EDS OR NewsletterVolume 1, Issue 3 November 2002

I N S I D E T H I S I S S U E

1 John Wins Election!

1 ATK Annie Awards

1 IT Challenges in Delivering OR Solutions

2 John Lucas’ Position Statement

2 Did You Know?

2 Cartoon: No Grey Areas

4 INFORMS’ Golden Anniversary

4 Young OR Conference in Bath, England

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John Wins Election!!Elections, elections, elections! Seems that’s all we’ve been hearing in the news lately. But we have our own good news regarding elections:

Our very own John Lucas was elected Vice President, Information Technology, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)!!

Read John’s Position Statement on the next page.

Also read more about John in our last issue’s Profile.

IT Challenges in Delivering OR Solutions

Ronald B. Adams II

Imagine that you are an operations research professional who has just been given the good news that you've just been selected to lead the optimizer team on the Megacorp project. Your sense of elation increases when a preliminary investigation suggests that a large, multi-commodity network flow model with several interesting constraint types is the core of the desired solution. You are happy and content as you meet with Megacorp business managers discussing workflows and process

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ATK’s Annie Awards

As the EDS news brief says:

A.T. Kearney created the Annies - short for analytical - three years ago to recognize analytical thinking in client engagements. The awards are based on overall impact, inherent complexity, originality and applicability to other projects.

The top awards were:

Gold Medal: Cluster analysis for demand segmentation. Kristalee Montemayor, Debra Rosenberg, Sarah Smith.

Silver Medal: Nonlinear optimization for retail store consolidation. Robin Pano, Sharon Neeter, Jennifer Schoenemann.

Bronze Medal: Inventory optimization. John Lewelling, Steve Mehltretter.

Bronze Medal: Supply chain optimization. Victor Chen, Sherif Mityas, Bob Kupbens, Jennifer Schoenemann.

Plus, there were five Honorable Mentions for applications of regression, simulation optimization and “product deproliferation analysis”!

Read the complete news brief at:

http://infocentre.eds.com/news/briefs/arch/arch_651585.html

Hopefully, we’ll feature these interesting and beneficial analyses in future issues!

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John Lucas’ Position Statement forVice President, Information Technology

INFORMS 2002 Elections

If I am elected Vice President, Information Technology, do not expect me to be the resident IT expert; I am not an encyclopedia of ever changing IT knowledge. However, do expect me to apply more rigor to our IT planning and budgeting processes. Expect a new collaborative IT planning process that is continually driven by our INFORMS strategic plan.

So, what unique strengths would I bring to this position? While working 18 years for the largest global IT service provider, I have led successful projects with large international clients developing and maintaining corporate IT plans. Success required the collaboration of diverse entities, personalities, and cultures; this is not unlike the divergence we have in INFORMS between Academia and practitioners, between different industry focus groups, and by OR/MS technology preference.

Because I am not an IT expert, I have leveraged a professional network of experts for as needed technical advice. Combined with our network of INFORMS members that are on top of new technology, there is a wealth of IT knowledge, vision, and good suggestions to tap into and rigorously prioritize and manage in our plan.

I am honored with this nomination. I would hope that if I am elected, and if I can lead INFORMS to a manageable IT planning vision, then the resulting new process will survive us and anchor the INFORMS IT strategy well into the future. This will guarantee that our IT infrastructure will be relevant, cost effective, and have measurable value to our membership.

Editor’s Note: Let’s pitch-in to help John be the most productive and successful VP of IT INFORMS has ever had! I’ll get the word out in future issues about volunteering to help John and to help increase EDS’s visibility and prominence within INFORMS.

Did You Know?

(A late-breaking update from our last Issue)

NEWS FLASH -- BusinessWeek announced this week that it

welcomed Information Systems Research to its list of

journals used to evaluate the ranking of the best business

schools. Returning this year are INFORMS flagship

journals Operations Research and Management Science.

Having three entries on the list puts INFORMS in a class of

its own. (from www.INFORMS.org, as reported in

BusinessWeek, October 21, 2002)

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data, filling many whiteboards with nodes and arcs and modeling elements of their business process as solution constraints. Your contentment begins to wane, however, after you are introduced to their computer systems manager who informs you that the majority of data that you've been discussing resides in a DB400 database on their preferred AS/400 platform. You begin shaking when you come to the realization that this manager can't even spell TCP/IP. You've entered the IT Twilight Zone!

While this newsletter is putatively about operations research, this article focuses on the challenges that have been and will continue to be encountered in bringing the benefits of OR to real customers with real information systems and information system policies. These challenges fall into three broad categories: data, legacy systems, and project/policy issues.

To explore these challenges, it is helpful to picture an OR solution as a core OR engine surrounded by a variety of ancillary components that might move data into or out of the core, persist data, monitor the state of the core, etc.

The primary challenge of data is that there is usually LOTS of it; if there wasn't, making decisions based on that data could be (and likely is) done manually. Routing delivery trucks, for example, requires knowledge about the fleet of trucks including their capabilities/capacities, their current or projected locations, and their availability. One must also know about all of the drivers including where they are, when they're available, where they need to be after their routes. The loads that are to be delivered are also important; where are they, where do they need to go, by when? And unless you use some great circle approximation, you need large amounts of map data to calculate travel distances. Even for a medium-sized supplier this adds up to a lot of data… and oh yeah, our planning horizon is seven days. Core engine bandwidth requirements must be accounted for in the system architecture and supported by the design.

But wait...we analyze requirements, specify capable architectures and create solid, well-reviewed designs...the REAL problem with "lots-of-data" is often getting or assembling representative test data. To be representative, there needs to be LOTS of it. Further, it needs to be sufficiently well characterized so that the results of running the optimization on it are understandable by both you and the customer.

Data quality and timeliness can also cause headaches. If the customer's data occasionally

reports that the starting location of some delivery truck is just a short swim from Bikini Atoll, you have to design and incorporate data validation functionality to protect yourself.

Unless you are very, very lucky, you will not encounter a customer that does not have some relevant information systems in place (I have only once worked with a client that had no legacy systems). Integrating with older systems can be troublesome, but not as challenging as having to develop new applications in an obsolete environment. Customers have many reasons for holding onto obsolete (especially operating system) software, but it's usually because some core component is not available for later releases of the OS. The problem of old OS software cascades into more problems with older compilers, debuggers and third-party packages. Support may not be available and, in general, the older stuff just doesn't work as well. Older versions of database engines and even middleware components can limit your options, negating the possibility of using the latest integration tools.

Finally, there is the policy type of issue that can wreak havoc with your best-laid plans for software development. For example, some clients don't want you to touch their databases directly. They will instead provide the required data by some other mechanism, often by flat file. Other clients insist that all data be interchanged directly through the database. Both of these approaches lead to interesting challenges. With flat files, the format of these files, whether they are comma-separated values or XML or whatever, must be fixed or better still version controlled. As with all "touch points" between systems or components, small changes to these formats can have a dramatic impact on the rest of the system. Similarly, database direct implementations need a "fixed" schema and a clear understanding of who can modify which tables and when. With flat files, database referential integrity is the responsibility of the file generator/reader components; with direct database manipulation, referential integrity concerns may spill through to the OR engine.

I have tried to limit this article to a few issues that seem to be more true in an OR deployment situation than in general IT work. This means that I have left out all of the challenges that also go with every meaningful project, like multi-threading, user interfaces, multiple servers, load balancing, cache coherence, latencies of all kinds, etc. But you can satisfy your curiosity about these and many more on your next visit to the IT Twilight Zone.

Editor’s Note: the next page for Ron’s brief bio.

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INFORMS’ Golden Anniversary

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of INFORMS… well, sort of. At least, this gala celebration will commence next week at the INFORMS National Meeting, San Jose, California, U.S.A.,

One must consider that today’s INFORMS is the amalgamation of several historically separate organizations, most notably the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) and The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS). ORSA is the older sibling, with the first organizational meeting held on May 26, 1952. TIMS was founded eighteen months later, on December 1, 1953 to be exact. The merger creating INFORMS occurred in 1995. As fate would have it, the first meeting of ORSA was held on November 17, 1952, precisely coinciding with the November 17, 2002 start of this year’s San Jose INFORMS meeting. Thus there will be much hoopla and celebration at this professional conference.

INFORMS has produced a number of commemorative items for this special occasion, including: The 50th Anniversary Issue of the flagship journal Operations Research (Volume 50, Number 1, January

– February 2002). This special issue includes historical articles about the origins of OR and the models and methods it employs.

The Celebrating 50 Years of Operations Research 2002 Commemorative CD which was sent as a special gift to all current INFORMS members. It includes the complete issue of Operations Research, Volume 1, Issue 1, the complete twenty-fifth anniversary issue, Operations Research, Vol. 25, No. 1, the video “Operations Research: Science and Technology for Informed Decision Making,” and a ”Great Moments in History” time line tracing the significant events of our profession all the way back to 1654!

Additional copies of The Commemorative CD is available to INFORMS members for $10 and to non-member for $15. Contact Lisa Klose at lisa.klose@informs.org to place your order.

The Young OR Conference in BathBy Paul Harper, University of Southampton and YOR13 Chair

How do you fancy meeting like-minded young OR practitioners and academics, to exchange ideas, share experiences and generally have lots of fun, all within the beautiful surroundings of the City of Bath? If so, then the next Young OR conference, to be held from 1 - 3 April 2003, is definitely for you. If you've beento a YOR conference before, you'll be sure to know how rewarding and enjoyable they are. If you've never been, make sure you don't miss out this time round!

YOR is a biennial conference intended for young academics and practitioners with up to ten years' experience in OR. It gives younger members of the profession an opportunity to present their work in a non-threatening environment to an audience of their peers. There are plenary talks by keynote speakers, interspersed with parallel streams and a comprehensive and fun evening social programme.

Remember that this is your conference and only you can help make it a success. If your commitment and enthusiasm is anything like the previous YOR conferences, then once again this should be a fantastic event! Editor’s Note: I received correspondence from Professor Harper about this interesting conference and his specific invitation to EDS to participate and/or sponsor some of the events. I promised him I would let you know about it in the next issue of our Newsletter. So here ‘tis. Please see: www.orsoc.org.uk/conf/yor13/main.htm for more information.

About Ron Adams… Ron received a B.S.E. (Physics) from the University of Michigan, and completed graduate work in physics and computer science. He has worked to understand, apply and advance the professional standards of information technology, being an active member of the Association of Computing Machinery and the Usenix Association since 1983 and 1984, respectively. He was American Airlines’ technical liaison to the Object Management Group (OMG) in 1992-93. Ron served as the Vice President and then as President of the North Texas Society for Object Technology in 1994 and 1995 respectively. He has over twenty years experience in IT with companies such as Texas Instruments, Hughes Aircraft, Sabre and EDS. Ed. Note: And, after a few beers, he’ll freely admit he’s a closet OR Geek as well!!

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