Homeland Security: From Mathematical Models to Policy Implementation August 26, 2009
Posted by Michael Trick in : Homeland Security 2009 , 1 comment so farIn the July-August, 2009 issue of Operations Research, Larry Wein of the Graduate School of Business provides his Philip McCord Morse Lecture, delivered in 2008. From the abstract:
It describes the author’s research on four topics in homeland security and public health: preparedness and response to a bioterror anthrax attack, preparedness and response to a bioterror attack on the food supply, routes of transmission and infection control for pandemic influenza, and biometrics (e.g., fingerprint matching) to prevent terrorists from entering the country. The paper focuses on the modeling, policy recommendations, and implementation of these recommendations. The author draws lessons about policy implementation from these examples and from examples from his other homeland security work with colleagues, including a bioterror smallpox attack, preventing nuclear weapons from entering the country on a shipping container, preventing nuclear weapons from entering a city, and preventing terrorists from crossing the border between the United States and Mexico.
You can find the full paper here Homeland Security.
The editors of Operations Research have asked four prominent researchers in related areas to provide commentary on this paper.
Richard Larson is the Mitsui Professor of of Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his commentary, Dr. Larson notes that Dr. Wein’s work is significant, but concentrates on the natural science. Dr. Larson believes the field should also include the social sciences. From the commentary:
I suggest adding social science to complement the natural science. One could argue that for all the devastation including loss of life on 9/11/01, a dominating outcome was the psychological response of the citizens of the USA. 9/11 caused a national trauma of immense proportions. The economy suffered greatly, as it took a long time for people again to feel comfortable getting back onto airplanes. Certain national policies that followed most likely were over-reactions to the trauma of 9/11. Especially in the case of terrorists, their ultimate aim is not the immediate loss of lives and infliction of numerous injuries; it is paralysis of the country due to national trauma, grief and despair. Adding a social science component to already superlative work would be in the nest traditions of Philip M. Morse. His teams during WWII were interdisciplinary, often including social scientists to cover those important aspects of the problem that perhaps ‘could not be seen’ or articulated by the natural scientists, engineers and mathematicians. It is noteworthy that many founding members of ORSA were social scientists. Isn’t it time we invited them back – to INFORMS?
You can read Dr. Larson’s entire commentary Larson Commentary.
The second commentary comes from Eva Lee, Director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Health Care at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In her commentary, Dr. Lee describes her work with the Centers for Disease Control on using operations research to more effectively get medical counter measures into the hands of people:
Larry’s work has unquestionably and positively influenced US government policy on homeland security measures and strategies. He and his co-authors study on confronting an anthrax attack and dispensing of medical counter measures ignited a chain of useful reactions to public health policies and initiatives on rapid and strategic bio-response. Time-constrained casualty mitigation in an anthrax attack demands rapid protection that goes well beyond existing health systems capabilities. Much of my work with CDC since 2003 focuses on enhancing those capabilities. This includes rapidly determining and setting up optimal locations for dispensing sites, efficient clinic layout design, optimal staffng, intra-facility disease propagation and mitigation strategies, and subsequent clean-up and long-term economic impact.
You can read Dr. Lee’s full commentary Lee Commentary.
The third commentator is Dr. Nathaniel Hupert, Associate Professor of Public Health and Medicine at the Weill Medical College, Cornell University. Dr. Hupert also is currently employed by the CDC as Director of the Centers’ Preparedness Modeling Unit (though the commentary represents his views, not necessarily those of the CDC). Dr. Hupert, as a medical doctor and not an engineer, is fascinated by the “engineering mind” that Dr. Wein shows in his work:
Engineers seem to have an interesting, and somewhat unique, definition of “fun.” Ask your doctor or a local public health official what defines a good time, and you are not likely to hear about the logistics of mass antibiotic distribution or mathematical models of influenza transmission. Larry Wein’s opus over the last decade has been, to use a hackneyed phrase, deadly serious, and yet he notes that a personal criterion for his engagement in a project is that it be enjoyable. For those of us in public health emergency response, this provides an important insight into the workings of the engineering mind, since it is precisely those things that we often avoid (i.e., the nitty gritty, and
by that I mean quantitative, evaluation of the feasibility and performance of the programs we plan and carry out in the name of health protection) that appeal to Prof. Wein and a relatively small number of colleagues. Capitalizing on that sense of adventure into the unknown could bring about important advances not only in public health, but in medical care more generally. What is needed is a new generation of engineers who can speak the language of health care (and vice versa), and who then step into the unknown in much the way Prof. Wein describes to discover the important unsolved (or avoided, as the case may be) problems.
You can read Dr. Hupert’s full commentary Hupert Commentary.
The final commentary comes from David Alderson of the Naval Postgraduate School. Dr. Alderson joins Dr. Wein in wanting to have an effect on policy, but questions how exactly to go about about it:
As a junior tenure-track professor intent on improving security and defense policy, I was eager to read Larry Wein’s article “Homeland Security: From Mathematical Models to Policy Implementation.” Dr. Wein has made impressive contributions to public debate of homeland security, and he seems to have found the secret formula for success, namely: (1) find an important, real security problem that nobody has addressed adequately; (2) solve it, even if you have to make a lot of assumptions about underlying details and science; (3) brief it to Congress and/or the White House; and (4) publish an Op-Ed in the New York Times. But somehow I get the sense that it was, and should be, harder than that.
My own limited experience suggests that policy issues are rarely as clean as suggested here, and that there often exist considerable tensions even within the Science and Technology (S&T) community on any one of these topics. Confusion (or disagreement) among S&T experts becomes a quagmire when it comes to debate among non-technical policy-makers, as we see every day in the newspapers on topics ranging from global warming, to health care, to the economy. Perhaps Wein was careful to steer clear of topics that he thought would get bogged down in controversy. If so, this seems an important omission from his criteria for problem choice.
Dr. Alderson’s full commentary is available here Alderson Commentary.
Now it is your turn. What effect can operations research have on the important issues in national security? How can individuals and research groups help policy makers? Why is our field not having more effect? Feel free to add your comments!
Rocket Science Retailing July 13, 2009
Posted by Michael Trick in : Retailing 2009 , 1 comment so farIn the May-June, 2009 issue of Operations Research, Marshall Fisher, UPS Transportation Professor for the Private Sector at the Wharton School, discusses his experiences with the Consortium for Operational Excellence in Retailing. This paper grew out of Fisher’s 2006 Philip McCord Morse Lecture. From the abstract:
Retailing is a huge industry. In the United States, retail business represents about 40% of the economy and is the largest employer. Retail supply chain management is still more art than science, but this is changing rapidly as retailers begin to apply analytic models to the huge volume of data they are collecting on consumer purchases and preferences. This industry-wide movement resembles the transformation of Wall Street that occurred in the 1970s when physicists and other “rocket scientists” applied their analytic skills to investment decisions.
The Consortium for Operational Excellence in Retailing (COER) (codirected by Ananth Raman, Harvard Business School, and myself) is a group of academics working with about 50 leading retailers to assess their progress towards rocket science retailing and to accelerate that progress through selected research projects.
After some brief comments on the current state of industry practice in retail supply chain management, this paper will describe examples of COER research in four areas: assortment planning, pricing, inventory optimization, and store execution.
You can read the full paper at 2006 McCord Morse Lecture Rocket Science Retailing.
The editors of Operations Research have invited two groups of researchers to provide commentary for this paper. The first commentary comes from Juin-Kuan Chong from the National University of Singapore and Tek-Hua Ho from the University of California Berkeley. The emphasis in their commentary is on determining the optimal assortment of items in the case of substitution. From their commentary:
Retail decision making begins with assortment planning and assortment drives pricing and inventory sizing decisions. It is thus apt for Fisher to begin his lecture on assortment planning. This commentary focuses on the excellent works of Fisher and collaborators in assortment planning and aims to achieve 2 goals. First, we will describe other research for demand forecasting (including new products that have new attribute levels and lost sale due to imperfect demand substitution)
that may be better suited in some industries (e.g., frequently purchased consumer products). Second, we highlight the importance of using alternative sources of data to validate their method of estimating demand substitution, which uses managerial judgment. Our suggestions and approaches may be added to the existing toolbox for e ective retail decision making.
You can read their full commentary at Commentary by Chong and Ho.
Marshall Fisher has provided a response to the commentary, where he says, in part:
Thank you to Juin-Kuan Chong and Teck-Hua Ho for taking the time to write a letter and for your very helpful comments. I am quite familiar with Chong, Ho and Tang (2001) (which is referenced in Fisher (2009)) and have a high regard for this work. This was the first paper to propose a decision support model for assortment planning and to apply it to real data to derive an improved assortment. This is also one of the papers that inspired my collaborator and coauthor Ramnath Vaidyanathan and me to use an attribute approach in our own work on assortment optimization, which is reported in Fisher and Vaidyananth (2008).
You can read the full response at Response to Chong and Ho.
The second commentary comes from Gary Lilien, Distinguished Research Professor of Management Science in the Smeal College of Business Administration at Pennsylvania State University. Lilien entitles his response “Extending the Range of Rocket Science Retailing”. He begins with a statement from Fisher’s paper:
His paper begins with the statement that retailing is “paradise for operations researchers” (p527), yet he notes that his biggest surprise when entering the field was that “despite all the data … available, the decision making of most retailers was still highly qualitative and judgment-based.”
Lilien gives five opportunities to extend work in retailing. These are:
- Multichannel retailing
- Online buzz
- Co-creation
- Other data/analysis sources
- Disappointment level of implementation
You can read the full commentary at Commentary by Lilien
.
Marshall has provided a response to this commentary. As part of the response, Marshall states:
I like all of your ideas and have some comments on each of them.
He then provides detailed comments on each of these areas. You can find the full response at Response to Lilien.
Now it is your turn: what is the role that operations research can play in retailing? What are the barriers to implementation, and what are the areas being overlooked? Feel free to provide your comments!
The Evolution of Closed-Loop Supply Chain Research March 19, 2009
Posted by Michael Trick in : Closed Loop Supply Chains 2009 , comments closedIn Issue 1 of volume 57 of Operations Research (2009), Profs. Dan Guide and Luk Van Wassenhove outline how closed-loop supply chain (supply chains where the taking back of product from customers is important) research has advanced over the past 15 years or so. From the abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to introduce the reader to the field of closed-loop supply chains with a strong business perspective, i.e., we focus on profitable value recovery from returned products. It recounts the evolution of research in this growing area over the past 15 years, during which it developed from a narrow, technically focused niche area to a fully recognized subfield of supply chain management. We use five phases to paint an encompassing view of this evolutionary process for the reader to understand past achievements and potential future operations research opportunities.
To frame their discussion, Guide and Van Wassenhove identify five phases of research:
• Phase 1—The golden age of remanufacturing as a
technical problem.
• Phase 2—From remanufacturing to valuing the reverse-logistics process.
• Phase 3—Coordinating the reverse supply chain.
• Phase 4—Closing the loop.
• Phase 5—Prices and markets.
You can read the full paper here: The Evolution of Closed-Loop Supply Chain Research.
The Editors of Operations Research have invited two leading scholars to provide their comments on this article. The first commentary is by Robert D. Klassen, Professor of Operations Management and J.J. Wettlaufer Faculty Fellow at the Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario, Canada. Dr. Klassen’s primary point regards the definition of “business value”
At the outset, and later emphasized again, Guide and Van Wassenhove (2009) narrowed their tutorial to a business perspective on value-added recovery activities. While it is always helpful to clearly delimit what is being examined, it also is important to critically assess if the limits exclude strategically or methodologically important aspects. And defi ning business value has become a rather contentious issue subject to increasingly complex debate, particularly with growing interest in sustainable development.
You can read Dr. Klassen’s full commentary: Klassen Commentary.
The second commentary comes from Dr. Moritz Fleischmann, Associate Professor of Supply Chain Management, Rotterdam School of Management. In his commentary, Dr. Fleischmann takes issue with some of the divides identified by Guide and Van Wassenhove:
Somewhat less convincing, in my opinion, are some of the presumed `dualities’ in the research development in the eld of CLSCs. This includes, for example, the `US market-driven approach’ and the `European waste-stream approach’ mentioned in Section 5. While there are certainly important di fferences between countries regarding their legislative context, this does not mean that pro fit driven CLSCs and corresponding research are a U.S. phenomenon exclusively (as documented e.g. in the book of Flapper et al., 2005, cited in this paper). Likewise, I do not observe the suggested stark contrast between `OR-based’ research and `business economics’ research (again Section 5) since many of the papers cited in the second stream also make use of OR techniques.
Dr. Fleischmann’s full commentary is here: Fleischmann commentary
Drs. Guide and Van Wassenhove have provided a response to the commentaries: Guide and Van Wassenhove Reponse.
Now is your chance: what do you think the role of closed-loop supply chains has been? What is the state of research, and where is this field going? Feel free to add your comments or respond to the paper and commentaries.
Personal Decisions are the Leading Cause of Death January 6, 2009
Posted by Michael Trick in : Health Decision Making 2008 , comments closedIn the November-December 2008 issue of Operations Research, Dr. Ralph L. Keeney of Duke University, in the paper “Personal Decisions are the Leading Cause of Death”, argues that personal decisions cause a large fraction of the deaths in the United States, with the vast majority of those decisions resulting in the death of the decision maker. Some of the key decisions people make involve diet, alcohol and drug use, exercise and driving habits. From the abstract:
This paper analyzes the relationships between personal decisions and premature deaths in the United States. The analysis indicates that over one million of the 2.4 million deaths in 2000 can be attributed to personal decisions and could have been avoided if readily available alternative choices were made. Separate analyses indicate 46% of deaths due to heart disease and 66% of cancer deaths are attributable to personal decisions, about 55% of all deaths for ages 15–64 are attributable to personal decisions, and over 94% of the deaths attributable to personal decisions result in the death of the individual making the decisions. Relative to the current 45%, retrospective appraisal suggests that roughly 5% of deaths in 1900 and 20%–25% of deaths in 1950 could be attributed to personal decisions. These results suggest that more effort directed toward improving personal choices regarding life risks may be an effective and economical way to save lives.
You can read the full paper here: Personal Decisions are the Leading Cause of Death
The editors of Operations Research, led by Area Editor Stefanos Zenios, asked a number of leading researchers to provide commentary on this paper.
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Catching the “Network Science” Bug November 19, 2008
Posted by Michael Trick in : Networks 2008 , comments closedIn the September-October, 2008, issue of Operations Research, David Alderson of the Naval Postgraduate School offers insights and opportunities for operations researchers in the area of network science. From the abstract:
Recent efforts to develop a universal view of complex networks have created both excitement and confusion about the way in which knowledge of network structure can be used to understand, control, or design system behavior. This paper offers perspective on the emerging field of “network science” in three ways. First, it
briefly summarizes the origins, methodological approaches, and most celebrated contributions within this
increasingly popular field. Second, it contrasts the predominant perspective in the network science literature
(that abstracts away domain-specific function and instead focuses on graph theoretic measures of system
structure and dynamics) with that of engineers and practitioners of decision science (who emphasize the
importance of network performance, constraints, and tradeoffs). Third, it proposes optimization-based reverse
engineering to address some important open questions within network science from an operations research
perspective. We advocate for increased, yet cautious, participation in this field by operations researchers.
You can find the full article here.
The editors of Operations Research have invited four senior researchers to provide commentaries on this work.
The OR/MS Ecosystem: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats April 23, 2008
Posted by Michael Trick in : Ecosystem 2008 , comments closedIn the March/April issue of Operations Research, ManMohan Sodhi and Christopher Tang look at operations research/management science and discuss how research, teaching, and practice interact in our field. From the abstract:
We believe that research, teaching, and practice are becoming increasingly disengaged from one another in the OR/MS ecosystem. This ecosystem comprises researchers, educators, and practitioners in its core along with end users, universities, and funding agencies. Continuing disengagement will result in OR/MS occupying only niche areas and disappearing as a
distinct field even though its tools would live on. To understand the reasons for this disengagement better and to engender discussion among academics and practitioners on how to counter it, we present the ecosystem’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Incorporated in this paper are insights from a cluster of sessions at the 2006 INFORMS meeting in Pittsburgh (“Where Do We Want to Go in OR/MS?”) and from the literature.
This article, dedicated to Art Geoffrion who, as the authors state, is a “role model of a great research, educator and practitioner” in OR/MS, is a call for increased interaction between all those interested in our field.
For an ecosystem to thrive, efforts have to be made in increasing healthy interaction on many fronts. Specifically,…, we believe that (1) academic journals editors could serve as catalysts for making the ecosystem healthier by publishing more multidisciplinary papers that reflect the core strengths and uniqueness of OR/MS, (2) researchers could initiate efforts for strengthening the links with end users and practitioners, and (3) educators (especially in business schools) could enlist support from practitioners and end users to motivate more students to become OR/MS practitioners or end users.
You can find the full paper here.
The editors of Operations Research have invited two prominent educators and researchers to comment on this paper.
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Simple Models of Influenza Progression within a Heterogeneous Population June 15, 2007
Posted by Michael Trick in : Influenza 2007 , comments closedIn the May-June, 2007, issue of Operations Research, Professor Richard C. Larson looks at the role that operations research can place in one of the most pressing issues of our time: handling a possible influenza pandemic. In his abstract, he outlines his goals:
The focus of this ‘OR framing paper’ is to introduce the OR community to the need for new mathematical modeling of an influenza pandemic and its control. By reviewing relevant history and literature, one key concern that emerges relates to how a population’s heterogeneity may affect disease progression. Another is to explore within a modeling framework ‘social distancing’ as a disease progression control method, where social distancing refers to steps aimed at reducing the frequency and intensity of daily human to human contacts. To depict social contact behavior of a heterogeneous population susceptible to infection, a non-homogeneous probabilistic mixing model is developed. Partitioning the population of susceptibles into subgroups, based on frequency of daily human contacts and infection propensities, a stylistic difference equation model is then developed depicting the day-to-day evolution of the disease. This simple model is then used to develop a preliminary set of results. Two key findings are (1) early exponential growth of the disease may be dominated by susceptibles with high human contact frequencies and may not be indicative of the general population’s susceptibility to the disease; and (2) social distancing may be an effective non-medical way to limit and perhaps even eradicate the disease. Much more decision-focused research needs to be done before any of these preliminary findings may be used in practice.
In the paper, Prof. Larson provides a number of simple, yet plausible, difference equations and uses them to model influenza spread in and environment with a population that is heterogeneous in the amount of social interaction made. In his conclusions, Prof. Larson describes his view of the rationale and importance of this research:
No one knows how or when the next pandemic influenza will emerge and what its intrinsic properties will be. If history can be a guide, the next influenza will have ‘emergent properties,’ meaning that it will mutate during the course of the epidemic and its intrinsic properties will evolve accordingly. Any mathematical model of the disease and its control is bound to be incorrect. But we are not seeking multi-decimal numerical accuracy but rather insights on how to limit the spread of the disease. We firmly believe that fresh eyes from the OR community can play a significant role in this quest.
You can read the full paper here along with its online companion.
The editors of this journal have invited three individuals and groups to comment on Prof. Larson’s paper.
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Thirteen Reasons Why the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves Process is Not Practical April 17, 2007
Posted by Michael Trick in : Auctions 2007 , comments closedIn the March – April 2007 issue of Operations Research, Michael Rothkopf of Rutgers University argues that the well-known Vickrey-Clarke-Groves process for auctions is not practical. The abstract reads:
In theory, the mathematically elegant Vickrey-Clarke-Groves process offers perfect efficiency with dominant truth-revealing strategies. However, it has many serious practical problems. This paper describes these problems and argues that research that aims to maintain the dominant truth-revealing strategies while compromising on the other practical issues is of limited practical value.
Rothkopf goes on to discuss thirteen reasons for this limited value. These are
- the fact that the dominant strategy equilibrium is a weak equilibrium and there may exist alternative weak equilibria,
- the nonexistence of dominant strategy equilibria in models that include reasonable bid preparation costs,
- the exponential growth of effort related to bid preparation and bid communication,
- the NP completeness of the winner determination problem,
- problems related to capital limited bidders,
- problems associated with the disclosure of valuable confidential information,
- problems associated with various kinds of cheating including
- false bids by the bid taker,
- conspiracies by competing bidders,
- conspiracies in two-sided markets between bidders offering to sell and those offering to buy,
- and the use of false name bids by single bidders,
- the fact that strategies in sequences of strategy-proof auctions may not be strategy-proof,
- and the fact that the process can be revenue deficient.
You can find the entire article here.
The editors of Operations Research have invited three researchers to provide commentary on this paper:
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Introduction to the OR Forum March 11, 2007
Posted by Michael Trick in : Administration/ Announcements , comments closedThe OR Forum is an area of the journal Operations Research, published by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). The purpose of the Forum area is spelled out in its mission statement:
The OR Forum area invites work that challenges the reader to consider and evaluate the status of past, present, or future prospects and challenges within the field of operations research. Possible submissions include critical reviews of research in a specialized field, closely reasoned commentary on the practice within an area, analysis of prospects for operations research broadly, or any other area where a substantive, significant work will clarify and illuminate research and practice. Published work will often be accompanied by supplemental pieces that enhance or dispute the theses developed.
An online forum will provide opportunity to continue the discussion after publication. Papers that address prospects in areas not traditionally covered by Operations Research are strongly encouraged, as are provocative papers that take a strong stand on policy and practice issues. The arguments made in the paper should not be casual or speculative, but should be based on a firm foundation consistent with publication in a professional journal. Survey papers are appropriate providing such papers go beyond a listing of who wrote what to include a critical appraisal of the research and the prospects for the future. The work should be accessible and of interest to a significant portion of the readership of Operations Research. Authors are encouraged to contact he Area Editor early in the process of developing their work to determine suitability for consideration in this area.
This site is an adjunct to the published papers in the journal. At this site, we invite commentary and discussion of each of the OR Forum’s papers. There is no set time-limit to this discussion, and interested readers are invited to check back periodically for updates.
All comments and posts are moderated for content by the Area Editor, Michael Trick (trick@cmu.edu) .
Welcome to the OR Forum!