has long been appreciated that the constructive approach allows a more detailed analysis of the system statistics. Whereas the queueing formula may be limited to a prediction of the mean, in the simulation model it is possible to observe the variability of the response, not to mention relations among different statistics. This is just the beginning of the possibilities! Increasingly it has been noted that analytics and simulation might be good partners. Simulation can provide detailed data that can now be stored and accessed for insights using the tools of analytics, both within simulation replications and between different scenarios or cases. Once a valid and credible model has been built, it can be used for experimentation and optimization. In the former case, many of the simulation tools have the capability of generating experimental results automatically. They are sometimes called scenario generators or experiments.That is, the user can specify the parameters values to be run, and the complete set of replications can be performed automatically, with the results available as a group. The results can then be compared graphically and statistically. In most cases, the results can be exported for a more detailed analysis using statistical software. Once a simulated process has been developed, it is frequently (and naturally) desirable to optimize the process or to seek out the best from among specific options. Optimizers such as OptQuest usually use heuristic approaches (e.g.,Tabu search) that seem to work well where little can be assumed about the simulation responses. Optimization is used when the possible scenarios are too numerous to compare directly, so an algorithm is used to search among the parameter values to obtain improved responses.Various ranking and selection methods can be used when there are a fixed number of alternatives to compare to obtain the best solution.
VENDOR DIRECTORY
aGPSS Simulation System Education SSE, Box 6501 Stockholm SE 11383 Sweden +4687369425 +468321270 ingolf.stahl@hhs.se www.aGPSS.com
Alion Science and Technology 4949 Pearl East Circle, Suite #100 Boulder, CO 80301 303-442-6947 ipme_support@alionscience.com www.alionscience.com/ipme
AnyLogic North America 20 N Wacker Drive Suite 2044 Chicago, IL 60606 312-635-3344 info@anylogic.com https://www.anylogic.com
Booz Allen Hamilton 8283 Greensboro Drive McLean, VA 22102 703-902-5000 argo@bah.com http://boozallen.github.io/argo/
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These algorithms are often sequential in nature, determining the number of replications necessary to make a statistically valid decision, depending on how “best” is defined. Several products have the ability to perform sensitivity analysis on a model scenario given uncertainty in the model parameters. This can be used to determine the parameters that the responses are most sensitive to. A final reason for simulation success is that the number of people trained in simulation has steadily increased. Most vendors provide discounted student versions of their software and training materials and books for use in the classroom. All industrial engineering programs include simulation in their curriculum, and simulation also is offered in many business and computer science programs as well. Most vendors also have active training programs for new users, with classes available across the world, and many provide blogs, forums and even product-oriented conferences to share experience and new product developments. The 2017 Survey This survey is the 11th biennial survey of simulation software for discrete event systems simulation and related products (Swain, 2015 [1]). All product information has been provided by the vendors. Products that run on personal computers to perform discrete-event simulation have been emphasized, since these are the most suitable for usage in management science and operations research. Simulation products whose primary capability is continuous simulation (systems of differential equations observed in physical systems) or training (e.g., aircraft and simulators) are omitted here. This year’s survey includes 44 product listings taken from 26 vendors who submitted survey questionnaires. The range and
CACI 1455 Frazzee Road Suite #700 San Diego, CA 92018 619-881-5809 619-692-1042 mwjohnson@caci.com www.SIMPROCESS.com
FlexSim Software Products, Inc. 1577 North Technology Way Building A, Suite 2300 Orem, UT 84097 801-224-6914 801-224-6984 markus.cueva@flexsim.com www.flexsim.com
Frontline Systems Inc. P.O. Box 4288 Incline Village, NV 89450 775-831-0300 775-831-0314 info@solver.com www.solver.com, www.analyticsolver. com, www.rason.com
Geer Mountain Software Corp 440 Lurgan Road New Hope, PA 18938 860-672-5554 statfit@geerms.com www.geerms.com
GoldSim Technology Group 22500 SE 64th Place, Suite 240 Issaquah, WA 98027 425-295-6985 425-642-8073 software@goldsim.com www.goldsim.com
Imagine That Inc. 6830 Via Del Oro, Suite 230 San Jose, CA 95119 408-365-0305 408-629-1251 info@ExtendSim.com ExtendSim.com
INCONTROL Simulation Solutions 118 College Drive #5191 Hattiesburg, Mississippi 39406 601-266-5280 siminfo.usa@incontrolsim.com http://www.incontrolsim.com/
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variety of these products continues to grow, reflecting the robustness of the products and the increasing sophistication of the users. The information elicited in the survey from the vendors is intended to provide a general gauge of the product’s capability, special features and usage. This survey includes information about experimental run control (e.g., experimental design and automated scenario run capabilities) and special viewing features, including the ability to produce animations or demonstrations that can run independent of the simulation software itself. A separate directory listing gives contact information for all of the vendors whose products are in the survey. An online version of the survey will include vendors who missed the publishing deadline. Of course, most of the vendors provide their own websites with further details about their products. Many of the vendors also have active user groups that share experience in the specialized use of the software and are provided with special access to training and program updates. A number of technical and professional organizations and conferences are devoted to the application and methodology of simulation. The INFORMS journals Management Science, Operations Research and Interfaces publish articles on simulation. The INFORMS Simulation Society sponsors simulation sessions at the national INFORMS meeting and makes awards for both the best simulation publication and recognition of service in the area, including the Lifetime Achievement Award for service to the area of simulation. Further information about the Simulation Society can be obtained from the website http://connect.informs.org/simulation/home. This site also contains links to many vendors of simulation products and sources of information about simulation, simulation education and references about simulation.The Society for Modeling and
Lanner Forward House 17 High Street Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire B95 5AA United Kingdom 01564 333 300 info@lanner.com www.lanner.com
Logic Design Inc. 170 The Donway W., Suite 706 Toronto, ON M3C 2E8 Canada www.circuitlogix.com
Lumina Decision Systems, Inc 26010 Highland Way Los Gatos, CA 95033 650-212-1212 info@lumina.com www.analytica.com
Mesquite Software, Inc. P.O. Box 63206 Austin, TX 78755 1-512-338-9153 info@mesquite.com www.mesquite.com
MJC2 33 Wellington Business Park Crowthorne Berkshire RG45 6LS United Kingdom 1344360000 https://www.mjc2.com/strategicplanning-logistics.htm
Oracle Corporation 100 Oracle Pkwy. Redwood City, CA 94065 800-633-0738 cbsalesna_ww@oracle.com www.oracle.com/crystalball
ProbabilityManagement.org 3507 Ross Road Palo Alto, CA 94303 Support@ProbabilityManagement.org http://probabilitymanagement.org/
ProModel Corporation 7540 Windsor Drive, Suite 300 Allentown, PA 18195 888-900-3090 610-391-9709 saleshelp@promodel.com www.promodel.com
number of technical and professional organizations and conferences are devoted to the application and methodology of simulation. A
Simulation International (www.scs.org) is devoted to all aspects of simulation. Its conferences include three multi-conferences in the spring, summer and autumn that cover all aspects of simulation practice and theory. The AlaSim International Conference is a relatively new conference hosted in Huntsville, Ala., with a focus on DOD and other government applications of simulation. The next conference is scheduled for October 2017. The INFORMS Simulation Society and the Society for Modeling and Simulation are both sponsors of the annual Winter Simulation Conference (see page 32). This year’s conference is the 50th Anniversary conference and will be held Dec. 3-6 in Las Vegas. Further information and registration information is available from the site www.wintersim.org. This site also links to the complete contents of the Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference from 1968 to 2016 for ready access to research and applications of simulation. ORMS James J. Swain (swainjj@uah.edu) is a professor in, and chair of, the ISEEM department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
REFERENCE 1. Swain, J. J., “Simulation software survey: Simulated worlds,” OR/MS Today, Vol. 42, No. 5, October 2015, pp. 36-49.
SAS
SIMUL8 Corporation
SAS Campus Drive Cary, NC 27513 919-677-8000 919-677-4444 www.sas.com
225 Franklin Street, 26th Floor Boston, MA 02110 800-547-6024 info@SIMUL8.com www.SIMUL8.com
Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc.
Syncopation Software
5800 Granite Parkway, Suite 600 Plano, TX 75024 +1 800 498 5351 http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/
336 Baker Ave., Suite 1-11 Concord, MA 01742 1-866-796-2375 sales@syncopation.com https://www.syncopation.com
Vanguard Software Corporation
SigmaXL, Inc. 305 King Street West, Suite 503 Kitchener, ON N2G 1B9 Canada 1-519-579-5877 1-416-352-0037 info@SigmaXL.com https://sigmaxl.com/DiscoverSim.shtml
1255 Crescent Green Cary, NC 27518 +1-919-859-4101 +1-919-851-9457 sales@vanguardsw.com www.vanguardsw.com
Simio LLC 504 Beaver Street Sewickley, PA 15143 412-259-5295 412-253-9378 info@simio.com https://www.simio.com
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Specific s
Batch R un or Ex perimen tal Desig n
Specific s
Output Analysis Support
Model Building
Specific s
System requirements for Software
Operati ng Syste ms
Software Product Listing
Primary Markets the Software is applied
Use of a Multipro cessor Use Oth CPU? er Softw are to P Controll erform? ed by a n Exte Can the Software rnal Program? be Custo Ability to mized? Monitor How CP Graphic U Cycle a (icon or l Model Co s? ns drag-an d-drop) truction Model B u il d ing Usin Accces g Prog s to Run Tim Programmed ramming/ Models e Debug Input dis tributio n Fitting
Typical Applications of the Software
aGPSS
General purpose discrete events simulation for situations with uncertainty requiring many runs
Education, esp. students of business, logistics and supply chain systems
Windows, Mac OS 10.10 and later
– y – – – y y y –
Analytic Solver Simulation
Business risk analysis, resource allocation decisions under uncertainty
Finance/investment, insurance, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, MBA education
Windows 7, 8, 10
y y y y – y y y y Fit to over y Frequency, y Multiple 50 distributions, sensitivity, parameterized P-P and Q-Q scatter charts, simulations, plots statistics, risk reports and measures, charts across percentiles; etc. simulations
Analytica
Energy, environment, Windows XP y y y y y y y y y Various options, y Many types, y Range sensitivity. Continuous and climate, health, high to Windows including including graphs, Scenarios. discrete simulation, tech, aerospace, R&D 10 Metalog Keelin sensitivity, Random, dynamic systems, management, education, fitting scenarios, stratified, and forecasting, public policy, regression importance uncertainty/ risk, sampling. optimization, etc.
AnalyticSolver.com
Business risk analysis, resource allocation decisions under uncertainty
aGPSS Simulation System Education
Frontline Systems, Inc.
Lumina Decision Systems, Inc.
Frontline Systems, Inc.
AnyLogic
Finance/investment, insurance, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, MBA education
–
y
Student’s t-distribution confidence intervals
–
–
Cloud based: y y – – – y – – y Fit to over Multiple y Frequency, y Windows, 50 distributions, sensitivity, parameterized Linux, iOS, P-P and Q-Q scatter charts, simulations, Android plots statistics, risk reports and measures, charts across percentiles; etc. simulations
Multimethod general- Supply Chains, Logistics, Windows, y y y y y y y y y 31 built-in y Reports, model y Flexible user Manufacturing, Mac, Linux distributions plus execution logs, interface to purpose simulation custom distribution. charts, output to the create: Parameter tool. Discrete Event, Healthcare, Pedestrian Flows, Traffic, Mining, Distribution built-in database or Variation, Agent-Based, and Defense, Social fitting with other any external data Compare Runs, System Dynamics Processes, Marketing. software. storage. Monte Carlo, etc. modeling.
AnyLogic North America
Argo
Booz Allen Hamilton
Capacity Planning Tool for Shipyards ProModel Corporation
CircuitLogix
Logic Design, Inc.
CSIM20
Mesquite Software, Inc.
Spreadsheetbased Monte Carlo Simulation
Portfolio Management, Cost Analysis, Engineering
Windows y y – y – y y – – XP, 7, 8, 10
–
y Visualization, – Impact/Sensitivity Analysis, Custom Reporting, Custom Statistical Functions, etc.
Capacity Planning; Daily Operations: space usage, schedule, heavy lift; Management and Sales-Related Capacity Forecasting
Shipbuilding, Heavy Construction, Manufacturing
Web Server: y y – y – y y – – Windows Server 2012 (minimum) with IIS
–
y Robust Online Reporting
Electronic Circuit Simulation
Education
y – – – – y y y –
–
–
Simulating many types of systems
System design and evaluation
Windows, y y y y y – y y – Linux, OSX
–
–
Windows 8, 10
–
y
Scenario Manager
–
y
–
–
y
Automatic run-length control
DiscoverSim Version 3
Quality, Design for Six Windows y – y – – – – – y 53 Continuous + y User friendly – Excel Add-In for Threshold (where output graphics Monte Carlo Sim., Sigma, Risk and Project 7 or later, Management in service, w/current applicable) + and Six Sigma Optimization transactional and srvc. packs 10 Discrete capability Distribution Fitting, manufacturing (Windows 10 Distributions statistics in native Tolerance Intervals & processes. compatible) Excel workbook. Time Series Forcst.
–
DPL
Life Science, Energy, Capital Investment, New Product R&D Prioritization, Development, Utilities, Market Forecasting, Mining, Supply Chain, Supply Chain Risk Defense, Mgmt, Infrastructure Manufacturing Planning, OpEx Planning
–
SigmaXL, Inc.
Syncopation Software
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Windows, Mac
– y y y – y y – –
–
Numerous – Graphical Sensitivity, Distrubution, and Decision Policy Outputs
y
ormstoday.informs.org
y Grid search
–
Support Training
–
– – y – – – – – y – y – y
Price
$700
–
y Rich array of y options: Simulation opt., robust opt., stochastic prog. methods, 12 solver engines
y
y Powerful solvers y for constraint satisfaction, LP, QP, MIP, and nonlinear problems
y
y Rich array of y options: Simulation opt., robust opt., stochastic prog. methods, 12 solver engines
y
y OptQuest is y included, plus users can employ any custom optimization algorithms.
y
Models can be exported as standalone Java applications or shared online at AnyLogic Cloud (cloud. anylogic.com).
No
y y y y y y y y y y y y y
Please see the website.
Free AnyLogic Personal Learning Edition
No Cost
Multiple packaging Free for y y – – – – – – y y y y y $1,995 tools built-in Tableau, Power first year, BI, Excel $1,000 Online, Google annual Sheets; other renewal options
Very low cost licenses, from one semester to two years
Analytica Cloud ACP free y y – y – – – – y y y y y Professional Analytica Player deploys model with any $995, Free 101 $0. as web app and Analytica Enterprise Other Analytica Free 101 editions. $2,795, educational runs any model. ACP Group Optimizer at 50% off. plans. $4,995 No
Comments
S
Student Version
Standard 150 blocks $40; Extended 400 blocks $90
–
Multiple packaging tools built-in
New Features (Since 2015)
Standard
Extra? Cost All ocation /Costi Mixed D iscrete/C ng ontinuo Animati us Mod on eling Real-tim e Viewin g Export A nimatio n Compati ble Anim ation So 3D Anim ftware ation Import C AD Draw ings User Su pport/H otline User Gro up or Dis cussion Training Area Courses On Site Training Consult ing Avail able
Animation
Does Th is Featu re Cost
Tools to Support Packag ing
others w completed m od h develop o might lack th el be shared with their ow e n model software to ):
Code R euse (e .g., obje cts, tem Model P plates) (i.e., Can ackaging a
Specific s
Optimiz ation
Model Building
Available on Mac; new booklet with cases, applications and exercises; Free demo version 60 blocks
aGPSS meant to be best software for starting courses in simulation, leading to realistic student projects in business
Time series simulation, compound distributions, copulas plus correlation fitting, metalog distributions, fastest optimization
Analytic Solver Simulation (formerly Risk Solver Platform) works with Excel desktop, Excel Online, and AnalyticSolver. com.
Multiprocessor support, user-interface improvements, table formats, rapid finder, and much more.
Influence diagrams provide radical transparency. Intelligent Arrays flexibility and power for large scale.
y y – – – – – – y y y y y Contact vendor
Very low New cloud-based service cost licenses, launched Fall 2016 (special from one combos with semester to desktop two years
AnalyticSolver.com is a uniquely powerful, cloudbased simulation/risk analysis, optimization, and data mining tool.
software)
AnyLogic Cloud, a web service for sharing models and running them online on any device. New Road Traffic Library.
The only simulation tool that supports combining Discrete Event, AgentBased, and System Dynamics simulations in one model.
No Cost
.xll installation file, OAT (One-at-a-time) Effects
–
N/A
N/A - New Product
–
–
–
y
y
Yes
No
– y – – – – – – y y y y y
–
–
–
–
–
–
– – y y – – – – y – – y y Contact ProModel 888-9003090
y
–
y
–
–
–
– y y y – – y y – – – – –
$299
–
–
–
–
–
y
y
No
No
– – – – – – – – y – – – y
$1,195
$65
–
CSIM is targetted at sophisticated users, developing models of large and/or complex systems
y Local Smooth: – Sequential Quadratic Prog.; Local NonSmooth: NelderMead; etc.
–
–
–
– y – – – – – – y – y – –
$995
$200
Time Series Forecasting, Tolerance Intervals for non-normal distributions, new TSP Tour & improved IsAllDifferent, CDF Plots.
DiscoverSim is bundled with SigmaXL for statistical and graphical analysis. Free 30-day trial is available at www. SigmaXL.com
y Decsion Tree Rollback
y
Multiple Objective Functions, Parallel Endpoint Recording, Estimate Probabilties from External Data set, Enhanced Multi-select
DPL combines Decision Tree Analysis & Monte Carlo Simulation to perform robust decision, risk, and real options analyses.
y
(Fully functional, perpetual license)
None required
No
DPL 9 y y – – – – – – y y y y y Professional $1,495 Professional Academic $149
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Enterprise Dynamics
Manufacturing, Logistics, and Material Handling Simulation
INCONTROL Simulation Solutions
Warehouses/Distribution Microsoft y y y y y y y y y Internal Feature y Internal Centers, Airport, Windows 10, called Autofit Feature called Harbors, Healthcare, 8, Vista, XP Experiment Pharmaceuticals, FMCG Wizard
Specific s
Batch R un or Ex perimen tal Desig n
Specific s
Specific s
Model Building
Output Analysis Support
System requirements for Software
Operati ng Syste ms
Software Product Listing
Primary Markets the Software is applied
Use of a Multipro cessor Use Oth CPU? er Softw are to P Controll erform? ed by a n Exte Can the Software rnal Program? be Custo Ability to mized? Monitor How CP Graphic U Cycle a (icon or l Model Co s? ns drag-an d-drop) truction Model B u il d ing Usin Accces g Prog s to Run Tim Programmed ramming/ Models e Debug Input dis tributio n Fitting
Typical Applications of the Software
y By providing Experiment Wizard and Scenario Manager
Enterprise Portfolio Simulator (EPS)
Web-based simulation Project & Portfolio For Server: y y – y y – y – y 21 Custom analysis of multiple, Planning; Strategic Windows; For Options within simultaneous project/ Resource Capacity Client:Mac Software product plans across Planning; Product or PC run one or more portfolios Development, R&D; Project browser w/ of projects Selection & Prioritization MSL
ExtendSim DE
Entry-level generalCommunication, Windows y y y y y y y y y 35 pre-defined y Output to charts & y User’s choice. purpose, DE & Healthcare, Manufacturing, and distributions. reports, or export Store run results continuous simulation Security & Defense, Macintosh to other analysis in the internal tool. Analyze & predict Aerospace, Transportation, applications. database or export effects of changes on Sustainability, Logistics, Sensitivity to an external new or existing systems H2O Mgmt. analysis, etc. application.
ExtendSim Pro
Prof. level tool for Consumer Products, Windows y y y y y y y y y 35 pre-defined y Output to charts & y User’s choice. Store modeling & analyzing Healthcare, Energy, and distributions reports. Integrated run results in the complex DE, discrete Petro-Chem, Pulp/Paper, Macintosh plus includes Scenario Manager internal database rate, continuous, Transportation, Pharma, Stat::Fit software with dialog or or export to an agent-based, and Semiconductors, Military for distribution database factors external application. hybrid systems. & Gov, Mining fitting. and responses, etc. And more.
FlexSim
Simulation and Manufacturing, Windows modeling of any packaging, warehousing, 10, 8, 7, process, with the material handling, Vista, and purpose of analyzing, supply chain, logistics, XP understanding, and healthcare, factory, optimizing that process. aerospace, mining.
An y y y y – y y y y Fully integrated y A full suite of y with ExpertFit charts and graphs experimentation in the Dashboard, engine is as well as built into the extensive Excel software. output options.
FlexSim Healthcare
Simulation and modeling to analyze, optimize, and better understand healthcare systems.
Healthcare, healthcare systems, architecture.
Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista, and XP
An y y y y – y y y y Fully integrated y A full suite of y with ExpertFit. charts and graphs experimentation in the Dashboard, engine is as well as built into the extensive Excel software. output options.
ADT Decisioning, Patient Flow and Bed Management
Inpatient Healthcare
Web/ Browser enabled system
y y y y – – – – y User Defined y Browser based y Iteration and Distributions customizable Scenario and Any Popular reports always Manager Statistical available available Distributions
ProModel Corporation
Imagine That, Inc.
Imagine That, Inc.
FlexSim Software Products, Inc.
FlexSim Software Products, Inc.
FutureFlow Rx
ProModel Corporation
y Output analysis y Unlimited reports and scenarios can charts included. be predefined to Output to Excel experiment on parameters
GoldSim
Engineering risk Environmental analysis, strategic engineering, mining, planning, system design water resources, and reliability, water energy, nuclear, waste resource management, management waste management
Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and 10
y y – y – y y y –
–
y Sensitivity and y Batch runs uncertainty Integrated analysis
Integrated Performance Modelling Environment (IPME)
Human performance Global defense, modeling, Operator manufacturing, air traffic workload modeling, control Operator workload management
Windows
y y y y – y y y –
–
y Built-in graphing y Batch run and and statistical experimental support, export design output to Microsoft Excel
Windows 10, 8.1, 7, Vista
y y y y y y y y y 16 statistical distributions available OR Stat::Fit
GoldSim Technology Group
Alion Science and Technology
MedModel Optimization Suite
Capacity Analysis, Patient Flow and Throughput, Facilities Planning, Staff and Labor Utilization, etc.
ProModel Corporation
Oracle Crystal Ball
Spreadsheetbased Monte Carlo simulation, optimization, and time-series forecasting
Oracle Corporation
44 | ORMS Today
|
Healthcare, Hospitals, Clinics
Business, financial, Windows energy, pharma, environmental, healthcare, defense, manufacturing, education, telecommunication
October 2017
y Output Viewer, Minitab, Excel
y
Scenario Manager
y – y – – – – y y 15 continuous y Output analysis y Full batch and 7 discrete includes charts, control through pre-defined tables, reports VBA or other distributions with and output to software statistical fitting Excel supporting COM/ OLE
ormstoday.informs.org
y By providing support for various third-party optimizers
Support Training
Price
New Features
Comments
S
Student Version
(Since 2015)
Standard
Extra? Cost All ocation /Costi Mixed D iscrete/C ng ontinuo Animati us Mod on eling Real-tim e Viewin g Export A nimatio n Compati ble Anim ation So 3D Anim ftware ation Import C AD Draw ings User Su pport/H otline User Gro up or Dis cussion Training Area Courses On Site Training Consult ing Avail able
Animation
Does Th is Featu re Cost
Tools to Support Packag ing
others w completed m od h develop o might lack th el be shared with their ow e n model software to ):
Code R euse (e .g., obje cts, tem Model P plates) (i.e., Can ackaging a
Specific s
Optimiz ation
Model Building
y
y
By providing a free Viewer License of the software
No
y y y y y y y y y y y y y $2,350 $8,200 Annual Subscription Fee
$0
Improved Support for BIM, CAD, and CityGML, Oculus Support, New Modeling Objects, Improved Animation, Improved Debugger. etc.
Free Trial Download Available via www. incontrolsim.com
y Via experiments y and running simulation scenarios
y
Not Required
N/A
y – – – – – – – y y y y y $29,000
N/A
Additional Rule for Resource Capture, Context Help, Failed Duration & Work Default, Templates View Optimization, Compatibile MS Project 2013 & 16
–
y Evolutionary Optimizer is included in all versions of ExtendSim.
y
y
Trial version runs any model built in ExtendSim. Analysis RunTime version allows for further model analysis.
Contact Vendor
y y y y – y – y y y y y y Contact
Contact
Complete overhaul of the application using industry-standard IDE & leading-edge app framework, plus hundreds of new features.
Message-based DE architecture combines with continuous modeling technology to simplify the modeling & analysis of processes.
y Evolutionary Optimizer is included in all versions of ExtendSim.
y
y
Trial version runs any model built in ExtendSim. Analysis RunTime version allows for further model analysis.
Contact Vendor
y y y y – y y y y y y y y Contact
Contact
App overhaul plus new UI, charts & reports, Advanced Resource Mgmt, source editing environment, & import/ export capabilities.
Unified modeling architecture with powerful internal relational DB & flexible framework to represent widely different systems
y An optimization y engine, powered by OptQuest, is available as an add-on.
y
The free trial version of FlexSim is capable of running any simulation model built with FlexSim.
No
y y y y y y y y y y y y y $10,000 to $20,000
$0 to $100
A new graphical tool for process definition (Process Flow), support for virtual reality (Oculus Rift, HTC Vive)
FlexSim is committed to help answer questions relating to any process in the most intuitive, easyto-use interface possible.
y An optimization y engine, powered by OptQuest, is available as an add-on.
y
The free trial version of FlexSim Healthcare is capable of running any simulation model built with FlexSim Healthcare.
No
y – y y y – y y y y y y y $10,000 to $20,000
$0 to $100
New and improved precoded modeling options, additional 3D objects and animations.
FlexSim Healthcare is committed to supporting the healthcare industry by helping them answer “what if” questions.
y
y
Web browser on demand model creation
No
y – – y – – – – y y – y y Contact ProModel 888-9003090
N/A
New Product in 2017
–
Global y optimization of complex dynamic systems
y
Comes with software
No
y y y – – – – – y y y y y
$4,450
Free
Entirely redesigned user interface with high resolution graphics; new licensing system to better support network licenses
A hybrid Monte Carlo simulator with powerful features for simulating uncertain and stochastic processes and random events
y
y
Run-time model distributions are packaged as self-supporting .exe files
No
y – y y – – – – y y y y y
$9,500
$100
Microsoft Excel import and export, support for arrays of booleans
IPME is a general purpose modeling tool that can be used to analyze a system with a focus on the operator’s workload.
y
–
–
–
y y y y – – y y y y y y y $21,500
$30
Resource Distance Traveled Stats, In Process ResourcUtilizStats, Shift Carryover, Grouped Entities, FailedArrivalStats for Ordered Entities
–
–
y
Runtime version of Crystal Ball
No
Special – – – – – – – – y y y y y Professional: $995. classroom Enterprise w/ package, Optimization: contact $1,995 vendor
Support for Excel 2016 and Windows 10, improved time-series forecasting, improved optimization
Trend-setting spreadsheet risk analysis and forecasting package with modern interface for Excel users
y
Program automatically optimizes
y
–
–
y SimRunner
y
OptQuest engine
October 2017
|
ORMS Today
| 45
Pedestrian Dynamics
Crowd Simulation, EAP Development, Ingress, Egress, Evacuation, and Shelter Scenarios
INCONTROL Simulation Solutions
Sports Industry, Microsoft y y y y y y y y y Internal Feature y Internal AEC’s, Emergency Windows called Autofit Feature called Management, School 10, 8, Vista, Experiment Districts, Education and XP Wizard Entertainment Venues
Specific s
Batch R un or Ex perimen tal Desig n
Specific s
Specific s
Model Building
Output Analysis Support
System requirements for Software
Operati ng Syste ms
Software Product Listing
Primary Markets the Software is applied
Use of a Multipro cessor Use Oth CPU? er Softw are to P Controll erform? ed by a n Exte Can the Software rnal Program? be Custo Ability to mized? Monitor How CP Graphic U Cycle a (icon or l Model Co s? ns drag-an d-drop) truction Model B u il d ing Usin Accces g Prog s to Run Tim Programmed ramming/ Models e Debug Input dis tributio n Fitting
Typical Applications of the Software
y By providing Experiment Wizard and Scenario Manager
PLCLogix
Programmable Logic Controller Simulation Software
Education
Polaris
Monte Carlo simulation for Integrated Cost and Schedule Risk Analysis; Sensitivity Analysis; etc.
Public Sector (NASA, DoD, Air Force, Army, Navy/Marine Corp, IC), Commercial (oil/ gas, construction, transportation)
Process Simulator
Lean, SixSigma, DoD, Gov, Manufacturing, Windows value stream Pharma, Med Device, 10, 8.1, 7, mapping, process Supply Chain and Vista mapping, flow chart Logistics, Warehouse and simulation, etc. DC, Healthcare
Output y y y – y y y y y 15 predefined y y Unlimited distributions, Viewer, Minitab, scenarios can plus distribution Excel be predefined to fitting using experiment on Stat::Fit software parameters included
ProModel Optimization Suite
Process optimization DoD, Gov, Manufacturing, Windows and Improvement, Pharma, Med Device, 10, 8.1, 7, Resource utilization, Food, Supply Chain and Vista System capacity and Logistics, Warehouse throughput, etc. and DC
y y y y y y y y y 16 statistical distributions available OR Stat::Fit
RASON Analytics API
Business risk analysis, resource allocation decisions under uncertainty
Risk Solver app
Learning simulation Cloud spreadsheet users Cloud y y – – – y – – – and risk analysis; new to simulation/risk based: deploying simulation analysis; advanced users Windows, models created in deploying models to the Linux, iOS, desktop software cloud Android
Logic Design, Inc.
Booz Allen Hamilton
ProModel Corporation
ProModel Corporation
Frontline Systems, Inc.
Frontline Systems, Inc.
RoboLogix
Industrial Robot Simulation
Logic Design Inc.
Web applications in finance/investment, insurance, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas
Education
Windows 8, 10
–
–
Windows XP y y – – – y y y y User can select y Visualization, – (SP3 or >), “best fit” from Custom Vista, ~12 pre-defined Reporting, insight 7, 8,10 distribution via Polaris Help types Desk (Polaris@ bah.com)
–
y – – y y y y y –
–
–
–
Output y y Viewer, Minitab, Excel
Scenario Manager
Cloud based, y y y y – – y – y Fit to over y Statistics, risk y Multiple mobile50 distributions, measures, parameterized friendly: multiple fit percentiles, data simulations with Windows, criteria mining options data collection Linux, iOS, Android
Windows 8, 10
y – y y y – – y –
–
y Frequency, – sensitivity, scatter charts, statistics, risk measures, percentiles
–
–
–
–
–
–
SAS Simulation Studio
Discrete-event Manufacturing, banking, Windows, y y y – – y – y y Via JMP and simulation: supply pharmaceutical, Linux SAS software chains, resource healthcare, energy, (as of 14.3 integration. management, capacity government agencies, release, planning, workflow & retail, education, Sept. 2017) cost analysis transportation, etc.
y Steady state y Experimental analysis design; manual included. Output in the Simulation analysis via Studio interface or SAS software automated via JMP products. or SAS integration.
Simio Design Edition
Ideal for professional Academic, Aerospace modelers and & Defense, Airports, researchers. Powerful Healthcare, OO modeling and Manufacturing, Mining, integrated 3D animation Military, Oil & Gas, Supply for rapid model Chain, Transportation
Windows y y y y y y y y y Works with Vista, 7, 8 ExpertFit or 10. and Stat::Fit. 32 and 64 Supports table bit OSs are driven input supported sampling
y SMORE Plots y Run manual for risk analysis, scenarios sensitivity with multiple analysis, custom replications. Condashboards, current full use of etc. all processors. etc.
Simio Enterprise Edition
Ideal for professional Academic, Aerospace modelers and & Defense, Airports, researchers. Powerful Healthcare, OO modeling and Manufacturing, Mining, integrated 3D animation Military, Oil & Gas, Supply for rapid model Chain, Transportation
Windows y y y y y y y y y Works with Vista, 7, 8 ExpertFit or 10. and Stat::Fit. 32 and 64 Supports table bit OSs are driven input supported sampling
y SMORE Plots y Run manual for risk analysis, scenarios sensitivity with multiple analysis, custom replications. Condashboards, current full use of etc. all processors. etc.
SAS
Simio LLC
Simio LLC
46 | ORMS Today
|
October 2017
ormstoday.informs.org
Price
New Features
Comments
(Since 2015)
–
y
y
By providing a free Viewer License of the software
No
y y y y y y y y y y y y y $3,000 $14,500 Annual Subscription Fee
–
–
–
–
–
–
– y y y – – – y – – – – –
y Capability to y select number of Monte Carlo simulation iterations or trail runs
y
y Via experiments y and running simulation scenarios
y
Results can be saved to Visio data graphics; Model packaging can be created though the Program itself
No
y y y y y y y y y y y y y
y SimRunner
y
–
–
y Rich array of y options: Simulation opt., robust opt., stochastic prog. methods, 12 solver engines
y
Standard
–
S
Student Version
Does Th is Featu re Cost
Extra? Cost All ocation /Costi Mixed D iscrete/C ng ontinuo Animati us Mod on eling Real-tim e Viewin g Export A nimatio n Compati ble Anim ation So 3D Anim ftware ation Import C AD Draw ings User Su pport/H otline User Gro up or Dis cussion Training Area Courses On Site Training Consult ing Avail able
Support Training
Specific s
Tools to Support Packag ing
Animation
Optimiz ation
Code R euse (e .g., obje cts, tem Model P plates) (i.e., Can ackaging a
others w completed m od h develop o might lack th el be shared with their ow e n model software to ):
Model Building
$0
Improved Support for BIM, CAD, and City GML, Oculus Support, New Modeling Objects, Improved Animation, Improved Debugger. etc.
Free Trial Download Available via www. incontrolsim.com
$299
–
–
–
$5,000
$5,000
Automated Risk Priotization, Probabilistic Calendars and Branching, Sensitivity Analyses
Polaris is a rapid Monte Carlo simulation product that integrates cost, schedule and risk artifacts into a single model.
$5,400
$0
Captured Resource Units, In Process ResourcUtilizStats, Initialize Routing from External Data, Programmatic Export of Stats, Stat::Fit
–
–
y y y y – – y y y y y y y $21,500
$30
Resource Distance Traveled Stats, In Process ResourcUtilizStats, Shift Carry over, Grouped Entities, Failed Arrival Stats for Ordered Entities
–
Create desktop, web page, Tableau, Power BI packages
No
y y – – – – – – y y y y y Free and paid ($97 to $297/ month) accounts at rason.com
N/A
Time series simulation, compound distributions, copulas plus correlation fitting, metalog distributions, fastest optimization
RASON is a new modeling language embedded in JSON with a REST API, used to add simulation/ optimization to any web/ mobile app.
Free
Runs models from Analytic Solver Simulation V2017
Risk Solver brings free simulation/risk analysis to Excel Online + Google Sheets, runs full Analytic Solver Simulation models
–
–
Capability to export No y y – – – – – – y – y y y most data to Excel as capability a .csv file. Graphical included in views can be exported licensing as a JPEG or as a PDF report.
–
–
–
–
Unnecessary since software is free
No
y y – – – – – – y y y – – No Cost
–
–
y
–
–
–
– – y y – – y – – – – – –
y Via data transfer to y SAS/OR software; can be embedded in a simulation model via SAS Program block.
–
–
–
y – y y – – – – y y y y y Contact
Full version available at reduced cost; contact SAS for pricing.
Linux support; enhanced controls on order of execution for blocks and block ports; extended queueing controls.
Included with SAS/ OR. Integrated with SAS and JMP analytical capabilities. Models can incorporate any SAS or JMP code.
y OptQuest takes y full advantage of all processors. Multi-Objective & Pattern Frontier optimization
y
Requires Team Edition or above to package model
No
y y y y y y y y y y y y y Contact
Free version, $25 version, Full Academic Grants for lab software available
See https://www.simio. com/resources/releasenotes/ for a list. Agile development makes our list of developments incredible!
Patented innovations, designed by the Dr. C. Dennis Pegden team, takes Flexibility and Rapid Modeling to new levels.
y OptQuest takes y full advantage of all processors. Multi-Objective & Pattern Frontier optimization
y
Requires Team Edition or above to package model
No
y y y y y y y y y y y y y Contact
Free version, $25 version, Full Academic Grants for lab software available
See https://www.simio. com/resources/releasenotes/ for a list. Agile development makes our list of developments incredible!
Patented innovations, designed by the Dr. C. Dennis Pegden team, takes Flexibility and Rapid Modeling to new levels.
$299
–
October 2017
|
ORMS Today
| 47
Specific s
Batch R un or Ex perimen tal Desig n
Specific s
Specific s
Model Building
Output Analysis Support
System requirements for Software
Operati ng Syste ms
Software Product Listing
Primary Markets the Software is applied
Use of a Multipro cessor Use Oth CPU? er Softw are to P Controll erform? ed by a n Exte Can the Software rnal Program? be Custo Ability to mized? Monitor How CP Graphic U Cycle a (icon or l Model Co s? ns drag-an d-drop) truction Model B u il d ing Usin Accces g Prog s to Run Tim Programmed ramming/ Models e Debug Input dis tributio n Fitting
Typical Applications of the Software
Simio Personal Edition
Ideal for professional Academic, Aerospace modelers and & Defense, Airports, researchers. Powerful Healthcare, OO modeling and Manufacturing, Mining, integrated 3D animation Military, Oil & Gas, Supply for rapid model Chain, Transportation
Windows y y y y y y y y y Works with Vista, 7, 8 ExpertFit or 10. and Stat::Fit. 32 and 64 Supports table bit OSs are driven input supported sampling
y SMORE Plots y Run manual for risk analysis, scenarios sensitivity with multiple analysis, custom replications. Condashboards, current full use of etc. all processors. etc.
Simio Team Edition
Ideal for professional Academic, Aerospace modelers and & Defense, Airports, researchers. Powerful Healthcare, OO modeling and Manufacturing, Mining, integrated 3D animation Military, Oil & Gas, Supply for rapid model Chain, Transportation
Windows y y y y y y y y y Works with Vista, 7, 8 ExpertFit or 10. and Stat::Fit. 32 and 64 Supports table bit OSs are driven input supported sampling
y SMORE Plots y Run manual for risk analysis, scenarios sensitivity with multiple analysis, custom replications. Condashboards, current full use of etc. all processors. etc.
Simio LLC
Simio LLC
SIMPROCESS
Business Process Improvement, Process Management, Predictive Analytics
SIMUL8 Professional
Assembly Line, Line Manufacturing, Balancing Strategic Healthcare, Education, planning, Operations, Engineering, Supply Healthcare Systems, Chain, Logistics, Govt, BPMN, Lean, Shared BPMN, Lean, Automotive, Services, etc. Call Centers
Microsoft Windows
y y y y – y y y y Custom options – within software and Stat::Fit
SIPmath™ Modeler Tools for Excel
Real-Time Monte Carlo in Excel using Data Table without macros or add-ins
Windows/ Mac
y y – – – – – – y
CACI
SIMUL8 Corporation
ProbabilityManagement.org
SLIM
Logistics and supply chain simulation and planning
MJC2
Military, government, Windows – y y y – y y – y commercial, education, XP, Vista, 7, international, foreign or Server 2003; Linux LSB 3.0 or higher
Light industrial simulations and interactive risk dashboards in Excel
Logistics, manufacturing, Windows, y – – – – y y – – transport, retail, Linux, Unix food & beverages, construction, automotive, petroleum
Model Fit
y Run scenarios y Experiment can be defined manager and compared; allows DOE and standard and batch runs of custom reports experiments available; etc. –
y
Multiple Replications and Scenario Management
Metalog distributions
–
–
y Parameterized Simulation
–
–
–
–
–
Solver SDK Platform
Business risk analysis, resource allocation decisions under uncertainty
Stat::Fit
Statistically fits to Simulation and Modeling, PC your data the most Risk Assessment, Windows useful analytical Reliability, Quality, distribution and Engineering and exports into specific Financial Management forms for simulation
– y – – – – – – y 32 distributions. – Auto::Fit capability. Exports into specific forms for simulation software
Tecnomatix Plant Simulation
Discrete-event Automotive OEM & simulation, Supplier, Aerospace visualization, analysis & Defense, Consumer and optimization Products, Logistics, of production Electronics, Machinery, throughput, etc. Healthcare, Consulting
Microsoft Windows
y y y y y y y y y Beta, Binomial, y Datafit, Charts, y Experiment Cauchy, Sankey, Manager Continuous Bottleneck supporting Empirical (cEmp), analyzer, Energy distributed Discrete Empirical Analyzer, Neural simulation (dEmp), etc. Networks
Vanguard Business Analytics Suite
Monte Carlo All industries, but simulation for large customer base in business forecasting, pharmaceuticals and analytics, and aerospace planning
Windows
Various y y y y – y y y y Based on input y data reports and analyses
WITNESS
Fast, productive predictive simulation desktop software for professional modelling and application development
Windows
y y y y y y y y y
Frontline Systems, Inc.
Geer Mountain Software Corp.
Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software, Inc.
Vanguard Software Corporation
Lanner
48 | ORMS Today
|
Finance/investment, insurance, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, MBA education
Business Planning, Process Optimization and Decision-Making
October 2017
Windows y y y y y – y y y Fit to over y Statistics, risk 7, 8, 10, 50 distributions, measures, most Linux multiple fit percentiles, versions criteria data mining options
–
y
–
–
Multiple parameterized simulations with data collection
y
–
–
y
Based on model design
y
–
ormstoday.informs.org
Support Training
Price
y OptQuest takes y full advantage of all processors. Multi-Objective & Pattern Frontier optimization
y
Requires Team Edition or above to package model
No
y y y y y y y y y y y y y
y OptQuest takes y full advantage of all processors. Multi-Objective & Pattern Frontier optimization
y
Requires Team Edition or above to package model
No
No
New Features
Comments
Free
S
Student Version
Standard
(Since 2015)
Extra? Cost All ocation /Costi Mixed D iscrete/C ng ontinuo Animati us Mod on eling Real-tim e Viewin g Export A nimatio n Compati ble Anim ation So 3D Anim ftware ation Import C AD Draw ings User Su pport/H otline User Gro up or Dis cussion Training Area Courses On Site Training Consult ing Avail able
Animation
Does Th is Featu re Cost
Tools to Support Packag ing
others w completed m od h develop o might lack th el be shared with their ow e n model software to ):
Code R euse (e .g., obje cts, tem Model P plates) (i.e., Can ackaging a
Specific s
Optimiz ation
Model Building
Free
See https://www.simio. com/resources/releasenotes/ for a list. Agile development makes our list of developments incredible!
Patented innovations, designed by the Dr. C. Dennis Pegden team, takes Flexibility and Rapid Modeling to new levels.
y y y y y y y y y y y y y Contact for Free version, details $25 version, Full Academic Grants for lab software available
See https://www.simio. com/resources/releasenotes/ for a list. Agile development makes our list of developments incredible!
Patented innovations, designed by the Dr. C. Dennis Pegden team, takes Flexibility and Rapid Modeling to new levels.
y – y y – – – – y – y y y $10,000
$1,500
See current “read me” file located in free trial download
SIMPROCESS specializes in data connectivity, realtime decision support, and predictive analytics.
$4,995
$1,995
SIMUL8 Studio, Power & Free Conveyors, Work Item tracking, Create custom interfaces, Overtime, Financial Input Sumary
We also have a Basic version at $1,995 and a bundled version Professional Plus that includes support and training at $7,495
y
OptQuest
y
y
Model bundles can be created and extracted
y
OptQuest
y
y
SIMUL8 Studio and SIMUL8 Web Technology
–
–
–
y
Models run in native Excel without macros or add-ins using the Data Table
–
– – – y – – – – – y y y y
$500
FREE
HDR random numbers, 17 input distributions including Metalog, and correlated varaibles
See article in Dec. 2016 Analytics http://viewer. zmags.com/publication/ d13fb97d#/d13fb97d/65
y
–
–
–
–
–
y y y y y – – – y – y y y
POA
POA
Integrated modeling of ports and terminals
Configurable simulation & optimization solution for large, complex networks
y Rich array of y options: Simulation opt., robust opt., stochastic prog. methods, 12 solver engines
y
Tools are built-in
No
y y – – – – – – y y y y y
$1,995 first year, $1,000 annual renewal
N/A
R and Python support, compound distributions, copulas plus correlation fitting, metalog distributions, fastest optimization
Solver SDK is a leading object library for simulation/risk analysis/ optimization used in desktop, server and Web service apps
–
–
–
–
– – – – – – – – y – – – y
$289
Free
Version 3 is faster, includes new graphics capabilities and has a new, more intuitive user interface.
–
Genetic y Algorithm, Layout Optimizer, Neural networks, Hill Climbing, etc.
y
Built-in Pack and Go functionality
No
y y y y y y y y y y y y y Various
Free student download version; additional options available
Enhanced worker, robot, mixer, motion paths and visualization, new Simtalk, OPC UA and Siemens PLCSIM Advanced connections
Siemens PLM Software appreciates the opportunity to participate in this simulation software survey.
y
y
Vanguard models can be distributed as interactive Webbased models via the Vanguard System platform
Yes
y y – y – – – – y y y y y Call for pricing
Call for pricing
–
We have also incorporated simulations into our enterprise forecasting and planning platform, Vanguard IBP
y
y
Cloud Deployment, Experimentation, Optimization
Yes
y y y y y y y y y y y y y Contact for details
Available
–
–
–
–
y
y Supports a proprietary Stochastic Optimizer for Monte Carlo simulations y
–
Free and y y y y – – y y y y y y y Paid Options available
October 2017
|
ORMS Today
| 49
HALL
HOURS
Dozens of booths you can visit & learn about new products & technologies.
For quickest queue, register before you get to Houston.
coffee breaks Sunday & Monday: 9:30–10am & 4–4:30pm Tuesday: 9:30–10am & 1:35–2pm Wednesday: 9–9:30am Come & Get your caffeine fix!
Researchers, practitioners, and students share their O.R. & Analytics projects in these special sessions on Monday & Tuesday from 12:30–2:30pm.
ColORing Wall Join us to make our own INFORMS Houston mural. Take a brain break and show Houston some love.
Make sure you’re there to optimize your 2017 Annual Meeting experience in Houston! For more information please visit:
http://meetings.informs.org/houston2017
Technology Center
Saturday, Monday, & Tuesday: 7am–5pm Sunday: 7am–5:30pm Wednesday: 7am–1:30pm
Career Fair for job seekers, one-on-one interviews, résumé review & drop off.
This dynamic space is the hub for your Annual Meeting activities. Be sure to stop by & see key INFORMS leadership & staff, and learn more about the many programs and activities taking place both at the Annual Meeting and throughout the year. Members who renew on-site will receive an INFORMS t-shirt.
networking Lounge &
registration HOURS
welcome reception
Sunday: 12noon–5pm, 7:30–9pm Monday & Tuesday: 9am–5pm Wednesday: 9am–12:30pm
Exhibitors
All activities on this page will be held in Exhibit Hall B3 in the George R. Brown Convention Center on Level 3.
Meet with colleagues and visit the exhibits on Sunday evening at the INFORMS Center, 7:30–9pm. Light fare will be served. Soft drinks are complimentary, with a cash bar for other beverages.
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Space for attendees to relax, hang out, play games, meet other members, and take advantage of free Wi-Fi. Make sure to follow @INFORMS2017 for special popup events in the Networking Lounge. Sponsored by AMPL
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Meetings
In Memoriam
Thomas L. Saaty
INFORMS
(1926-2017)
By Arjang Assad and Luis G. Vargas Thomas L. Saaty, Distinguished Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, member of the National Academy of Engineering, and creator of the decision-making mechanisms Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Analytic Network Process (ANP), passed on Aug. 14. He was 91 and remained a creative and passionate researcher until the end. Tom was born in Mosul, Iraq, on July 18, 1926. His parents were descendants of Assyrian Christians from northern Iraq. Tom’s father, David, lived in Rhode Island for many years but returned to his home town of Mosul in the early 1900s. David was a well-known entrepreneur; he opened the country’s first ice-making factory in 1923. His ambition was to modernize Iraq. David’s marriage to Dola in 1925 produced four children: Tom, John, Ben and Grace. Tom was the first child. Tom went to Brummana High School in Lebanon, a Quaker school, when he was 15. Upon graduation, he attended the American University of Beirut for two years. He came to the United States as a youth of 19 to attend Columbia Union College in Takoma Park, Md. He went on to receive an M.S. degree in physics from the Catholic University of America. In 1953, he received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University under the supervision of the functional analyst Einer Hille. Tom’s dissertation was on the Bessel Tricomi equation. He conducted postgraduate studies for a year in Paris, at the Sorbonne, under the direction of the algebraic topologist Henri Cartan. After graduating from Yale, and, despite efforts by Einer Hille who wanted Tom to stay at Yale to do research, he joined Melpar, Inc. as a scientific analyst studying submarine defense until 1954. He then joined the Operations Evaluation Group (OEG) in Washington D.C. OEG was formed in 1945
as a successor to the World War II Operations Research Group that conducted the Antisubmarine Warfare Operations Research Group (ASWORG) organized by Philip Morse in 1942. At OEG, Tom worked on classified submarine detection problems and the mathematics of radar reconnaissance, a topic of interest due to U.S. aircraft flights (RB48 and U-2) over the Soviet Union. This period also produced Tom’s first papers in Operations Research. The 1954 paper resulted from joint work on parametric programming at project SCOOP with Saul Gass. Tom’s survey of queueing theory appeared in Operations Research in 1957. In 1958, Tom was appointed scientific liaison officer to the U.S. Embassy in London. His 1959 book, “Mathematical Methods of Operations Research”, was the result of his international travels and served as the first graduate level text on the subject. In 1959, he was named director of advanced planning in the Office of Naval Research (ONR), a post he held until 1961 when he was appointed as scientific analyst in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), Department of State. He stayed in ACDA during 1963-1969. He then left to start his academic career at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1979, Jerry Zoffer, then dean of the business school at the University of Pittsburgh, recruited Tom to the university, where he held a Distinguished University Professor Chair. For the next 38 years, Tom was the most widely known member of the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, with several affiliated appointments in other academic units of the university. During his long tenure at the Katz school, his fame
Board of Directors Election results Ramayya Krishnan, d e a n a n d W. W. Cooper and Ruth F. Cooper Professor of Management Science and Information Systems at the Heinz College of Information Ramayya Krishnan Systems and Public Policy in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, was elected president-elect of INFORMS. After serving a year on the INFORMS Board as president-elect, Krishnan will assume the presidency in 2019. Krishnan is an INFORMS Fellow and a Distinguished Fellow of the INFORMS Information Systems Society. Other newly elected members of the Board include:
Secretary: Victoria Chen
Vice President, International: Sue Merchant
Vice President, Practice: C. Allen Butler
Vice President, Marketing, Communications and Outreach: Laura Albert
Vice President, Membership and Professional Recognition: Susan Martonosi
Vice President, Chapters/Fora: Gino Lim
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spread internationally. He traveled widely across the globe, and scholars and students from several countries came to Pittsburgh to work with Tom. Tom was trained in pure mathematics and published several volumes in that area. He then turned his attention to writing books on subjects of interest to the OR community: “Elements of Queueing Theory with Applications” (1961) where he surveyed the literature; “Nonlinear Mathematics” in two volumes (1964); “Finite Graphs and Networks” (1965) and “Optimization in Integers and Related Extremal Problems” (1970). Tom’s book with George Dantzig, “Compact City” (1973), was part of O.R. lore for many years. Tom is best known for his theory of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and its extension to the Analytic Network Process (ANP). Tom developed AHP based on his work at the U.S. State Department’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. AHP is a general methodology to derive ratio scales from pairwise comparisons in a multilevel hierarchical structure. It allows alternatives in complex decision problems to be ranked using an intuitively appealing procedure. It has proven to be remarkably versatile in the range of its possible applications. The first major application of AHP was reported in Tom’s 1977 paper in Interfaces; it addressed the ranking of infrastructure projects in the Sudan. Tom described the mathematical principles underlying AHP in his book “The Analytic Hierarchy Process: Planning, Priority Setting, Resource Allocation” (1980). He continued to author another two dozen books on the subject. In 2008, Tom was awarded the INFORMS Impact Prize “for his seminal work on the
More a father than a co-worker On a personal note, I worked with Tom Saaty for more than 40 years, but I consider him more a father than a co-worker, for I knew him longer and spent more time with him than I did with my own father. I met Tom in the fall of 1975 when I came to study under him from Spain. From the beginning, I was considered part of his family. After 40 years spent with him I cannot find words to express the sadness I feel, but I am happy to think that perhaps now he has found the answers he was looking for to the innumerable questions he had about physics, mathematics, science and life in general. – Luis Vargas
Analytic Hierarchy Process, and for its development and extraordinary impact.” Tom’s past experience in government and arms control made him passionate about conflict resolution, and in particular, finding a solution for the Israeli-Palestinian Middle East conflict. Starting in 2009, he organized seminars with representatives from both sides to a promising mutually acceptable solution that leveraged the AHP/ANP methodology. An account of this multi-year project is planned to appear in book form. Creativity, especially in applications of mathematics, was Tom’s passion. He cultivated it in his own research across a remarkably diverse collection of fields. He also loved teaching the creativity course at the Katz school, challenging students to think outside the box. Students who appreciated this challenge remembered him as a remarkable mentor. His book, “Creative Thinking, Problem Solving and Decision Making” (2001), ties together his main pursuits and interests in this area. Tom also was intrigued in decision-making in the brain. He introduced an extension of his discrete eigenvalue model for AHP to continuous spaces to model cognitive brain activity using this approach. He dedicated most of his time until his death to this problem.
Amazingly curious and creative mind I knew of Tom Saaty’s works for years before I got to know him as a friend. Tom was very kind to me when I came to Pittsburgh; he welcomed me to his home and insisted on showing me the city’s sights and attractions. It was in these meetings that I came to appreciate his amazingly curious and creative mind. If thinking can be described as a passionate activity, Tom exemplified it. His home was an open and inviting workshop to international scholars who sought him out. As a researcher, as a teacher, and as a friend and colleague, he brought honor and prestige to his school and the University of Pittsburgh. I join his many colleagues in missing his prodigious presence at Katz. – Arjang Assad
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Tom was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1959 and, in 1970, to the Spanish Royal Academy of Mathematical, Physical and Natural Sciences. His election to the National Academy of Engineering came in 2005. His other awards include the Gold Medal of The International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision Making (2000) and the International Quality Function Deployment Akao Prize from Japan (2007). At the University of Pittsburgh, Tom received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award, the highest award for research at the university. His cumulative Google Scholar citation count exceeded 97,000 citations. Tom loved music and humor. He possessed CDs and records of all of Beethoven’s works and, at one point in his life, could identify any work by Beethoven. When he was younger, he realized that he was not good at telling jokes. He decided to improve his abilities as a raconteur of jokes. This led to his compilations of hundreds of jokes into many booklets under a wide variety of pseudonyms. He took special pleasure in sharing these collections with colleagues, friends and students. Tom is survived by his wife, Rozann Saaty; his children, Linda, Michael, Emily, John and Daniel; his grandchildren, Tom, Michael, Meghan, Amy, Kara, Monica, Emma, Nina, Max and Fletcher; and his great grandchildren, Lydia, Fiona and Lilly. ORMS Arjang Assad is professor and Henry E. Haller Jr. Dean of the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a current member and past chair of the INFORMS History & Traditions Committee. Luis G. Vargas is professor of Business Analytics & Operations at Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration at the University of Pittsburgh. He has co-authored several books and numerous papers with Tom Saaty.
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Exhibit Hours
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Sunday, Oct. 22: 12 p.m.-5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.-9 p.m. (Welcome Reception) Monday, Oct. 23: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. • Tuesday, Oct. 24: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. • Wednesday, Oct. 25: 9 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
2017 INFORMS Annual Meeting guide to exhibitors The following companies, organizations and academic institutions will have booths in the exhibit area at the 2017 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Houston on Oct. 22-25. Note: The list includes vendors confirmed as of Sept. 20. AIMMS Booth #50 www.aimms.com
AIMMS is an innovative technology company with offices in Europe, the U.S. and Asia. Half of the global Fortune top 20 corporations rely on AIMMS because of our unique analytics, modeling and optimization platform that supports both strategic and daily operational challenges such as supply chain optimization, strategic sourcing, pricing, workforce optimization, portfolio optimization, and production planning and scheduling. Amazon Booth #23 www.amazon.jobs
When Amazon.com launched in 1995, it was with the mission “to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” This goal continues today, but Amazon’s customers are worldwide now, and have grown to include millions of consumers, sellers, content creators and developers & enterprises. Each of these groups has different needs, and we always work to meet those needs, innovating new solutions to make things easier, faster, better and more cost-effective. AMPL Optimization, Inc. Booth #29 www.ampl.com
AMPL is an exceptionally powerful and natural tool for developing and deploying the complex optimization models that arise in diverse business and engineering applications. AMPL’s modeling language lets you formulate problems the way you think of them, while the AMPL interactive development system supports all of the best large-scale solvers to help you find good solutions fast. AMPL also features an integrated scripting language for automating analyses and building iterative optimization schemes; application programming interfaces for embedding your models within enterprise systems; and alternatives for deploying AMPL models as web-based collaborative decision-making tools. Artelys Corp. Booth #28 www.artelys.com
Artelys provides decision-support solutions through numerical optimization and analytics technologies with worldwide offices. The high qualified consultants offer their expertise in the energy & environment, logistics & transportation, telecommunications, finance and defense sectors. The company also develops and supports a comprehensive portfolio of efficient and robust optimization tools such as Artelys Kalis, FICO Xpress Optimization suite, Knitro, and AMPL, and offers Artelys Crystal suite, a set of user-friendly software dedicated to the optimization of energy and transportation systems. Artelys provides comprehensive and flexible solutions from functional analysis and organizational architecture design to implementation of solutions and operational tools. ARUNDO Booth #38 www.arundo.com
Arundo is an analytics company delivering data-intensive, business-backed use cases across the oil & gas value chain through its cloud platform. The company’s proprietary “models deployment framework” allows for rapid delivery of machine learning algorithms without the overhead of IT/ development, shortening the time-to-value for data science teams. The company services multiple IOCs and NOCs, optimizing asset performance and boosting productivity with machine learning. Arundo will share real-world examples from their client base as well as lessons learned in delivering machine learning in oil & gas.
Bentley University Booth #52 www.bentley.edu
Bentley University is one of the nation’s leading business schools, dedicated to preparing a new kind of business leader and one with deep technical skills. We have been a leader in the advanced study of analytics, providing the valuable skills needed to succeed in the field. With two graduate programs in analytics, you can master information, integrate it into successful business practices, and communicate the results like never before. Binghamton University Booth #31 www.binghamton.edu
Binghamton University is proud to offer BS, MS and Ph.D. options in Industrial and Systems Engineering, and an executive health systems program in Manhattan. Learn from awardwinning professors in a vibrant and rapidly growing department. Enjoy research opportunities in health systems, data science, supply chain/logistics, smart energy and other disciplines. Cambridge University Press Booth #33 www.cambridge.org
Cambridge University Press’ publishing in books and journals combines state-of-the-art content with the highest standards of scholarship, writing, and production. Visit our booth to browse new titles, available at a 20% discount, and to pick up sample copies of our journals. Visit our website to find out more about what we do: www.cambridge.org. COIN-OR Foundation, Inc. Booth #15 www.coin-or.org
The Computational Infrastructure for Operations Research publishes high-quality, free, open-source tools for O.R. professionals and students, suitable for commercial, educational and personal use. COIN-OR is the place to go when you need a “white box” for algorithm research and development. COIN-OR is a strategic partner of the INFORMS Computing Society. Dynamic Ideas LLC
predictive analytics and data science to improve operational decisions. FICO holds more than 165 U.S. and foreign patents on technologies that increase profitability, customer satisfaction, and growth for businesses in financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, retail, and many other industries. Using FICO solutions, businesses in more than 100 countries do everything from protecting 2.6 billion payment cards from fraud, to helping people get credit, to ensuring that millions of airplanes and rental cars are in the right place at the right time. Frontline Systems, Inc. Booth #19 www.solver.com
Frontline Systems is democratizing analytics, enabling business analysts and developers to get results quickly with just a browser, spreadsheet, or programming language, instead of expensive enterprise software with steep learning curves. See how easily you can solve optimization, simulation/ risk analysis, forecasting and data mining problems — starting for free, and scaling up easily to the largest models, using AnalyticSolver.com, Analytic Solver® for desktop Excel, and our RASON® modeling language and REST API. Use our Solver and XLMiner® SDKs for C#, Java, C++, R and Python to create your own analytics applications. Find your fastest path to real analytics results. GAMS Development Corp. Booth #12 www.gams.com
The General Algebraic Modeling System (GAMS) is a highlevel modeling system for mathematical programming and optimization. It consists of a language compiler and a stable of integrated high-performance solvers. GAMS is tailored for complex, large-scale modeling applications, and allows you to build large maintainable models that can adapt quickly to new situations. Come to our booth to learn more about GAMS or ask for an evaluation license. You can also visit our technology workshop or software demo. Gurobi Optimization Booth #30 www.gurobi.com
Dynamic Ideas LLC is a publisher of scientific books that have quality and originality in the areas of Operations Research and Applied Mathematics. The key objective of our titles is to “educate the next generation.” Many of our books are used as the main textbook in academic courses in some of the finest universities and research institutions in the world.
Gurobi Optimization is dedicated to helping our users succeed with optimization. We provide the leading math programming solvers, offering best-in-class performance as well as a broad array of tools for developing and deploying optimization applications on top of these solvers. We support all of the most popular programming languages, as well as client-server architectures, cloud computing, and distributed optimization. We also provide outstanding, easy-to-reach support and transparent, no-surprises pricing.
Elsevier
IBM
Booth #27 www.dynamic-ideas.com
Booth #18 www.elsevier.com/social-sciences/decisionsciences
Elsevier is a global information analytics company publishing leading journals in OR/MS and Decision Sciences, including European Journal of Operational Research, Computers & Operations Research and Omega: International Journal of Management Science. Come to the Elsevier booth #18 to find out more, including how to use Elsevier’s researcher centric tools to develop your research. Want to know more now? Visit elsevier.com/decision-sciences. To find out more about what Elsevier has to offer at INFORMS, go to elsevier.com/ exhibitions-update/informs. FICO Booth #1 & 2 www.fico.com
FICO (NYSE: FICO) powers decisions that help people and businesses around the world prosper. Founded in 1956 and based in Silicon Valley, the company is a pioneer in the use of
Booth #21 www.ibm.com/us-en
Critical business decisions can be made with ease when you know what is likely to happen in the future and how you should respond. IBM is paving the way to the next generation of analytics solutions and platforms by combining descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics with the power of cloud and cognitive insights. These advanced analytics capabilities provide robust, user friendly platforms aimed at helping you solve even the most complex business and research problems. Visit the IBM Advanced Analytics booth to learn more about our family of offerings. IEOM Booth #51 www.ieomsociety.org
IEOM Society International is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Its core purpose is to globally foster critical thinking and its effective utilizations in the field of Industrial Engineering (IE) and Operations Management (OM) by providing means
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new s Guide to Exhibitors, continued from p. 53 to communicate and network among diversified people motivated by similar interests. IEOM® provides means to communicate and network among people enthused with similar interests through association services, conferences, seminars, workshops, student chapters, professional chapters, journals, certification, awards and recognition across the globe, and illustrative research publications to disseminate the earned knowledge and experience. IFORS Booth #16 www.ifors.org
The International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS) is an umbrella organization comprising the national Operations Research societies of over 45 countries from four geographical regions: Asia Pacific, Europe, North America, South America. Total membership is over 30,000. IFORS’ mission is to promote Operations Research as an academic discipline and profession. Ivey Publishing Booth #34 www.iveycases.com
Ivey Publishing is the leader in providing business case studies with a global perspective. With over 40,000 products in our library, Ivey Publishing adds more than 400 classroom-tested case studies each year. Virtually all Ivey cases have teaching notes. Clear, concise, and current, Ivey cases are lauded by the academic community as meeting the rigorous demands of management education by responding to the ever-changing needs of business and society. Meet with one of our case experts on how to publish with us and how you can integrate world-class cases into your curriculum. LINDO Systems, Inc. Booth #36 www.lindo.com
LINDO Systems offers three products hooked to industrial strength solvers for linear, integer, stochastic, NLP, and global optimization. LINGO includes a powerful modeling language and convenient data options to make building models faster and easier. What’sBest! allows you to build large optimization models in Excel. Models are easy to build and understand for anyone comfortable within Excel. LINDO API allows you to plug the power of the LINDO solvers right into customized applications that you have written. Find out about the latest solver enhancements and pick up a full capacity evaluation license to try or a free educational research license. Lumina Decision Systems Booth #24 www.lumina.com
Booth #32 http://mitsloan.mit.edu/master-of-businessanalytics/
MIT’s newest and most competitive degree–the Master of Business Analytics (MBAn) program–prepares students for careers that apply and manage modern data science to solve critical business challenges. Launched by MIT Sloan with support and leadership from the MIT Operations Center, this full-time, year-long program is divided into three semesters: fall, spring, and summer, and includes core coursework in Machine Learning, Data Mining, Optimization, Software Tools, and Probability & Stochastic Models. The highlight of MIT’s MBAn program is the 7-month Analytics Capstone Project that seeks to provide students will real-world data science challenges. North Carolina State University Booth #44 www.ise.ncsu.edu
The Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at NC State University is among the top ranked programs in the country. The department brings together industry professionals and academic leaders across innovative and cutting-edge curriculum including regenerative medicine, health systems and advanced manufacturing. Optimization Direct, Inc. Booth #10 www.optimizationdirect.com
Optimization Direct Inc., co-founded by Dr. Robert Ashford, a pioneer in the field of optimization, and Dr. Alkis Vazacopoulos, a leader in the industry, markets IBM® ILOG® CPLEX Optimization Studio ®, the world’s leading software product for modeling and optimization. CPLEX Optimization Studio solves large-scale optimization problems and enables better business decisions and resulting financial benefits in areas such as supply chain management, operations, healthcare, retail, transportation, logistics and asset management. It has been applied in sectors as diverse as manufacturing, processing, distribution, retailing, transport, finance and investment. Palisade Corporation Booth #8 www.palisade.com
Palisade Corporation is the maker of the market leading risk and decision analysis software @RISK and the DecisionTools® Suite. Virtually all Palisade software adds in to Microsoft Excel, ensuring flexibility, ease-of-use, and broad appeal across a wide range of industry sectors. Free trial downloads at www.palisade.com. Princeton Consultants, Inc.
Lumina Decision Systems develops innovative software for analytics and decision support, notably the Analytica suite of products, about which PC Week said, “Everything that’s wrong with the common spreadsheet is fixed in Analytica.” Lumina also provides training and consulting to help organizations build effective decision tools. Lumina has won the Decision Analysis Practice Award from the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society and Society for Decision Professionals for the year’s best application of decision analysis. MathWorks
Booth #26 www.princeton.com
Founded in 1980, Princeton Consultants blends advanced analytics, data science, software development and management consulting to help industry leaders and fastgrowing innovators transform performance. Based on our track record of developing and implementing critical operational systems, we review and improve optimization and predictive analytics models through our quality assurance service. We are a member of the INFORMS Roundtable. Provalis Research
Booth #25 www.mathworks.com
The MATLAB and Simulink product families are fundamental applied math and computational tools at the world’s educational institutions. Adopted by more than 5,000 universities and colleges, MathWorks products accelerate the pace of learning, teaching, and research in engineering and science. MathWorks products also help prepare students for careers in industry worldwide, where the tools are widely used for data analysis, mathematical modeling, and algorithm development in collaborative research and new product development. Application areas include data analytics, mechatronics, communication systems, image processing, computational finance and computational biology.
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Booth #46 www.provalisresearch.com
Provalis Research is a leading developer of text analytics software with ground-breaking qualitative and quantitative analysis programs, such as QDA Miner, an innovative mixedmethods qualitative data analysis software; WordStat, a powerful add-on module for computer assisted content analysis and text mining; and Simstat, an easy yet powerful statistical software. One of the most distinctive features of these tools is their interoperability, allowing researchers to integrate numerical and textual data into a single project file and to seamlessly move back and forth between quantitative and qualitative data analysis, as well as to easily explore relationships between numerical and textual data.
Responsive Learning Technologies Booth #41 www.responsive.net
Responsive Learning Technologies provides compelling business simulations to teach Operations Management and Supply Chain Management in a dynamic context and adaptive self-study software to help students prepare for beginning a degree program. Our software has enriched courses at the undergraduate, graduate, and executive levels for thousands of students at hundreds of institutions in dozens of countries. Our products are developed with leading scholars, to achieve well-defined learning objectives. SAS Booth #49 www.sas.com
The effective use of analytics is more important than ever for today’s organizations. The most effective analytics are coordinated, and the best and most complete set of coordinated analytic capabilities comes from SAS. Data integration, statistics, data and text mining, econometrics, and forecasting integrate deeply with operations research features like optimization, simulation, and scheduling. SAS helps organizations around the world build analytic models, populate them with relevant data and insights, communicate recommended decisions effectively, and surface these capabilities within accessible, business-oriented interfaces. See how SAS can help you understand the past and present, anticipate the future, and make better decisions. JMP, a Division of SAS Booth #48 www.jmp.com
JMP® statistical discovery software from SAS is the tool of choice for scientists, engineers, and other data explorers worldwide. JMP links dynamic data visualization with powerful statistics, in memory and on the desktop. Interactive and visual, JMP reveals insights that raw tables of numbers or static graphs tend to hide. JMP simplifies data access, cleanup and processing, and makes it easy to share results. It includes comprehensive capabilities for: • Statistical analysis • Design of experiments • Multivariate analysis • Quality and reliability analysis • Scripting, graphing and charting, and more. Savitz Consulting Booth #47 www.savitzconsulting.com
Savitz Research Solutions is a marketing research consultancy who has served leading brands in domestic and global markets for over 30 years. We engage some 300 of the top market research and management science consultants in the U.S. and beyond. Clients hire us for individual projects as well as by the hour, short-term assignment, temp-to-perm, and even full time. Join or hire our elite consultants for your next business challenge! SIAM Booth #5 www.siam.org
Visit the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM, Booth #5) to check out our new publications, including recent titles in the MOS-SIAM Series on Optimization, such as “First-Order Methods in Optimization” (Beck) and “Advances and Trends in Optimization with Engineering Applications” (Terlaky et al.), and other bestselling SIAM books, all available at a conference discount. You’ll also find sample issues of SIAM’s renowned journals, including SIOPT, along with information and membership applications for anyone interested in joining SIAM. And don’t forget to pick up a copy of SIAM News for the road. Simio LLC Booth #53 www.simio.com
Simio Simulation and Scheduling Software is the most advanced solution on the market. With simulation, it is the only software that is fully object oriented with process and
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objects being defined graphically with no programming. Unlike other scheduling software, Simio allows you to introduce risk into your production schedule with its patented Risk Based Planning and Scheduling. This dual function in Simio not only helps you improve your business performance from a facility design perspective, but also helps you maximize business results by optimizing the use of critical resources and assessing the risk associated with operational decisions.
Management, a Master of Science in Engineering, a Master of Science in Operations Management, and a Project Management Graduate Certificate. All programs can be completed entirely online and are accredited by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.
Springer
Systems Engineering is the process by which we understand a complex need and then develop, test, and deploy elegant and harmonious solutions to meet that need. We have aligned five of the world’s most renowned engineering departments at Cornell University to offer both the oncampus and distance learning MEng degree and our newly rolled PhD. This remarkable combination is at the core of our interdisciplinary approach.
Booth #39 & #40 www.springer.com
Looking to publish your research? Discover Springer’s print and electronic publication services, including open access! Get high-quality review, maximum readership and rapid distribution. Visit our booth or springer.com/authors. You can also browse key titles in your field and buy (e) books at discount prices. With Springer you are in good company. Syncopation Software Booth #13 www.syncopation.com
Syncopation Software, publisher of DPL and DPMX, has been an innovator in the decision & risk analytic software space since its founding in 2003. Syncopation’s tools, services, and solutions are the embodiment of our commitment to holistic decision quality. The Syncopation approach combines bestin-class analytics with a pragmatic mindset that focuses the available resources where they will have the most impact. Whether you face a capital investment strategy decision, an environmental clean-up with multiple attributes, an adversarial problem with multiple, non-aligned decision makers, or an R&D portfolio prioritization — Syncopation has a proven solution backed by solid decision analysis principles that can help you create value. Tableau Software Booth #35 www.tableau.com
Data is everywhere. But it can be hard to make sense of it all. Tableau enables you to easily analyze data, create dashboards and visualizations, and share them with anyone. It’s fast, insightful analytics that work the way you think. Tableau is free for students and instructors worldwide. Taylor & Francis Booth #9 www.taylorandfrancis.com
Taylor & Francis partners with world-class authors, from leading scientists and researchers, to scholars and professionals operating at the top of their fields. Together, we publish in all areas of the Humanities, Social Sciences, Behavioural Sciences, Science, Technology and Medicine sectors. We are one of the world’s leading publishers of scholarly journals, books, eBooks, text books and reference works. Turner Booth #11 www.turner.com
We are better known as the folks who bring you CNN, HLN, TCM, TNT, TBS, truTV, Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Boomerang, Turner Sports and so much more! We create premium content and deliver exceptional experiences to fans whenever and wherever they consume content. These efforts are fueled by data-driven insights and industry-leading technology. From cutting-edge breaking news stories, up-to-the-minute sports coverage, and the characters we grew up loving on to the shows we love today, Turner continues to be the gold standard in first class television programming and a demonstrated leader in digital content. We tell the stories the world wants to hear. Won’t you be a part of our story? University of Arkansas Booth #43 http://engineering.uark.edu/academics/distanceeducation.php
The University of Arkansas College of Engineering offers a variety of programs designed to meet a diversity of student needs to include a Master of Science in Engineering
Cornell University Booth #20 www.systemseng.cornell.edu/
Didi Chuxing Booth #6 www.didichuxing.com/en/
Didi Chuxing is the world’s leading mobile transportation platform. The company offers a full range of mobile tech-based mobility options for nearly 400 million users. As many as 20 million rides were completed on DiDi’s platform on a daily basis, making DiDi the world’s second largest online transaction platform. DiDi acquired Uber China in August 2016. DiDi is committed to working with communities and partners to solve the world’s transportation, environmental and employment challenges using big data-driven deep-learning algorithms that optimize resource allocation. In 2016, Didi was named one of the World’s 50 Smartest Companies by MIT Technology Review. University at Buffalo, Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering Booth #3 www.ise.buffalo.edu/
The Industrial & Systems Engineering Department at UB, ranked among the top 30 programs nationally, offers BS, MS, and PhD degrees, along with a five-year BS + MBA
option. Undergraduate students may select a minor in manufacturing, while an advanced manufacturing certificate is available for grad students. Graduate degree areas include operations research, production systems, human factors & ergonomics, and data & information fusion. Our 21 full-time faculty specialize in security and defense applications, health systems, transportation & logistics, and advanced manufacturing & sustainable manufacturing design. University of Houston Booth #37 www.ie.uh.edu/
Ranked among the top 50 best programs in the country, the Industrial Engineering Department at the University of Houston Cullen College of Engineering consists of topperforming students and world-class faculty members. UH industrial engineering students are taught by professors who are actively conducting research in the areas of healthcare and medical decision-making, homeland and port security, energy, reliability and maintenance, logistics and transportation, supply chains and manufacturing. The UH Industrial Engineering Department, led by chairman Gino Lim, offers B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in industrial engineering, as well as an innovative B.S./MBA program and accelerated B.S./M.S. program. Graduates of the Industrial Engineering Department can be found optimizing processes, people, machines, energy and information in industry, government and academia across the Houston region and around the world. Wiley Booth #22 www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/
Wiley is a global provider of knowledge and knowledgeenabled services in areas of research, professional practice, and education. We develop digital education, learning, and assessment and certification tools, partner with societies, and support researchers to communicate discoveries. Our digital content, books, and 1600 online journals build on a 200 year heritage of quality publishing.
Roundtable retreat report The Roundtable summer retreat was held July 30-31 at the Boar’s Head Inn and Resort in Charlottesville, Va. The 30 attendees included Roundtable member representatives and alternates, invited speakers and Roundtable guests. The meeting theme was “Leading and Training Technical Teams.” Featured speakers and their presentations included: • Dr. Steve Spear, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and HVE, LLC, “Discovering Your Way to Greatness: Creating the Learning Dynamics Necessary for Competing in a Fast-Paced Hyper-Connected World” • Adm. Arnold Lotring, U.S. Navy (ret), “Technical Training Concepts for the 21st Century Work Force” • Dr. Nelson Baker, dean of professional education and associate professor, School of Civil and Environmental
Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, “Higher Education Roles and Relationships – Things Must Change” • Adam Hall, senior vice president, SS&C Learning Solutions, and chairman, Nervanix, LLC, “The ‘So What?’ Factor: Exploring the Nexus of Attention, Metacognition and Machine Learning” A panel of Roundtable members including Pooja Dewan (BNSF), David Hunter (Institute for Defense Analyses), Jonathan Owen (General Motors), Stephen Sashihara (Princeton Consultants) and Jeffrey Winters (UPS) described what their organizations are doing in leading and training technical teams and their challenges. The Sunday afternoon outing was a guided tour of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. ORMS October 2017
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new s People Robert F. Bordley, a longtime member of INFORMS, was named professor of practice (or clinical professor) at the University of Michigan where he is director of the master’s degree in Robert F. Bordley systems engineering. A Fellow of both INFORMS and the American Statistical Association, Dr. Bordley has been integrating decision analysis, Bayesian statistics and marketing science into the systems engineering curriculum. As a certified analytics professional, expert systems engineering professional, project management professional and professional statistician, Bordley is also integrating certification training into the curriculum. Bordley was formerly a program director at the National Science Foundation and a technical fellow at General Motors, where he worked in research, portfolio management, strategic planning, marketing and quality engineering. Bordley will also continue to support Booz-Allen Hamilton as an advisor, where he has worked for seven years. MIT professor Richard Larson, a longtime member, past president a n d Fe l l o w o f INFORMS, is profiled in the September/ October 2017 issue of Popular Science Richard Larson for his seminal paper and research on queueing that spans several decades. Widely known in the O.R. community as “Dr. Queue,” Larson recalls in the article “the line that broke him” – an extended and seemingly unfair wait at a popular department store – that
inspired his 1987 paper, “The Psychology of Queueing and Social Justice,” in which he famously “highlighted the importance of fairness and feedback to a person’s waiting experience.” As the article notes, “It wasn’t the 30-minute wait that bothered (Larson). It was how people who arrived after him had beat him to the exit – and that he had not expected a delay.” The rest, as they say, is queueing theory history, thanks to Professor Larson’s well-documented research in this area. James J. Cochran, professor of applied statistics at the University of Alabama and a longtime member of INFORMS, accepted an appointment as associate dean James J. Cochran of research for the Department of Information Systems, Statistics and Management Science within the university’s Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration. Cochran previously served as interim chair of his academic department before transitioning to his new position, where he will be responsible for developing, implementing and overseeing programs to increase the college’s sponsored and published research productivity. “I am very excited about this new opportunity and the challenges it will provide,” Cochran said. An active member of INFORMS, Cochran received the INFORMS Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice, served for five years as editor in chief of INFORMS Transactions on Education, and helped organize the INFORMS Teaching Effectiveness Colloquium series and annual Case Competition. He is also co-founder of Statistics Without Borders. ORMS
Check out the September/October 2017 Issue of Analytics Now Available at: www.analytics-magazine.org
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October 2017
Meetings INFORMS Annual & International Meetings Oct. 22-25, 2017 INFORMS Annual Meeting
George R. Brown Convention Center & Hilton Americas, Houston Chair: William Klimack, Chevron http://meetings.informs.org/houston2017/
2018 April 15-17, 2018 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics & Operations Research Marriott Waterfront Hotel, Baltimore Chair: Jack Kloeber, Kromite, LLC http://meetings.informs.org/analytics2018/
June 17-20, 2018 INFORMS International Conference
Taipei International Convention Center, Taipei, Taiwan Chair: Grace Lin, Asia University http://meetings2.informs.org/2018international/
Nov. 4-7, 2018 INFORMS Annual Meeting
Phoenix Convention Center & Sheraton Phoenix Hotel, Phoenix Chair: Young-Jun Son, University of Arizona http://meetings.informs.org/phoenix2018
INFORMS Community Meetings 2017 Dec. 3-6 Winter Simulation Conference
Red Rock Casino Resort & Spa, Las Vegas Chair: Ernest H. Page, MITRE www.wintersim.org
2018 March 23-25 INFORMS Optimization Society Conference
University of Colorado, Denver Chair: Stephen C. Billups, University of Colorado-Denver http://orwe.mines.edu/conference/info.html
May 23-25 14th INFORMS Telecommunications Conference University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Chair: Stefan Voss https://www.bwl.uni-hamburg.de/en/iwi/forschung/ konferenzen/informs2018.html
June 14-16 INFORMS Marketing Science Conference Temple University, Philadelphia Chair: Xueming Luo, Temple University http://connect.informs.org/isms/conferences
Dec. 9-12 Winter Simulation Conference
The Swedish Exhibition & Congress Center Gothenburg, Sweden Chair: Bjorn Johansson, Chalmers University of Technology
Go to www.informs.org/Conf for a searchable INFORMS Conference Calendar.
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DEA SolverPro has been widely used all over the world. In response to numerous customer requests, we have released Version 14 with SBM_Bounded Models. On top of more than 192 models in 53 clusters, Version 14 added a new model, called SBM_Bounded. The basic Slacksbased Measure (SBM) Models usually report the worst efficiency scores for inefficient DMUs, i.e. the projected point is the farthest one on the associated efficient frontier. The SBM_Bounded Models set bounds to slacks, i.e. we project inefficient DMUs by putting a reduction bound (%) to each input-slack and an expansion bound (%) to each output-slack. Thus, coupled with the SBM_Max model, the projected point serves to offer more practical and useful improvements (Kaizen). Note detailed manual and licensing options are available. Visit our website for pricing and ordering information.
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57 Geer Mountain Software Corporation statfit@geerms.com www.geerms.com 9, 21, 25, INFORMS 27, 31, 35, informs@informs.org 37, 58, 59, meetings@informs.org 70 www.informs.org
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Industry News Frontline Systems announces nextgen Solver add-in for optimization Frontline Systems, developer of the “classic Solver” add-in that ships with desktop Microsoft Excel, announced a newly enhanced, free Solver add-in that works equally well in desktop Excel 2016, Excel Online and Excel for iPad – and handles the smallest to the largest, most challenging optimization models. Upon release, users can obtain Solver in the Microsoft Office Store. More than 100,000 existing “cloud Solver” users will receive the new version automatically. “Today Frontline offers tools for the full spectrum of predictive and prescriptive analytics, but we’re still best known for Solver,” says Daniel Fylstra, president of Frontline Systems.“In our third-generation free version for cloud use, we’ve greatly extended Solver’s flexibility and power for everyone.” Frontline’s “next-gen” Solver, designed for mobile devices and touch screens as well, appears in a “modeless” Task Pane to the right of the spreadsheet, where nearly all user selections are made and messages appear.
AIMMS announces new WebUI features AIMMS announced a number of new WebUI features to improve usability for both App developers and end users and significantly enhance how users interact with AIMMS Apps.The features include: • A new page manager and navigation menu that allows App developers to easily create and manage page trees and generate context-specific navigation menu bars at the top of the screen. • Wizard support, enabling the App developer to easily create wizards with a sequence of pages and entry and exit procedures. Using wizards, developers can guide end users to complete even the most complex tasks. • The Scalar widget now allows the end user to view, enter or edit longer text strings, such as descriptions. • A number of changes that make it easier for App developers to work on projects with a WebUI user interface.
Simio simulation yields insights into retirement savings Retirement Clearinghouse, LLC used Simio simulation software to reveal that widespread adoption of plan-to-plan transfers for small-balance accounts could generate more than $115 billion in new employer-plan savings for the current and next generation of plan participants. The simulation is the first time discrete-event simulation has been used to model the effects of America’s mobile workforce in the retirement industry. Retirement Clearinghouse used Simio to model the effect of leakage – when employees cash out retirement accounts upon switching jobs – for those retirement accounts containing less than $5,000. J. Spencer Williams, founder, president and CEO of Retirement Clearinghouse, envisions many other opportunities for Simio simulation to provide a picture of the industry.“We are likely to continue building out the mobile work force model so that eventually we will have a clear picture of the full impact that portability solution will have on the industry,” he says. ORMS
CALL FOR APPLICATIONS 2018
DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS IS TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2017 Are you the best in OR/MS/Analytics education? The UPS George D. Smith Prize is created in the spirit of strengthening ties between industry and the schools of higher education that graduate young practitioners of operations research. INFORMS, with the help of The Practice Section, will award the prize to an academic department or program for the effective and innovative preparation of students to be good practitioners of operations research, management science, or analytics. The prize will include a trophy and $10,000 award. The UPS George D. Smith Prize will be announced at the 2018 Edelman Gala at the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research, in Baltimore, MD.
For more information, questions can be sent to Rina Schneur, 2018 Smith Prize Chair at rinarsg@gmail.com.
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October 2017
2017 UPS Smith Prize Winners United States Air Force Academy, Operations Research Program
ing ties hen t g en str
ups george d smith prize ormstoday.informs.org
BOOST OR/MS PRACTICE
The INFORMS Practice Section is on a mission to comprehensively support and advance practice in all types of organizations—business, government, military, healthcare, universities, and nonprofits.
Our Members • • • • • •
(Dues are just $20 annually)
Develop and strengthen relationships with others interested in advancing practice Receive twice per year newsletters with thoughtful articles from well-known practitioners Enjoy a reception for members and guests at the INFORMS Annual Meeting Access numerous networking, volunteering, and leadership opportunities Support real-world applications – without which the profession would not exist Contribute to conferences and journals
Networking & Volunteering
(We are currently seeking volunteers to improve our web and social media presence!)
Meet people in your field and enhance your own skills by getting involved in section activities. • • • •
Organize the Practice Section track at the Annual Meeting Judge one of the award competitions we support Serve on the Edelman Gala Committee Contribute to our online LinkedIn community
Awards
One of our most important functions is stewarding three prestigious award competitions for INFORMS. • Franz Edelman Award: Outstanding achievement in OR/MS and advanced analytics • Daniel H. Wagner Prize: Excellence in O.R. practice • UPS George D. Smith Prize: Preparing students to practice OR/MS and analytics
Learn More
Please contact the Chair of the INFORMS Section on Practice: John Milne, Clarkson University, jmilne@clarkson.edu
http://meetings.informs.org/nashville2016 Visit http://connect.informs.org/practice/home
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UMASS
AMHERST Tenure Track in Operations and Information Management Isenberg School of Management University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst is a land-grant university, the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts system, and the largest public university in New England. The University offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in 88 undergraduate and 72 graduate areas of study, through eight schools and colleges. In a 2009 article for MSN.com, Amherst was ranked first in Best College Towns in the United States. In 2012, U.S. News and World Report ranked Amherst among the Top 10 Great College Towns in America. The Operations and Information Management (OIM) Department of the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst invites applications for a tenure track position in Operations and Information Management to begin September 1, 2018. The rank for the position is Assistant Professor. Candidates are required to hold a Ph.D. in management science, operations management, operations research, or an OM-related discipline by August 31, 2018. The position is focused in the area of service systems and candidates must show evidence of research and teaching interests in areas of service operations, design and optimization of service systems, and service quality; preferably, research that applies to a spectrum of industries. Candidates must have expertise or evident potential in providing quality teaching at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Potential or demonstrated ability to teach in both face-to-face and distance education formats to MBA students with considerable work experience is highly desirable. The ideal candidates for the position will have active programs of research with a demonstrated ability for high quality scholarly publications. Evidence of engagement with the business community and industry is desirable. Initial teaching responsibilities will be focused on developing and delivering innovative instruction in design and optimization of service systems and operations. The Operations and Information department includes 11 tenure track faculty and three full-time lecturers who play active roles in undergraduate and graduate education across the Isenberg School. The department offers a thriving undergraduate major in Operations and Information Management with tracks in Information Systems, Supply Chain Management and Integrated Operations and Information Management, contributes to a highly reputed MBA program, and offers both IS and Management Science Ph.D. specializations in the doctoral program in Business Administration. Department faculty are committed to conducting research that furthers state-of-the-art knowledge in their respective areas of expertise. Their research has appeared in top-ranked journals such as Production and Operations Management, Management Science, Operations Research, INFORMS Journal on Computing, European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of the Operational Research Society, as well as in MIS Quarterly and Information Systems Research. For more information about the department and faculty research, please visit: https://www.isenberg.umass.edu/programs/depts/oim To apply for the position, please submit a letter of interest, curriculum vitae, and the names and contact information of three references, online at: http://umass.interviewexchange.com/jobofferdetails.jsp?JOBID=85799 Evaluation of applications will begin November 1, 2017, and will continue until a suitable candidate pool has been identified. Rank and salary will be commensurate with qualifications; salary and benefits are competitive. We are seeking talented applicants qualified for an assistant professor position. Under exceptional circumstances, highly qualified candidates at other ranks may receive consideration. The University is committed to active recruitment of a diverse faculty and student body. The University of Massachusetts Amherst is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer of women, minorities, protected veterans, and individuals with disabilities and encourages applications from these and other protected group members. Because broad diversity is essential to an inclusive climate and critical to the University's goals of achieving excellence in all areas, we will holistically assess the many qualifications of each applicant and favorably consider an individual's record working with students and colleagues with broadly diverse perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds in educational, research or other work activities. We will also favorably consider experience overcoming or helping others overcome barriers to an academic degree and career.
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The Department of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering (SSIE) in the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering is expanding further and seeks three (3) Assistant Professors and one (1) Endowed Full Professor. Two of these positions are seek research experience that complements the Binghamton University Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence* (TAEs: http://www.binghamton.edu/tae/). The following positions are sought to start in Spring or Fall 2018: • Assistant Professor – Healthcare Systems Engineering – 2 positions* • Assistant Professor – Advanced Manufacturing – 1 position • Endowed Full Professor – Systems Science – 1 position Positions involve: teaching at all levels (undergraduate courses through advanced graduate courses); establishing externally funded theoretical and applied research in the respective disciplines. The ideal candidates must have (i) an earned doctorate in industrial engineering or the applied sciences, (ii) excellent leadership skills, and (iii) superb records of research, including garnering funding and scholarly publications. Teaching experience is preferred. SSIE offers a BS degree in industrial and systems engineering (ISE) and MS and PhD degrees in Systems Science (SS) and ISE. Attracting over $3M dollars in research funding per year, our established faculty works collaboratively with over 30 sponsors from industry and federal agencies. SSIE also offers a cutting edge executive health systems program in Manhattan. More details are available at http://www.binghamton.edu/ssie/ For more details of each position and to submit the application online, please visit http://binghamton.interviewexchange.com Review of applications begins October 6, 2017 and continues until each position is filled. The State University of New York at Binghamton – Binghamton University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. Women and Historically Underrepresented Minority Applicants are Strongly Encouraged to Apply. October 2017
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The Computing and Mathematical Sciences (CMS) department at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position. CMS is a unique environment where innovative, interdisciplinary, and foundational research is conducted in a collegial atmosphere. Candidates in all areas of applied and computational mathematics, computer science and statistics are invited to apply. Areas of interest include (but are not limited to) scientific computing, optimization, statistics, probability, networked systems, control and dynamical systems, robotics, theory of computation, security, privacy, machine learning, and algorithmic economics. In addition, we welcome applications from candidates who have demonstrated strong connections between computer science, engineering and applied mathematics, and to other fields such as the physical, biological, and social sciences. A commitment to world-class research as well as high-quality teaching and mentoring is expected. The initial appointment at the Assistant-Professor level is for four years and is contingent upon the completion of a Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field. Applications will be reviewed beginning November 15, 2017, and applicants are encouraged to have all their application materials on file by this date. For a list of documents required and full instructions on how to apply on-line, please visit http://www.cms.caltech.edu/search. Questions about the application process may be directed to: search@cms.caltech.edu. We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.
APPLICATIONS INVITED FOR FACULTY POSITIONS IN INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT SCIENCES The Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences Department at Northwestern University invites applications and nominations for two faculty positions beginning September, 2018. The positions are at the Assistant Professor or Associate Professor level. The searches are broad, with a preference for candidates in the following two areas: (1) operations and logistics in services, healthcare, ecommerce, manufacturing, or other application domains, and (2) applied probability, simulation, optimization and machine learning. A strong commitment to rigorous and relevant research is essential. The hires would have opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration via broad University research initiatives in Optimization and Statistical Learning (www.osl.northwestern.edu), Engineering and Healthcare (www.ceh.northwestern.edu), and Transportation and Logistics (www.transportation.northwestern.edu).
. The IEMS Department offers an undergraduate program, a Ph.D. program, a full-time professional master’s degree in analytics and a part-time professional master’s degree in engineering management. Both the undergraduate and graduate programs have been consistently ranked among the top ten by US News & World Report. Submit application electronically at www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/industrial/career/. Materials to be uploaded include a cover letter and a curriculum vitae detailing educational background, research and work experience. Applicants at the assistant professor level should also include one research paper, a statement of their current and future research program, and a teaching statement. Candidates will be asked to provide contact information for three references on the application site. To receive full consideration, all materials should be received by December 1, 2017. To be considered for a meeting at INFORMS, please submit material by October 9, 2017.
Professor of Professional Practice in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research The Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) at Columbia Engineering invites applications for a Professor of Professional Practice in Financial Engineering starting in the 2018-2019 academic year or earlier. Professor of Professional Practice are full-time non-tenure-track faculty members who have substantial professional expertise. The IEOR Department is looking for applicants with a recognizable reputation reflecting publication, scholarship and distinguished professional experience in the field of financial engineering. Candidates for this position must hold a PhD in Operations Research, Financial Mathematics, or related disciplines. A successful candidate will be involved in all aspects of the educational mission of the Department in the field of Financial Engineering, which includes developing curriculum and courses relevant to the financial services industry, executive programs for practitioners, and developing industry contacts for sponsored projects and project-based courses. In addition, we expect a successful candidate to help with all aspects of the MS in Financial Engineering program, including admissions and student advising, and help organize seminars and conferences, and recruiting industry affiliates for the Center for Financial Engineering in the IEOR Department, and the Center for Financial and Business Analytics in the Data Science Institute. The Department is especially interested in qualified candidates who can contribute, through their research, teaching, and/or service, to the diversity and excellence of the academic community. For additional information and to apply, please see: http://engineering.columbia.edu/faculty-job-opportunities. Applications should be submitted electronically and include the following: curriculum-vitae including a statement of teaching interests and plans, and contact information for three experts who can provide letters of recommendation. At least three of the letters of recommendation must address teaching ability. Candidates will be considered on a rolling basis. Candidates that are invited to interview will be required to give a 50-minute technical presentation. Applicants can consult www.ieor.columbia.edu for more information about the department. Columbia University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer—Race/Gender/Disability/Veteran
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,,,.
From treading water to solving global problems. The UPS ORION (On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation) team is looking for Change Makers ...people who want to do things that have not been done before. UPS's ORION system, the winner of the 2016 Franz
Edelman Award, is considered to be one of the largest O.R. projects in the world. It uses expansive fleet telematics
and advanced algorithms to efficiently deliver more than 16 million packages every day.
Join this growing, diverse team that uses cutting-edge technology to implement practical solutions to business challenges. We are forward thinking while enjoying a culture that provides the highest levels of organizational visibility and support to what we do.
Our Senior Operations Research Analyst professionals: • Model UPS business problems with the objective of developing planning and control systems that improve the efficiency of UPS operations. • Research and develop optimization algorithms that have specific applications in UPS package pickup and delivery operations, transport and sort operations, and logistics and warehousing services. • Work on real-world challenges applying advanced O.R. methodology
Text "UPSOR" to 33588 or Visit UPSjobs.com • By participating, you consent to receive text messages sent by an automatic telephone dialing system. Consent to these terms is not condition of purchase. Message and data rates may apply. T&C Privacy Policy: www.SMS-terms.com
Get there
UPS is an equal opportunity employer - race/color/religion/sex/national origin/veteran/disability/sexual orientation/gender identity.
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TENURE-TRACK FACULTY POSITION IN OPERATIONS RESEARCH The Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University seeks candidates for a tenure-track faculty position in Operations Research, preferably at the Assistant Professor level, beginning in September 2018. Applicants are expected to have a Ph.D. in Operations Research or a related field at the time of appointment, a demonstrated potential for outstanding research, and strong teaching skills. The specialty of the candidate may be in the broad area of Optimization with connections to Business Analytics and Machine Learning. The ideal candidate will be able to contribute to the schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s analytical approach to business education, and engage in cross-disciplinary research activities within the Tepper School and Carnegie Mellon University. Applicants should submit an application letter, curriculum vitae, up to three publications or working papers, research and teaching statements, and three recommendation letters. Questions about the application can be addressed to Mr. Philip Conley at orgroup@andrew.cmu.edu or 412-268-6212. To receive full consideration, applications must be submitted by December 8, 2017.
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey â&#x20AC;&#x201C; New Brunswick Campus Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering Faculty Positions The Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) at Rutgers University is pleased to announce its search for multiple outstanding tenure-track hires, with position start date of Fall 2018. We are especially interested in candidates whose work contributes to advances in manufacturing, energy or healthcare fields. Candidates must have a Ph.D. in Engineering and have excellent verbal and written communication skills. Candidates must also have demonstrated capability and interests in fundamental contributions to engineering design, automation sciences, computational sciences and advanced simulations, and/or robotics. For the manufacturing position, preference is given to candidates with expertise or with a strong desire to contribute to advances in bio and pharmaceutical manufacturing fields, medical devices and advanced manufacturing processes and fields of applications. For the energy position, candidates with strong background in engineering and technology principles of distributed energy resources, microgrids, smart cities and IOT integration are preferred. For the healthcare position, we are particularly interested in candidates with strong background and desire to contribute to AI, Big Data, and Robotics in healthcare applications.
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Candidates are expected to develop an internationally recognized and externally funded research program; adopt innovative educational practices as they develop and teach graduate and undergraduate courses; advise and mentor graduate and undergraduate students; and participate in local and external service activities. Preferred rank is at the Assistant Professor level, however, applications at higher ranks will be considered for applicants with exceptional records.
Application Procedure: Faculty applications and all supporting documents must be submitted to: http://apply.interfolio.com/45280.
Interested candidates are encouraged to visit the ISE Department website ise.rutgers.edu and the School of Engineering website soe.rutgers.edu.
Carnegie Mellon University is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to increasing the diversity of its community on a range of intellectual and cultural dimensions. Carnegie Mellon welcomes faculty applicants who will contribute to this diversity through their research, teaching and service, including women, members of minority groups, protected veterans, individuals with disabilities, and others who would contribute in different ways.
Interested applicants should submit: (1) a cover letter, (2) a Curriculum Vitae, (3) a one-page research statement, (4) a one-page teaching statement, and (5) a list of 3-5 references. Send application and questions to http://jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/52464. Rutgers is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer, and is committed to providing employment opportunities to minorities, women, veterans, disabled individuals, and other protected groups.
Lecturer in Discipline Position in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research The Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia Engineeringinvites applications for a Lecturer in Discipline position. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis with a start date of January 2018. Lecturers in Discipline are full-time non-tenure-track faculty members who meet a need for instruction in specialized fields. The Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department is committed to hiring outstanding teachers to support the growing needs of its exceptionally strong undergraduate and MS programs. The IEOR department promotes a culture of innovation and experimentation in teaching including blended and online learning environments. We seek candidates with teaching interests at the intersection of Operations Research, Data Science, and Optimization. The candidate will be responsible for teaching courses in data science and optimization at the undergraduate and masters level. Some of the courses will be aimed at a broad engineering audience. The candidate should be comfortable teaching both mathematical foundations of data science and optimization, and the computational and programming skills needed to work with data and to model and solve optimization problems. Candidates must hold a PhD or its professional equivalent in Operations Research, Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or related disciplines. Since this is a teaching position, applicants must have excellent teaching credentials and communication skills. Experience with blended and online learning is a plus. Columbia fosters multidisciplinary research and encourages collaborations with academic departments and units across the university. The Department is especially interested in qualified candidates who can contribute, through their research, teaching, and/or service, to the diversity and excellence of the academic community. For additional information and to apply, please see: http://engineering.columbia.edu/faculty-job-opportunities. Applications should be submitted electronically and include the following: curriculum-vitae including a statement of teaching interests and plans, and contact information for three experts who can provide letters of recommendation. At least three of the letters of recommendation must address teaching ability. Candidates will be considered on a rolling basis. Candidates that are invited to interview will be required to give a 50-minute technical presentation. Applicants can consult www.ieor.columbia.edu for more information about the department. Columbia University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employerâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Race/Gender/Disability/Veteran
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ASSISTANT PROFESSORS, DEPARTMENT OF INDUSTRIAL AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON MICHAEL G. FOSTER SCHOOL OF BUSINESS FACULTY POSITION IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS The Information Systems and Operations Management (ISOM) Department at the University of Washington Michael G. Foster School of Business invites applications for two full-time (100% FTE) positions: one tenure-track Assistant Professor (0116) and one open position (-up to- tenured Associate Professor (0102)) in the Information Systems area. These are nine month appointments of indefinite length. The ISOM Department offers courses in Information Systems, Operations Management, and Quantitative Methods in Foster’s undergraduate, MBA (including Executive MBA), MSIS, MSCM and Ph.D. programs. University of Washington faculty engage in teaching, research and service. Duties include teaching at all levels and research leading to publication in leading academic journals. Our faculty enjoy close ties with the local business community as well as other departments at the University of Washington, one of the leading public universities in the nation. Applicants must possess a doctorate in Information Systems or a related field. Attach the following items: detailed curriculum vita, research papers and publications, information about teaching experience and performance, and the names and contact information of at least 3 references. Applicants for the Assistant position must possess the degree by the date of appointment or will be hired in an acting title for up to one year. Apply at: https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/9440. The committee will begin reviewing applications on October 15 to short list INFORMS interviews. The final application deadline is December 1, 2017. Department representatives will attend and interview a shortlist of applicants during the INFORMS meeting in Houston in October and the ICIS Conference in Seoul in December. For further inquiries, contact the committee chair, Professor Yong Tan (ytan@uw.edu). The University of Washington is an affirmative action and equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, age, protected veterans or disable status, or genetic information.
Applications and nominations are invited for two tenure-track Assistant Professor positions in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The ISE Department offers BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Industrial Engineering and MS and PhD degrees with an Engineering Management concentration. The Department currently has a total of 10 tenured or tenure-track faculty members and an enrollment of approximately 321 students, including 162 UG, 106 MS and 53 PhD students. The Department relocated to the new $25-million John D. Tickle Engineering Building in Summer 2013. The Department is entering a new era and is expected to play an important role in the Tickle College of Engineering's vision to become a leading research institution and to take advantage of unique opportunities for research partnerships with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Y-12 security complex and the National Institute for Computational Sciences. ISE also actively interacts with on-campus centers including the Reliability and Maintainability Center, the Center for Transportation Research, the state’s Institute for Public Service, and the Center for Industrial Services. For additional information about the Department, please visit http://ise.utk.edu/. Available effective August 1, 2018, this position will include a competitive compensation package commensurate with experience and qualifications. The successful candidate will be expected to establish and maintain a scholarly, externally funded, research program; to supervise graduate students; to develop and teach courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels; and to provide service to the Department. An earned doctorate in Industrial Engineering, Systems Engineering, Operations Research, or a closely related field is required. The successful applicants will have strong problem-solving and communication skills and the ability to work in an interdisciplinary environment. A strong commitment to teaching excellence and publications in leading journals are expected. Preferred qualifications are teaching experience, industrial experience, and demonstrated ability to attract external funding. Individuals interested in applying should submit as a single PDF file consisting of: a letter of interest addressing qualifications, research interests and teaching interests; curriculum vitae; and the names and contact information for at least 3 professional references to the search chair, Dr. Mingzhou Jin, at isesearch@utk.edu. Review of applications will begin on December 1, 2017 and continue until the position is filled. The University of Tennessee is an EEO/AA/Title VI/Title IX/Section 504/ADA/ADEA institution in the provision of its education and employment programs and services. All qualified applicants will receive equal consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, sex, pregnancy, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, physical or mental disability, or covered veteran status.
Lecturer in Discipline Position in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research The Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia Engineering invites applications for a Lecturer in Discipline position starting in the 2018-19 academic year or earlier. Lecturers in Discipline are full-time non-tenure-track faculty members who meet a need for instruction in specialized fields. The Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department is committed to hiring outstanding teachers to support the growing needs of its exceptionally strong undergraduate and MS programs. The IEOR department promotes a culture of innovation and experimentation in teaching including blended and online learning environments. We seek candidates with teaching interests at the intersection of Financial Engineering, and Analytics. Candidates must hold a PhD or its professional equivalent in Operations Research, Financial Mathematics, or related disciplines. Since this is a teaching position, applicants must have excellent teaching credentials and communication skills. Experience with blended and online learning is a plus. A successful candidate will be involved in all aspects of the educational mission of the Department in the field of Financial Engineering, which includes developing curriculum and courses relevant to the financial services industry, executive programs for practitioners, and developing industry contacts for sponsored projects and project-based courses. Columbia fosters multidisciplinary research and encourages collaborations with academic departments and units across the university. The Department is especially interested in qualified candidates who can contribute, through their research, teaching, and/or service, to the diversity and excellence of the academic community. For additional information and to apply, please see: http://engineering.columbia.edu/faculty-job-opportunities. Applications should be submitted electronically and include the following: curriculum-vitae including a statement of teaching interests and plans, and contact information for three experts who can provide letters of recommendation. At least three of the letters of recommendation must address teaching ability. Candidates will be considered on a rolling basis.Candidates that are invited to interview will be required to give a 50-minute technical presentation. Applicants can consult www.ieor.columbia.edu for more information about the department. Columbia University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer—Race/Gender/Disability/Veteran
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THE HONG KONG UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
STANFORD UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS Faculty Positions in Operations, Information and Technology The Operations, Information and Technology (OIT) area at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, is seeking qualified applicants for full-time, tenure-track positions, starting September 1, 2018. All ranks and relevant disciplines will be considered. Applicants are considered in all areas of Operations, Information and Technology (OIT) that are broadly defined to include the analytical and empirical study of technological systems, in which technology, people, and markets interact. It thus includes operations, information systems/technology, and management of technology. Applicants are expected to have rigorous training in management science, engineering, computer science, economics, and/or statistical modeling methodologies. Candidates with strong empirical training in economics, behavioral science or computer science are encouraged to apply. The appointed will be expected to do innovative research in the OIT field, to participate in the school's PhD program, and to teach both required and elective courses in the MBA program. Junior applicants should have or expect to complete a PhD by September 1, 2018. Applicants should submit their applications electronically by visiting the web site http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/recruiting and uploading their curriculum vitae, research papers and publications, and teaching evaluations, if applicable, on that site. For an application to be considered complete, all applicants must submit a CV, a job market paper and arrange for three letters of recommendation to be submitted by November 15, 2017. For questions regarding the application process, please send an email to Faculty_Recruiter@gsb.stanford.edu. Stanford is an equal employment opportunity and affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.
Faculty Positions Department of Industrial Engineering and Logistics Management
The Department of Industrial Engineering and Logistics Management invites applications for substantiation-track faculty positions in the area of (i) Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics, (ii) Healthcare and Sports Analytics, (iii) Financial Engineering and Fintech, and (iv) Demand and Supply Analytics. Applicants must have a PhD degree in Industrial Engineering, Operations Research, or a closely related area. The appointee is expected to demonstrate strong potential for effective teaching and promising research in the respective fields. Appointments at all ranks (Assistant Professor/ Associate Professor / Professor) will be considered. Salary is highly competitive and will be commensurate with qualifications and experience. Fringe benefits include annual leave, medical and dental benefits. Housing benefits will be provided where applicable. Appointment at Professor rank will be on substantive basis. Initial appointment for Assistant Professor/Associate Professor will normally be made on a 3-year contract. A gratuity will be payable upon successful completion of contract. Strong candidates applying for Associate Professor position may also be considered for appointment on substantive terms. Applications with a full C.V.; statement of research and teaching; transcript of graduate work; copies of 2 research publications; names, emails and addresses of at least three referees, should be directed to the Search and Appointment Committee, Department of Industrial Engineering and Logistics Management, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong [email : ielm@ust.hk]. Review of applications will start immediately and continue until the positions are filled. More information about the Department can be found at http://www.ielm.ust.hk.
DEPARTMENT OF OPERATIONS, INFORMATION AND DECISIONS THE WHARTON SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA The Operations, Information and Decisions Department at the Wharton School is home to faculty with a diverse set of interests in behavioral economics, decision-making, information technology, information-based strategy, operations management, and operations research. We are seeking applicants for a fell-time, tenure-track faculty position at any level: Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor. Applicants must have a Ph.D. (expected completion by June 2018 is preferred but by June 30, 2019 is acceptable) from an accredited institution and have an outstanding research record or potential in the OID Department’s areas of research. The appointment is expected to begin July 2018. More information about the Department is available at: http://oid.wharton.upenn.edu/index.cfm All interested individuals should complete and submit an online application via our secure website, and must include: • A curriculum vitae • A job market paper • (Applicants for an Assistant Professor position) Three letters of recommendation submitted by references To apply, please visit this web site: http://oid.wharton.upenn.edu/faculty/faculty-positions/ Further materials, including (additional) papers and letters of recommendation, will be requested as needed. To ensure full consideration, materials should be received by November 1st, 2017 CONTACT: OID Department The Wharton School University of Pennsylvania 3730 Walnut Steet 500 Jon M. Huntsman Hall Philadelphia, PA 19104-6340 The University of Pennsylvania is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.
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!"#$%& Disney was honored with the 2017 INFORMS PRIZE for pioneering and enduring integration of operations research and analytics programs. It’s no wonder we’re excited to attend this year’s INFORMS Conference. We love this opportunity each year to connect with others in the industry and get to know talented data professionals. Be sure to attend INFORMS 2017 to meet with our team. We’re excited to meet you!
Meet Jeanine
Sr. Recruiter for Data/Analytics Roles
Meet Haining
Sr. Manager of Decision Science
Parks and Resorts
“I’m excited to attend INFORMS because we get to share the impactful work our analytics team does across The Walt Disney Company. Additionally, we’ve found some great talent at the INFORMS Conference that we’ve been able to bring on board.”
Parks and Resorts
“At this annual meeting we connect with analytics professionals, share best practices, and discuss industry trends and movements. All these help us at Disney use analytics to improve the Guest experience and drive business value.”
!"# $# %$ &'# ()# (*&# +' ( & ,
Disney Careers
DisneyDataJobs.com/Informs
Disney Careers
EOE • DRAWING CREATIVITY FROM DIVERSITY • ©DISNEY
The Walt Disney Company
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Assistant/Associate Professor of Business Analytics – Lorem ipsum Collins College of Business The University of Tulsa’s Collins College of Business seeks candidates to fill a full-time faculty position in business analytics starting August 15, 2018. The successful applicant will teach face-to-face and online courses in the College’s undergraduate and graduate business analytics and related programs, develop a productive research program in the expanding field of Big Data analytics, broadly defined, and engage in appropriate professional and service activities. Candidates should possess a Ph.D. degree in a discipline directly related to data analytics (e.g., data management/modeling, predictive analytics, data science, statistics, information science, information systems) from an AACSB accredited university. ABD’s close to completion will be considered, as well as individuals with one or more post-baccalaureate degrees and significant experience leading and managing analytics organizations at the executive level. Complete job description and requirements at: https://utulsa.edu/about/working-at-tu/available-positions/faculty-position-business -analytics/ Review of applications will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled. The University of Tulsa is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is especially interested in candidates who can contribute to the diversity and excellence of the academic community through their research, teaching and/or service. Candidates should submit an application package that contains (1) a letter of interest that includes a statement of teaching philosophy and practice, a brief explanation of prior and proposed research objectives, and a description of the ways in which the candidate’s background aligns with, complements, or expands on the existing goals and objectives of the School, (2) copies of applicable student / course evaluations, (3) current resume or curriculum vita, and (4) the names and contact information for three references. Application materials should be sent to: Business Analytics Faculty Search Committee 201 Helmerich Hall The University of Tulsa 800 S Tucker Dr Tulsa, OK 74104 Email: BusAnalytics-search@utulsa.edu
DARDEN GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION Quantitative Analysis Area The Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia invites applications for a tenure-track or tenured faculty position in Quantitative Analysis, beginning in the fall of 2018. Applicants must have a PhD in Decision Sciences, Data Science, Management Science, Operations Research, Statistics, Computer Science, or related areas by the date of appointment, the ability to teach successfully in our MBA and Executive Education formats, and a strong research record. The Quantitative Analysis area at Darden specializes in teaching and research in the fields of data science, management science and operations research, broadly defined. The area offers MBA students a concentration in business analytics. Faculty in the area teach courses in decision analysis, data analysis, optimization, advanced decision modeling, data science in business, behavioral decision making, and project management. Faculty also teach these topics in Executive Education programs. The Darden School of Business is a top-rated global business school. The University of Virginia is regarded as one of the nation's finest public universities. Charlottesville is consistently ranked among the best places to live in the United States. To apply, go to http://jobs.virginia.edu, search for posting number 0621360 and complete a Candidate Profile on-line and attach a cover letter, CV, and contact information for three references. Deadline for applications is November 30, 2017. Under separate cover, please send a curriculum vitae to: QAapply@darden.virginia.edu.The Darden School of Business is committed to fostering a diverse educational environment and encourages applications from members of groups under-represented in academia. The University of Virginia is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer. Women, Minorities, Veterans and Persons with Disabilities are encouraged to apply.
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DEPARTMENT OF MANAGEMENT Assistant Professor of Management (Operations Management) Salary: competitive, plus benefits
The Department of Management at the London School of Economics is seeking to hire an Assistant Professor of Management in the area of Operations Management. The successful candidate will have a track record of internationally excellent publications, or a trajectory for achieving this, as well as a well-developed strategy for future outstanding research that has the potential to result in world-leading publications in top journals. Specifically, we would look especially favourably at publications in any of the following journals: Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Management Science, Operations Research, and Games and Economic Behavior. For full details and to apply for this post, please visit to www.lse.ac.uk/LSEJobs/AcademicCareers/ Applications must be received by 23.59 on 29 October 2017. LSE values diversity and strives to promote equality at all levels. For this post, we particularly welcome applications by women and ethnic minorities.
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering University of Minnesota Faculty Openings The Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities invites applications for two tenure-track faculty positions starting in Fall 2018. Applicants at all ranks will be considered. We seek candidates with a strong methodological foundation in Operations Research, Industrial Engineering and a demonstrated interest in applications including, but not limited to: business analytics, energy and the environment, healthcare and medical applications, transportation and logistics, supply chain management, and service systems. Applicants must hold a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering, Operations Research, Operations Management or a closely related discipline and have demonstrated the potential to conduct a vigorous and significant research program as evidenced by their publication record and supporting letters from recognized leaders in the field. Senior applicants must have a particularly strong record of research and teaching accomplishments, scientific leadership and creativity. The University of Minnesota is located in the heart of the vibrant Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, which is consistently rated as one of America’s best places to live and is home to many leading companies. The Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering is the newest department within the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota and is growing rapidly. Applicants are encouraged to apply by November 1, 2017. Review of applications will begin immediately and will continue until the position is filled. Applicants interested in meeting with current Industrial and Systems Engineering faculty members at the 2017 INFORMS Conference in Houston, Texas should apply by September 24, 2017. Additional information and application instructions can be found at http://www.isye.umn.edu. Candidates may contact the chair of the search committee at isyesrch@umn.edu. The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer.
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TUCK SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AT DARTMOUTH FACULTY SEARCH IN OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT, ANALYTICS OR MANAGEMENT SCIENCE The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth invites applicants for a faculty position in Operations Management, Analytics, or Management Science. This full-time, tenure-track position is at the Assistant or untenured Associate level, with a preference for new or recent graduates. The position begins in the 2018-2019 academic year. Applicants must have a Ph.D. or be near completion of a doctoral degree. We are interested in candidates who will produce research of excellent quality that will have a significant impact on the field. There must be evidence that the candidate can conduct research and teach at a high level. The school fosters a highly collegial culture that is intellectually stimulating and interdisciplinary, and we provide generous financial and logistical support for research and teaching. Founded in 1900, the Tuck School is the first graduate school of management. Its two-year program has a total of approximately 550 students, most with employment experience. Tuck also offers various management development programs for top level managers with high potential. The Tuck faculty numbers 50 full-time positions as well as visiting lecturers, post-docs, and adjunct faculty in specialized fields. Applicants should submit a vita, publications, working papers, a summary of teaching evaluations (if available), and three letters of reference by December 1, 2017. Candidates attending the INFORMS Annual Conference in Houston are encouraged to complete as much of their application as possible by October 5, 2017. All materials should be submitted to http://apply.interfolio.com/43466. Dartmouth is an equal opportunity/ affirmative action employer with a strong commitment to diversity. In that spirit, we are particularly interested in receiving applications from a broad spectrum of people, including women, persons of color, persons with disabilities, veterans or any other legally protected group.
Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor (Operations) The Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is seeking to fill one or more tenure-track or tenured faculty positions in the Operations area to start on July 1, 2018. Successful candidates will be both productive researchers and creative and effective teachers capable of contributing to the school’s Undergraduate, MBA, Ph.D., and Executive Development programs. Selected applicants are anticipated to teach and research in areas of Operations Management, such as Project Management, Business Analytics, Service Operations (e.g. Health Care, Retail, etc.), Supply Chain Management, and/or other related areas. Positions require a doctorate (or foreign equivalent) granted, or nearly completed, in Operations Research, Operations Management, or in a related field. Hired candidates with a doctorate can anticipate an initial appointment of Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, or Professor. Hired candidates with a doctorate nearly completed can anticipate an initial appointment of Instructor. Successful applicants will have strong research skills, and will be expected to publish in top-tier academic journals. Applicants may view the job posting and follow the application process to be considered at: http://unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/126250. Applicants should submit a curriculum vitae; sample research paper; and the names, institutions, email addresses, and telephone numbers of three reference letter writers. Reference letter writers will receive an email with instructions for submitting letters of recommendation through the recruitment system. At the time of hire, four letters of recommendation must have been received for selected applicants. Materials should be submitted electronically, but be addressed to: Dr. Vinayak Deshpande, Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Campus Box 3490, McColl Building, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3490. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, color, disability, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or status as a protected veteran.
The Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign invites applications for full-time open-rank faculty positions with an emphasis in the areas of: • Healthcare Systems Engineering and Cognitive Engineering • Internet of Things/Analytics/Big Data • Physical Ergonomics/Biomechanics Endowed Chairs and Professorships for distinguished candidates are available in all research areas of the department, including operations research, data analytics, decision and control systems, design and manufacturing, and financial engineering. Successful candidates are expected to direct graduate students in research, teach in the undergraduate and graduate programs, and develop a strong externally-funded research program in the area of systems engineering and design. Candidates must have a PhD in Industrial Engineering, Systems Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a closely related discipline by the appointment start date. For complete position announcement and application instructions, see http://jobs.illinois.edu. To ensure full consideration, applications must be received by December 1, 2017. Review of applications will be ongoing, and will continue until the positions are filled. The proposed start date is August 16, 2018. Questions should be referred to Cheryl Gerber, cgerber@illinois.edu, (217) 244-5070. The University of Illinois conducts criminal background checks on all job candidates upon acceptance of a contingent offer. Illinois is an EEO Employer/Vet/ Disabled (www.inclusiveillinois.illinois.edu) and committed to a family-friendly environment (http://provost.illinois.edu/faculty-affairs/worklife-balance/).
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DEPARTMENT OF MANAGEMENT Professor of Management (Operations Management)
Salary: competitive, plus benefits
The Department of Management at the London School of Economics is seeking to hire a Professor of Management in the area of Operations Management. The successful candidate will demonstrate a substantial track record of publications in top internationally-recognised journals. Specifically, we would look especially favourably at publications in any of the following journals: Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Management Science, Operations Research, and Games and Economic Behavior. For full details and to apply for this post, please visit to www.lse.ac.uk/LSEJobs/AcademicCareers/ Applications must be received by 23.59 on 29 October 2017. LSE values diversity and strives to promote equality at all levels. For this post, we particularly welcome applications by women and ethnic minorities.
The Culverhouse College of Commerce at The University of Alabama invites applications for two tenure-track faculty positions at the Assistant Professor level in Operations Management (OM) starting no later than August 16, 2018 in the Department of Information Systems, Statistics, and Management Science. Candidates must have completed a doctorate in OM or a closely related field (e.g., Operations Research, Industrial Engineering) by the start of the appointment. Application submissions from experienced Assistant Professors are strongly encouraged. Ideal candidates should demonstrate a proven ability to produce high-impact research and excel in undergraduate and graduate (M.S., MBA, and Ph.D.) teaching. Candidates should have methodological expertise in optimization or applied probability (i.e., queuing theory and/or Markov decision processes). Research interests and experience in data-driven decision-making and analytics applied to inventory control, supply chain management, transportation, healthcare, and/or sustainability are desirable. However, candidates with other research interests will also be considered. Salary is competitive and commensurate with experience and achievements. Prior to hiring, the candidate must successfully pass a pre-employment background investigation. Applicants must apply online at https://facultyjobs.ua.edu and include a one-page cover letter, curriculum vitae that includes at least three references (including contact information), research statement, and one or two representative examples of research papers. Required documents not attached at the time of application will disqualify the application. The review of applications will begin immediately. Applications will be accepted until October 29, 2017. Individual meetings will be held at the 2017 INFORMS Annual Conference, with preference given to individuals whose applications are received by September 29, 2017. All inquiries should be directed to the search committee chair, Dr. Emmett Lodree, at ejlodree@culverhouse.ua.edu. The University of Alabama is an Equal Employment/Equal Educational Opportunity Institution. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, genetic information, disability, or protected veteran status, and will not be discriminated against because of their protected status. Applicants to and employees of this institution are protected under Federal law from discrimination on several bases.
informs career fair The INFORMS CAREER CENTER offers employers expanded opportunities to connect to qualified O.R. & analytics professionals. INFORMS offers a complete line of services to be used alone or in conjunction with the Career Fair at the 2017 Annual Meeting, giving job seekers and employers a convenient venue to connect. The Career Fair is free to INFORMS attendees. EMPLOYERS PARTICIPATING IN THE CAREER FAIR ACTIVITIES AT THE 2017 ANNUAL MEETING WILL BE ABLE TO: • Provide their recruitment materials in a fun and energetic Career Fair setting • Schedule their own on-site interviews at reserved tables or interview booths • Promote their organization and meet highly-qualified, diverse candidates FOR CAREER FAIR REGISTRATION & INFORMATION:
http://meetings.informs.org/houston2017
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MULTIPLE FACULTY POSITIONS Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering The School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania is growing its faculty by 33% over the next five years. As part of this initiative, the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering is engaged in an aggressive, multi-year hiring effort for multiple tenure-track positions at all levels. Candidates must hold a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related area. The department seeks individuals with exceptional promise for, or proven record of, researchachievement, who will take a position of international leadership in defining their field of study, and excel in undergraduate and graduate education. Leadership in cross-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary collaborations is of particular interest. We are interested in candidates in all areas that enhance our research strengths in
1. NANODEVICES AND NANOSYSTEMS: (nanoelectronics, MEMS/NEMS, powerelectronics, nanophotonics, integrated devices and systems at nanoscale), 2. CIRCUITS AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING : (analog, RF, mm-wave, digital circuits, emerging circuit design, computer engineering, IoT, embedded and cyber-physical systems) 3. INFORMATION AND DECISION SYSTEMS (control, optimization, robotics, data science, network science,communications, information theory, signal processing, markets and social systems). Prospective candidates in all areas are strongly encouraged to address large-scale societal problems in energy, transportation, health, food and water, economic and financial networks, critical infrastructure, and national security. We are especially interested in candidates whose interests are aligned with the schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s strategic plan, http://www.seas.upenn.edu/PennEngineering2020/ Diversity candidates are strongly encouraged to apply. Interested persons should submit an online application at http://www.ese.upenn.edu/faculty-positionsand include curriculum vitae, statement of research and teaching interests, and at least three references. Review of applications will begin on December 1, 2017. The University of Pennsylvania is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Minorities/Women/Individuals with Disabilities/Veterans are encouraged to apply.
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Doug Samuelson
samuelsondoug@yahoo.com
The nurseryman’s parable The community pool’s Labor Day party had reassembled the group of neighbors, enjoying one of the last hot days of summer and the leisure to enjoy an occasion such as this. Of course, many of them still worked full time during the summer, so the conversation was not just about vacations – although there were plenty of those stories, too. Jean, the OR/MS analyst who had explained, in an earlier conversation, the importance of coordination and cooperation, seemed a bit fretful.“What’s the matter?” Bob asked. “Are things going badly in national security these days? Anything we should worry about?” “Nothing beyond the usual, which is bad enough,” Jean shrugged. “You see the same news stories I do about all the backbiting and infighting in this administration, probably even worse than usual, although what’s usually going on in most administrations is pretty nasty. But these things happen in lots of organizations, public and private. I’m glad football season is back, so maybe we can be reminded of the most important lesson you can learn from football.” “I didn’t think you were much of a football fan,” said Bob, somewhat surprised. “I’m not,” Jean affirmed, “but you know just about everyone uses sports metaphors to describe management practices. And it makes sense, because it’s a common language, widely understood, and because in sports you have fairly complete information about what happened and what the results were. The scores and the stats get posted, everybody gets interviewed, there it all is. Quite a bit more transparent than, say, defense policy.” Everyone laughed. “So what’s the big lesson?” Bob inquired. “Simple,” Jean responded. “On winning teams, people don’t tackle their teammates!” 72 | ORMS Today
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October 2017
This brought another laugh from the group. “Sounds obvious,” Jean added, “but you’d be amazed how many organizations don’t seem to get the idea.” Ed, who was more of a football fan than Jean, agreed, “You do have a good point there. You know who Bill Parcells is, right? He coached two different teams to Super Bowl wins and compiled quite a record. He was and still is widely regarded as one of the most knowledgeable commentators on the game. And at one time, when the teams were drafting players, he said something really interesting in an interview: ‘I’m not looking for the greatest players. I’m looking for the players who will do the most to make my team great.’ Good insight, no?” The others nodded. “Team-building is an art, and not well taught,” Hugh agreed. “We see that in some of our management think sessions where I work, too, and I can tell you it isn’t easy for everyone to see how important conflict reduction is. Being cohesive is often more effective than being right. You don’t want everyone to think the same way, but you want the differences to remain civil and have everyone remember we’re trying to cooperate.” “Good luck,” Ann chimed in. “Instead of all these sports coaches, maybe you and your colleagues need to talk to my nurseryman. He had the real picture.” This, of course, got the group’s attention. Ann recounted, “He was talking to me about my garden, and why it takes so much work to keep it looking good. He explained, ‘From a distance, a garden seems like the most harmonious place in the world, right? All the plants just coexisting in peace, reaching toward the sun together, pulling up water and nutrients from the earth. You wonder why people can’t be like that.’ And of course I agreed that that was what I thought, too.”
Ann continued, “He told me, ‘That’s how it seems from a distance. But what you don’t see is that actually, under the surface, very quietly and slowly, those plants are all trying to kill each other! The trees drop leaves that smother the grass and run their roots where they’ll soak up all the water. The grapevines wrap themselves around other plants’ branches and literally strangle them. Some of the flowers attract bugs that eat other plants but not those flowers that attracted them. It’s awful out there! And the only thing you can do about it is decide which plants you want to keep, and whack the ones that are harming the ones you want. Simple – and brutal! So much for harmony!’ How do you like that?” “That explains some healthcare providers’ meetings I’ve attended,” Jack agreed. “They say they’re all working for the public good, but somehow the new proposal for where to add a clinic often cuts into someone else’s practice. Your nurseryman seems to have the right picture of what’s really going on.” “And that’s why truly open, unrestricted economic competition has never worked,” Bob noted. “You have to have laws to restrain unfair competition or nearly everyone ends up losing. Even in football, baseball and basketball, where the owners figured out they had to have some mechanism to keep the richest teams from dominating so much that the games became uncompetitive and caused people to lose interest in watching. Something to keep in mind!” “Too bad we forgot to tell the Russians that when Communism fell,” Jean said dryly. “So they’re repeating what we call the ‘Robber Baron Era’ from the American historical experience in the late 19th century.” “And so are we,” Ed added, “if we’re not careful. And it doesn’t look as if we’re being careful, now does it?” “Walt Kelly, the cartoonist, had it right nearly 50 years ago,” Jean chuckled. “We have met the enemy, and he is us!” ORMS Doug Samuelson (samuelsondoug@yahoo. com) is president and chief scientist of InfoLogix, Inc., a small R&D and consulting company in Annandale, Va.
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OPTIMIZING POWER TRADING AUCTIONS
A GAMS Application in the Energy Sector The German “Energiewende” (transition of the energy system) aims for a power system on the basis of renewable energy sources (RES). In 2015, about 30% of the power generation was provided by RES. The RES target for 2025 is a 40–45 % share and 55–60 % are expected in 2035. Large parts of these shares are based on fluctuating wind and solar power. For a successful “Energiewende”, a highly efficient matching of generation and demand will be required.
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