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. The first is Alexis Tsoukiàs of the Université Paris Dauphine. Dr. Tsoukiàs is the Immediate Past President of EURO, the Association of European Operational Research Societies. In his commentary, Dr. Tsoukiàs raises a number of points with regards to the Sodhi and Tang’s SWOT analysis. For instance, he makes the point that the world of OR/MS is not well defined:

Who is our target? A rough check of the “eco-system” dimension tells that we have around the world 35000 people who actually recognise themselves as Operational Researchers (this is the world membership of IFORS). If we consider that only 1 out of 10 is “conscious” of being an Operational Researchers then our ecosystem has a potential dimension of 350000 world-wide. This is a fraction of any engineering branch in any major Economic Area in the world which makes us automatically a “niche” community at least quantitatively. Now the question is: to whom we are talking? The 35K existing community, the 350K potential community or a 35M target who should be diverted to our discipline?

He also identifies areas of research that he believes are understudied, particularly identifying what it is that OR/MS analysts do:

Research in OR/MS is very sophisticated today and this is a sign of the vitality of our research community. However, my impression is that among the research subjects to address we are missing the problem of analysing the decision aiding process from our perspective. With the noticeable exception of work done mainly in UK on Problem Structuring …, there is very little attention paid in analysing what exactly are the activities of an OR/MS analyst and the interactions with his/her client.

The full commentary of Dr. Tsoukiàs is available here.

Our second commentary comes from Dr. Michael Rothkopf. Dr. Rothkopf spent a career furthering interactions between academia and industry in OR/MS. In his commentary, Dr. Rothkopf takes issue with “the overstatement of the weaknesses of the profession and, especially the role of academics in this weakness”.

For example, the paper states that “It does not
help that practitioners are but little engaged in OR/MS journals. Even the practitioner-oriented
journal Interfaces has only two practitioners on its 26 member editorial board.” The paper fails to appreciate that a substantial number of academics are also practitioners. This includes Art Geoffrion, to whom the paper is dedicated, and over half of the (non-author) academics credited in the paper’s acknowledgements section with being presenters at the motivating cluster at the Pittsburgh INFORMS meeting. In addition, while 24 of the 26 members of the Interfaces editorial board have academic affiliations, at least half of the 26, including Gene Woolsey of the Colorado School of Mines, are serious practitioners.

Dr. Rothkopf agrees that the publishing paradigm can work against better interactions between academia and industry, with some important caveats:

Unfortunately, the paper is correct that, “Improvement on something already published by garnering more mathematical results under slightly different or more general assumptions is one of the formulas for getting a paper published, which in turn advances a young researcher’s career.”
However, this is a short-sighted strategy. It is counter balanced, in part, by the fact that most such papers get few citations while seminal papers that open up important new areas of application get many citations, which in turn advances a researcher’s career.

Tragically, shortly after providing this commentary, Dr. Rothkopf passed away, leaving our field with one less voice bringing together industry and academia. We are glad to have his commentary, and regret that he will not be part of the ongoing discussion about the future of our field.

You can find Dr. Rothkopf’s full commentary here.

We now invite you to read the Sodhi and Tang paper, and the commentaries, and continue the discussion. What is the state of our field? What steps are needed to strengthen it? What lies in the future? Click here to read the comments and add one of your own!

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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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:
(more…)

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!