So now we’ve been to the mountaintop (again), and what’s next?

I attended a very enlightening talk by Arnie Greenland on implementing inventory science at the LA Rapid Transit District warehousing system.  A very nice way to end a great conference.  This sort of thing is, for me, like going to the mountaintop.  As is walking past the open bar area just after the conference and hearing “Paul!!”  and there is a colleague, who was a prof when I was in grad school, whom I haven’t seen in several years.  Still looking as young as ever.  So a long conversation ensued, interrupted by the arrival of several other old friends and new friends I hadn’t met yet. 

Next for me is a few days exploring the SE Arizona desert with an old buddy and my 23-year old son, and then back to a more normal routine at home.  It strikes me  that this time in the desert is an opportunity to reflect on the conversations and talks of the past few days, look at what opportunities these new ideas may reveal in my regular working world, and maybe synthesize some new directions and foci (focuses?) for my department and my own orientation at work.

My hat is off to the organizers of the INFORMS Practice 2009 conference.  An engaging program, excellent networking opportunities, and a great locale all combined to make this the best practice meeting I have personally attended.   Thanks to you all!

Thanks to the YPC participants who attended our wrap-up session. It’s always good to get feedback on what was liked and ways we can improve the program for next year. Some comments we got on opportunities for improvement – 1. The YPC group gets together on Sunday and then again on Tuesday. It would be nice to have something in between. 2. There was a suggestion for mentoring. In the past, we had this sort of arrangement and will revive it in the future. 3. Have a table set aside at the Monday breakfast for YPC members. 4. To make conference attendees more aware of the blogs, have a screen up at the conference where people could read the blogs. There were other good ideas, but I am purposely leaving them out so that I will get your comments. We’ll see how many of you are reading this blog. Hope to see you all at the conference next year!

Wow!  What a great first day of the conference.  Here’s a brief recap from my point of view:

Breakfast with Brenda, Don and others (Brenda - I promise I’ll come up with something better than “benchmarking” :-))

Pierre Harden:  I have toured the Singapore harbor facility, and it is a fantastic port — the throughput and efficiency due to OR applications on scheduling, tendering, yard management efficiency, and customer service are one of the keys to it’s success as the ”next Hong Kong” gateway to Asia.  Nice to hear Pierre bring it up.  Also, continuing to keep a Chief Analytics Officer as a vision is absolutely a worthy goal for the OR profession. 

Stephen Barrager on Decision Analysis — I loved Stephen’s suggestion to change the name to Decision Design — that’s very consistent with our use of it at P&G.  Animal Spirits is now on my reading list.  Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, as well as discovering Chris Argiris http://www.infed.org/thinkers/argyris.htm for facilitating decision analysis in practice.   The Corvette platform decision analysis business case was a wonderful example of DA (or DD?) in action, having a significant impact ($200M investment decision), and using the classic methods and tools in the decision analysis toolbox.  Can’t wait to fetch those off of the Preceedings Disk.

Edelman — saw Norske Skog’s presentation, and was great to see the papermaking process described again (I started my career at P&G’s Mehoopany Paper Plant in Pennsylvania, at the time the largest paper manufacturing site in the US), and the capital decision analysis method used.   Plant consolidation is one of the most challenging decisions for any company to take on, and the testimonials from the union, management and community were well done.   Although they didn’t win the Edelman, as was noted last night, when you are a finalist in the Edelman, everyone is a winner. 

I session-hopped (that’s legal, you know) for the 2:00 track, and thought I was doing well until I landed in Ellen Coopersmith’s DA Framing/Scenario Planning session and found the attendees were just breaking up into “work groups” to flesh out strategies from a decision matrix.  Would have helped if I knew what the problem was (my bad for coming in at the middle of the session), but nonetheless, thanks to Ellen for making it a highly interactive session (we need lots more of these — adult education values a high degree of “tactile” learning, rather than just “talking heads”.  I hope we can encourage more of this type of session in the future.

I missed Tony Cox’s talk (can someone comment on it?), as I found myself needing a breath of fresh air and a little networking with a few folks (Erika, Jack, Irv, Mark)

Jack and Thornton — thanks again for the lively discussion at the Birds of a Feather on OR & IT, always good to talk this topic.

More later….

Glenn

For those of you who weren’t at the talk this morning by Mark Ehlen, Chief Economist at Sandia National Laboratories, you missed a very interesting discussion on applications of OR in Homeland Security. Of particular interest to those of us who have been traveling to and from this conference, is the concern about the spread of the swine disease and whether or not we might be subject to getting it. So, it was reassuring to know that although the disease has already spread to 7 or 8 states in the US, Homeland security is actively involved in curbing the spread. Dr. Ehlen discussed the economic implications for closing borders to try and stop the spread from Mexico, which might be our first reaction. However, analyses show that this would have only bought the US maybe a couple of weeks before it ultimately did land in our backyard with very severe economic implications, which would only compound our current economic crisis. The approach is that we know the disease will be in our backyard even if we close borders due to global travel as a way of life and business, so how do we preposition vaccines to minimize the time it takes to get these vaccines to people to minimize mortality. There are many opportunities for OR practitioners and academics in the area of homeland security, and I hope these kinds of talks will also be a part of future INFORMS programs.

Amongst the riches of outstanding presentations yesterday, I would like to single out one paper for its potential of transforming the lives of many, namely the lives of the poorest of this planet we all share. Justin Cohen from the Clinton foundation presented a compelling case for action to the OR community, which I would like to echo here. There are many obstacles to delivering live savings drugs and diagnostics to the developing world, but the lack of OR support should definitively not be one of them.

Once again an enjoyable and almost Emmy-like celebration last night at the Edelman Gala. I’m sure glad that I didn’t have to be on the judging committee, as all of the teams had impressive projects, and it would have been an especially tough decision. Congratulations HP! I especially liked the Zara team’s head guy who wore jeans with a sports coat. Who says math people don’t know how to dress! This is the look that I see when I go to visit the vehicle design center, and it seems to permeate across countries in the design/fashion world. Also, good choice by the Edelman committee for the MC - it was fun to have the dry wit of the “Bi” part of the Gurobi optimization. Congratulations to Intel for winning the INFORMS Prize! If you want to hear more about the work that Intel is doing, see the 9:10 session - Track T10. Hope everyone has recovered from last night’s festivities and are able to catch the Edelman reprisal talk at 8am. By the way, Eva, hope you can get the stain out.

My first few OR conferences, I focused on going to as many talks as possible, sponging up as much knowledge as I could.  Now I find myself savoring the conversations between sessions, making connections, coming to synergy of knowledge rather than acquiring bits and pieces.  With that said, however, I found Tony Cox’s talk on Risk yesterday very fascinating, and full of little bits of arcane humor.   More to come today…

Hewlett Packard, for their product portfolio management systems. As a judge, I don’t want to say anything beyond saying I think the HP team makes an outstanding Edelman Award winner. Congratulations to them and all of the other finalists.

The Edelman competition ceremony is over now.  Very impressive.  The meal was possibly the best conference meal I have ever had, and the ambience was right-on for such a prestigious award.  Great job by the planning committee!

Usually at these Networking lunches, there is a mix of both academics and practitioners. Today, however, I was at a table with only industry and national lab members, so forgive me for leaving out the academic perspective. We had a mix of software providers, consultants, national labs, and large companies. Our first main discussion topic was how to provide certification for OR professionals. This led to a lively discussion on “What is OR?” The increase or inclusiveness of topics that are now under the OR umbrella makes it more difficult to define the scope of what should be included in the certification process. INFORMS has a committee that is looking into this right now. If you are interested in this topic, there is a Birds-of-a-Feather Discussion today at 5:30 or send in your comments.

Our second point of discussion is how we’ve been affected by the current economic conditions. I would have thought that the national labs would be getting stimulus money, but they haven’t gotten any yet. The consensus with the big companies at the table is that layoffs are happening and projects are geared less towards long-term research and more towards strategic shorter term deliverables that have direct company benefits; the consultants have had new projects put on hold. While some software vendors have experienced a decline in software sales, one vendor at our table hasn’t been affected, as a majority of his business is university related, which seems to be stable; so, at least some good news at the table.. Although there’s lots of bad news, I think that this difficult economic time will bring about some of OR’s most interesting and challenging problems.

This morning’s Edelman Competition started with an outstanding talk by HP on Transforming Product Portfolio Management with OR. They really set the bar for the rest of the competition. There were two main thrusts to this work – evaluating new products for introduction and managing existing product portfolios. The second topic was particularly interesting to me, as reducing complexity while maintaining or increasing customer satisfaction is also one that we face in the automotive industry. The new algorithm that they developed, Simultaneous Parametric Max Flow, allowed them to solve this complexity reduction problem that used to take days down to 10 seconds. I’m interested in reading this work in more detail once it is published.

If you haven’t made it to any of the Edelman talks, I suggest you check out the remaining talks this afternoon.

Had a really productive first day (Sunday) at the conference, getting enlightened on a number of front as regards deterministic modeling versus stochastic.

Started the day with attending Sam Savage’s presentation about the Flaw of Averages at the JMP software distribution. JMP seems to have come so far away from v1.0 that I used as a grad student at UCLA! Sam talked about “parametrized simulation” and seeing it visually in JMP makes it appear that modeling can be for everyone!

It was great to hear Dan Fylstra from Frontline Systems talk about stochastic/robust modeling. As he pointed out, “optimization magnifies error” when the parameters in the model are not accurate. One of my fears having worked in industry before my present academic job is that managers prefer simulation or simply Excel models. Dan showed how the gap from a simple deterministic spreadsheet model to one with correct use of simulation to one with optimization has been closed with the solutions from Frontline.

I also had the pleasure of listening to Linus Schrage about stochastic optimization. Boy, has Lindo grown up! Linus talked about What’s Best! as well as the other tools. (Unfortunately the eight-hour jet lag caught up and I had to leave early to crash in my room.) Linus made it quite clear how tools like What’s Best! close the modeling effort from simple deterministic models, i.e., even without any optimization, to multi-stage stochastic optimization.

One thing was abundantly clear to me at the end of the day: stochastic optimization is not only possible because of growing computing power but also rendered conceptually easier with the tools currently on offer! These tools enable robust decision-making.

I also attended a part of the INFORMS Board Meeting with regard to the further development of INFORMS Online and got a sneek peek at some of the issues facing the Board: semi-independent (of INFORMS) journals, open-access to all journal articles by faculty being considered by universities (e.g., MIT and also my own university, City University London) in the US and the UK in the interest of the public good, plagiarism, legal issues, and what not. How do you steer an organization through such troubled waters! Perhaps, it is best to stick to tradition broadly with an incremental approach, learning from experiments. That too is a robust approach!

Continuing my coverage of a few of the Technical Workshops, I reiterate that the views here are neither those of the companies nor of INFORMS.  They are mine!

Ducking out of one technical workshop, I moved on to the presentation by ILOG (now styled ILOG, an IBM Company, since IBM’s acquisition earlier this year).  It was great to see the mix of IBMers and ILOG people on the stage.  Like many (about 2/3 according to a later audience survey), I was worried about the effect of having IBM acquire ILOG, but the unity of the group on stage allayed many of those fears.  The workshop had two major focuses:  the business strategy of having IBM together with ILOG and, more technically, details on the new version of ILOG’s CPLEX, CPLEX 12.

When it comes to business strategy, IBMers Brenda Dietrich and Gary Cross put out a persuasive and inspiring story on how IBM is focusing on Business Analytics and Optimization.  How can you make an enterprise “intelligent”?  You can make it aware of the environment, linked internally and externally, anticipating future situations, and so on.  And that requires both data (as in business intelligence) and improved decision making (aka operations research).  As IBM tries to lead in this area, they see the strengths in research meshing well with their consulting activities and with their software/product acquisitions.  The presentation really was inspiring, and harkened back to the glory days of “e-business” circa 1995 with an operations research tilt (with the hopes of not having a corresponding bust a few years later).

When it comes to CPLEX 12.0, there continues to be improvements.  These were given in three areas:

1. improved MIP performance.
2. parallel processing under the standard licence.
3. built-in connectors for Excel, Python, and Matlab.

The improved performance was characterized by two numbers.  For instances taking more than a second to solve, the improvement was about 30%;  for harder problems taking more than 1000 seconds, CPLEX 12 is about twice as fast as 11.2 (on the problems in the extensive testbed).  Strikingly, the CPLEX testbed still has 971 models that take at least 10,000 seconds to solve, so there is still lots of work to be done here.  The improvements came through some new cuts (multicommodity flow cuts) as well as general software engineering improvements.

I think the news on parallel (multicore) processing is particularly exciting.  If our field is to take advantage of modern multi-core systems, we can’t have our software systems charging us per core.  There are some issues to be handled:  the company doesn’t want people solving 30,000+ separate models on a cloud system simultaneously for the price of one license, but some system for exploiting the 2-8 cores on most current machines must be found.  I am really pleased that this will be available standard.

I was also very happy to see the Excel add-in.  As an academic, I know that my (MBA)  students are most comfortable working within Excel, and I will be very happy to introduce them to top-notch optimization in that environment (once ILOG figures out its pricing, which was unclear in the presentation).

Overall, I found this an inspiring workshop on both the business strategy and the technical sides.  IBM should also be recognized for bringing in a clicker system to get audience feedback:  that made for a very entertaining and useful audience feedback session.

One final point: IBM claims to have 800 “OR Experts”, which is a pretty good number.  If all of them became members of INFORMS, we would gain about 650 members, by my calculation.

It goes without saying that these statements are my individual views of the workshops, and are not the official word from either the companies or INFORMS.

The world of optimization software has been turned upside down in the last year.  Dash Optimization (makers of XPRESS-MP) was bought by FairIsaac (or FICO, as it is now called). ILOG, makers of CPLEX, was bought by IBM.  And three key people from ILOG, Gu Rothberg and Bixby, split off to form Gurobi (no prizes for guessing how the name was formed).  Gurobi held its first (I believe) technical workshop at an INFORMS Practice Conference, and had tons of interesting news.  Since “Operation Clone Michael Trick so He Can Attend All Interesting Workshops” failed, I spent the first half hour of the 3pm workshop session at the Gurobi sesssion before moving onto another session.  Here are a few things presented.

Bob Bixby presented an overview of the history of Gurobi.  Their main goal over the last year has been to create a top-notch linear and mixed integer programming code.  I was surprised that they were able to do this in the March 2008-November 2008 period.  Since then, the optimization code has been essentially static while the firm works on things like documentation, bug fixes, user interfaces and so on.

The business model of Gurobi has three main parts:

1. Focus on math programming solvers
2. Flexible partnerships
3. Technology leadership

The partnership aspect was quite interesting.  They very much value the relationship they have with Microsoft Solver Foundation (whose presentation I attended this morning), along with the partnerships they have with AIMMS, Frontline, GAMS, Maximal, and other groups.

Ed Rothberg presented the stand-alone user interface (to be released May 6), which has been implemented as a customization of the Python shell.  Some of my colleagues (in particularly those at the University of Auckland) have been pushing Python, but this is the first full scale system I have seen, and it is very impressive.

Beyond that, I can only go by the handouts, since I did some session jumping, but a few things are clear:

1. As an optimization code, Gurobi is competitive with the best codes out there, being better than all on some instances, and worse than some on others.
2. Gurobi is taking parallel optimization very seriously, stating that single-core optimization is nothing but a special case of its multi-core approach.
3. Python is a powerful way of accessing more complicated features of the system.

Gurobi is already available as an add-in to other systems.  It will be available in a stand-alone system in a week or so. Further versions are planned to come out at six month intervals.

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Greetings INFORMS Practice Conference attendees!   I’m arriving late to Phoenix Sunday evening, so I’ll miss the kick-off reception this evening, but will be ready for two full days of great presentations and interactions with colleagues old and new.   Many will know I have been in the O.R business at Procter & Gamble coming up on 25 years and still can’t get enough of this stuff!

I’m particularly looking forward to Pierre Haren and Thornton May’s keynotes, the Edelman presentations (of course), and the Risk & Uncertainty, Theories of Practice, and Methodology Tutorials tracks.  I’ll be bouncing between them and hanging out in the hallways between talking shop.

Inside tip — stop by Gerry Brown’s talk Tuesday in Camelback A at 9:10 for a hair-raising talk on bioterrorism risk assessment (also Tony Cox’s sobering and yet entertaining talk on Fixing Broken Risk Management Processes in Deer Valley Monday at 3:30).

Also, I’ll be leading the roundtable lunch discussion for the Consumer Products Industry on Tuesday — looking forward to a great discussion!

Bring it on!

Microsoft Solver Foundation became public late in 2008, and I have been curious what it is all about, so I sat in on this morning’s technical workshop. Two hours and six pages of notes later, I think I have a better idea.  At its heart, Solver Foundation is a pure “.NET” based library for mathematical programming.   At some level, that is all the justification it needs to exist.  There are a lot of .NET shops out there, so being able to work purely within .NET is a real plus to them.  For those of us who are not working in such an environment, there are still a number of nice aspects to Solver Foundation (SF), including

1. Modeling Breadth.  SF is based on a very general algebraic modeling structure (think Mathematica), so it is, in theory, not limited to “just” mixed-integer programming.  Current solver support includes constraint programming, MIP, quadratic programming, and nonlinear programming, but the underlying structure is extremely general.
2. Built-in parallelism to take advantage of either networks of machines or multicore systems.  Since much of the improved speeds in computers these days comes from the addition of cores (even notebook computers can have four or more cores), it is critical that systems take advantage of this.  The example given in the talk was a “horse race” between alternative optimization codes: SF will easily let you run CPLEX, XPRESS, and other solvers in parallel on the same problem, terminating when the fastest solver on that instance terminates.
3. Integration with Visual Studio and, particularly, Excel.  My (MBA) students really like to work within Excel, which has limited our use of modeling languages.  SF gives hope that we can embed real, scalable, models within Excel easily.
4. Symbolic and rational arithmetic possibilities.  For some models, roundoff errors create huge problems.  SF solvers have the ability to work in rational arithmetic (keeping track of numerators and denominators) to provide exact calculations.

For me, the best parts are the ability to combine constraint programming with mixed-integer programming, and the hope that maybe I can teach some real operations research to my MBA students through SF’s links with Excel.   Of course, it is inspiring to hear a Microsoft person talk about the multi-billion dollar market they hope to reach through optimization.

My favorite part:  the tagline “The Right Decision”.  That pretty well sums up operations research.

I just arrived in Phoenix, and I’m off to this evening’s game between the Giants and the Diamondbacks.  There is an operations research connection, of course:  both the teams and the umpires are scheduled with operations research.  So this is kinda like a site visit:  I’m there to be sure exactly two teams show up, along with four umpires!

More serious posts tomorrow when I attend some of the Technology Workshops.

Welcome to those of you who will be attending this INFORMS Practice Conference as a part of the Young Practitioner’s Program. Each year we look forward to meeting those who have been nominated by a senior OR professional or department member to participate in this program. We hope that this year’s participants will find it a rewarding experience and a good opportunity to meet more seasoned OR professionals, make new contacts, and get a taste of the rich opportunities available for those interested in OR.

For those of us who new Rick Rosenthal who started this program, we think of him at this time with fond memories and give our best to his family. Miguel Anjos and I, as co-chairs of the YPC, are happy to help his vision live on.

Welcome to the Informs 2009 blog! If I would be saying that I am getting ready for Informs, I would not be telling the truth. In a matter of fact I am en route to the New Orleans Jazz Fest, ready to enjoy two full days of music in what is going to be a memorable event. The line up is just so fantastic that difficult choices will have to be made. Who wants to have to decide between listening to The Neville Brothers, The Radiators and Buddy Guy? - If you are a blues and funk aficionado that is. The same holds true for this year’s program of presentation at Informs. Difficult choices will have to be made judging by the roaster of speakers. Having spent my entire carrier in the realm of difficult R&D investment decision, first in the oil and gas sector and recently in Pharma, I have decided to increase the shots on goal (diversification) by inviting two of my Merck colleagues to help me cover the event. With regards OR and management science, what is currently on my mind is our(my) inability to define useful productivity measures for high risk R&D, measures which truly help run a best in class Business of Science – would you like to share your experience in this domain?

Till Sunday night - Daniel