Operations Research articles from January 2002

Operations Research archives from January 2002

Introduction to the 50th anniversary issue of operations research.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... The field of operations research has been instrumental in developing several areas of applied mathematics and has had a profound impact on a wide range of issues in the public, private, and military sectors of our society. To celebrate the 50th...

The genesis of "Optimal Inventory Policy". (Articles).
January 1, 2002... I have been asked to write on the steps leading to the paper by Theodore E. Harris, Jacob Marschak, and myself (1951), "Optimal Inventory Policy." The account will be brief, for two reasons: (1) The origins are rather simple; (2) the event...

Solving real-world linear programs: a decade and more of progress.
January 1, 2002... This paper is an invited contribution to the 50th anniversary issue of the journal Operations Research, published by the Institute of Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS). It describes one person's perspective on the development...

Crime modeling (1).
January 1, 2002... INTRODUCTION Crime modeling in recent times (2) has its genesis in the decision of the President's Crime Commission (3) to create a Task Force on Science and Technology to augment the work of the Commission staff, composed mostly of...

Army Operations Research--historical perspectives and lessons learned.
January 1, 2002... This paper provides some of my historical perspectives on Operations Research (OR) in the U.S. Army. It is based on my 40+ years of personal experience and, thus, focuses on the modeling and analysis (M&A) aspects of OR in the Army. I have...

Abraham Charnes and W. W. Cooper (et al.): a brief history of a long collaboration in developing industrial uses of linear programming.
January 1, 2002... This paper describes a research strategy and its results, which guided a 40+ year collaboration between Abraham Charnes and William W. Cooper, which was initiated in a research center established at the (then) new Graduate School of Industrial...

Linear programming.
January 1, 2002... The Story About How It Began: Some legends, a little about its historical significance, and comments about where its many mathematical programming extensions may be headed. Linear programming can be viewed as part of a great revolutionary...

Richard Bellman on the birth of dynamic programming.
January 1, 2002... What follows concerns events from the summer of 1949, when Richard Bellman first became interested in multistage decision problems, until 1955. Although Bellman died on March 19, 1984, the story will be told in his own words since he left...

Some origins of operations research in the health services.
January 1, 2002... INTRODUCTION Several apparently independent events around the year 1952 formed the nucleus of what is now almost half a century of operations research in the health services as I have known it. In England, Norman Bailey published...

The first linear-programming shoppe.
January 1, 2002... We review the early history of linear programming with respect to the solution of linear equations, computer developments, and its origins within the federal government. 1. INTRODUCTION The development of linear programming has been...

The origins of traffic theory.
January 1, 2002... "In the beginning there was the Ford." With this biblical beginning, I started a paper in 1974 reviewing the development of traffic control theories. I think it is appropriate to start the present paper the same way. Traffic problems...

Early integer programming.
January 1, 2002... During the academic year 1953-54, I was a third-year graduate student in mathematics at Princeton, doing research on nonlinear differential equations. I wrote several papers, the first of which became my Ph.D. thesis. I was fortunate in having...

War and peace: the first 25 years of or in Great Britain.(operations research)
January 1, 2002... This paper identifies a number of events and circumstances, which contributed in Great Britain during the period 1938-1963 to the development and adoption of OR outside the military and defence concerns. I show how the OR club formed a focus...

Energy modeling for policy studies.
January 1, 2002... Energy policy modeling owes a great debt to the disciplines of operations research. Valuable modeling tools were available when the energy crisis struck unexpectedly. In turn, the immediate response to problem-driven policy modeling produced...

Learning how to plan production, inventories, and work force.
January 1, 2002... The HMMS research team of Holt, Modigliani, Muth, and Simon at Carnegie Tech's new Graduate School of Industrial Administration set out in the early 1950s to develop quantitative and computerized decision methods for business and industry. Bill...

Comments on the origin and application of Markov decision processes.
January 1, 2002... Recently, a European mathematician who had spent many years on the theoretical study of Markov decision processes visited me and inquired about the range of application. I replied that I knew of very few practical applications and that I had...

Navy Operations Research.
January 1, 2002... This paper emphasizes OR's utility to the U.S. Navy, as seen by its customers. Like many naval officers who subspecialized in operations research, the author was both producer and consumer of analysis toward improving fleet operations, Pentagon...

How networks of queues came about.
January 1, 2002... This essay, about work done almost a half century ago, is written as a snippet of autobiography rather than as a technical review of the mathematics of networks of queues. To summarize, interest in jobshop manufacturing led me to a good...

Interdisciplinary meandering in science.
January 1, 2002... I was a graduate student in mathematics at Princeton immediately following World War II, 1945-1947. In those days, with veterans of the war inundating universities, there was no option but to earn a Ph.D. within two years. My thesis research...

Looking back: four decades of analysis.(nuclear warfare planning & research)
January 1, 2002... When thinking back in the realm of analyses two defining efforts come into focus: the "Damage Limiting Study"; (1) and my tenure as the head of Studies and Analyses in the headquarters of the USAF. The Damage Limiting Study was conducted...

Creating a mathematical theory of computer networks.
January 1, 2002... 1. ORIGINS It all began with a comic book! At the age of 6, I was reading a Superman comic at my apartment in Manhattan when, in the centerfold, I found plans for building a crystal radio. To do so, I needed my father's used razor blade, a...

Being in the right place at the right time.(Mathematical Programming and Game Theory)
January 1, 2002... The theme of this paper is: "Being in the right place at the right time." The right place was the Department of Mathematics at Princeton University; the right time was the spring of 1948 and the period following. In the spring of 1948, I was a...

Public sector Operations Research: a personal journey.
January 1, 2002... Not all OR careers are carefully planned from the age of ten. LARCENY ON THE CHARLES It all started at an MIT fraternity mixer party in September 1965. Another brother and I, noting the need for additional female attendees--to balance...

Philip M. Morse and the beginnings.
January 1, 2002... Morse was the many-sided founding father of operations research in the United States. Following his pioneering wartime effort, he vigorously promoted the nonmilitary development of the field. A glimpse into his activities and accomplishments...

Operations Research at Arthur D. Little, Inc.: the early years.
January 1, 2002... THE BEGINNING One afternoon in the fall of 1949, I was sitting at my desk in the Manville, New Jersey, building products plant of the Johns Manville Corporation, where I worked as a financial analyst studying the financial and business...

Efficient portfolios, sparse matrices, and entities: a retrospective.
January 1, 2002... In 1989 I was pleased and honored to be awarded the ORSA/TIMS (now INFORMS) John von Neumann Theory Prize for my work in portfolio theory, sparse matrices, and SIMSCRIPT. The following is a retrospective on my work in these fields. ...

Perspectives on the evolution of simulation.
January 1, 2002... Simulation is introduced in terms of its different forms and uses, but the focus on discrete event modeling for systems analysis is dominant as it has been during the evolution of the technique within operations research and the management...

Memoirs on highway traffic flow theory in the 1950s.
January 1, 2002... There has been a revival of interest in traffic flow theory in the late 1990s, mostly because vehicle detectors have been installed at many highway locations throughout the world to record the passing of vehicles. The purpose of these detectors...

Decision analysis: a personal account of how it got started and evolved.
January 1, 2002... THE OPERATIONS RESEARCH ANTECEDENT I am no historian, and whenever I try, I get into trouble. I invariably forget some insignificant figures like Newton, Pascal, or Gauss, or--what is a bit more tragic--I forget some really significant...

Inventory theory.
January 1, 2002... Where to begin? I became involved with inventory theory in 1955, but the proper starting point for this memoir is some years earlier, in the fall of 1951, when I began my graduate training in the Department of Mathematics at Princeton...

Game theory and Operations Research: some musings 50 years later.
January 1, 2002... By its very nature, a discursive reminiscence has to be somewhat self-referential. Furthermore, it cannot offer an exhaustive survey of the many special topics to which it may refer. Rather than suffer "strangulation by footnotes and...

Analysis, design, and control of queueing systems.
January 1, 2002... 1. INTRODUCTION As the reader will quickly discover, this article is a survey--from my personal perspective--of fifty years of research on the analysis, design, and control of queues. My choice of topics is far from exhaustive; I have...

And then there were none.(inventory theory )
January 1, 2002... A half century ago, several scholars, some of whom subsequently received Nobel prizes in economics, developed inventory models primarily in response to the needs of American military service branches and a few large corporations. Significant...

Applied probability in Great Britain.
January 1, 2002... England is in love with the disorder and flux which have never ceased to intrigue her scientists and to inspire her philosophers, not as anomalies, but as a reflection of life itself. Philippe Daudy, Les Anglais. The subject of...