Pictures of the Social Networking and Operations Research Panel
This morning, I attended the “Social Networking and Operations Research” panel discussion, moderated by Laura McLay. It was interesting and informative to hear the panel’s thoughts on the use of social networking and blogging to further knowledge of operations research techniques and applications. I found their thoughts on LinkedIn (it’s a good idea, but not necessarily the best implementation) and twitter (it’s useful primarily to promote other things, including blog posts) to be pretty informative.
Panelists (l to r in the pictures):
Dr. McLay has already posted about the panel, as have Dr. Nagurney and Dr. Thiele, so I’ll keep this short.
image: Download
I’m at INFORMS 2010 in Austin. I’ll post now and then while I’m here.
Bees solve the Traveling Salesman Problem everyday.
The TSP is heavily used in theoretical compute science and in operations research, and is classified as a NP-hard problem.
In its original formulation, the solver is given a list of cities, and their pairwise distances, and is then tasked with finding the shortest possible distance that will allow them to visit each of the cities exactly once.
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“Foraging bees solve traveling salesman problems every day. They visit flowers at multiple locations and, because bees use lots of energy to fly, they find a route which keeps flying to a minimum,” explains Dr Nigel Raine.
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“Despite their tiny brains bees are capable of extraordinary feats of behavior. We need to understand how they can solve the Traveling Salesman Problem without a computer. What short-cuts do they use?” Raine says.
The new investigation could have significant implications for agriculture, because bee pollination patterns are critically important for next year’s crops.
(image source)
My original thesis project in graduate school related to optimal ambulance routing. It’s good to see people using operations research in that manner, and it’s not surprising how lucrative it can be.
“It’s about how you match the resources you have got available most effectively to the emergency calls that are coming in and it’s not just matching the ambulance to the call but also matching it from a geographic sense as well,” said Mackay. “It’s a very difficult thing for somebody to do in their head which is typically what happens in most dispatch centres.”
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In the United States there are 15,000 individual ambulance providers and another 30,000 fire providers.
“North America alone for us is potentially a billion dollar market. Even if we can get 5 per cent of that we’ll be doing well.”
Against the backdrop that the challenges faced by today’s government agencies and private businesses in Nigeria are many and varied, experts have called on public and private sectors’ managers to adopt operations research as an efficient way of tackling these problems.
According to Akingbade Funsho, president and chairman of council of Institute For Operations Research of Nigeria (INFORN) and former dean of Business and Social Sciences, University of Lagos (UNILAG), operations research is a discipline that can be applied in virtually every area of business and government such as in health care, manufacturing, finance, city planning, judiciary, defence, entertainment, among others.
(via INFORMS)
What they do: An operations research analyst formulates mathematical or simulation models of problems, relating constants and variables, restrictions, alternatives, conflicting objectives, and their numerical parameters.
This is an interesting program by Paul A. Jensen at the University of Texas that tracks/forecasts hurricanes using operations research algorithms. It’s historical data is old, but it’s still worth a look.
The Hurricane program tracks and forecasts hurricanes in and around the Gulf of Mexico. It accepts data published by the National Hurricane Center (NHC). The tracking program is implemented using VBA modules in an Excel workbook, hurricane.xls.
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The original forecast models were developed in the late 1970s by Bill Lesso, Professor Emeritus of the University of Texas. They were based on using a Markov process to model the movement of a storm, i.e. the next position only depends on the current position. To develop the probability transition matrices, several hundred historic storms tracks dating back to 1886 were used. The result was a simple, fast computer model that could be run on the newly introduced PC’s. On contract the NHC was using several different models that could be described as ‘aerosol physics’ models consisting of several hundred partial differential equations that, at that time took several hours to run.
(via INFORMS)
Looking for upcoming sports tickets? http://seatgeek.com/ uses an algorithm to predict when to optimize your purchase.
(via INFORMS)
This is neat. O.R. for the win, quite literally in the case of sports tickets.
