mem·o·ry·less·ness

This site features VBA operations research add-ins for Excel.  These would likely come in handy for small-scale (and not-so-small-scale) O.R. modeling.  Dr. Paul Jensen, Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas, gave a keynote presentation on these tools yesterday at INFORMS 2010.

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)