A Happy White Thanksgiving and Operations Research

For many in the US, Thanksgiving is a favorite holiday during which we celebrate history, give thanks, surrounded by family and friends and nourished by delicious food from the turkey and all the trimmings to sumptious desserts.

The 2014 Thanksgiving in the northeastern US will be especially memorable due to the snowstorm that hit with travel disrupted from planes to road travel and with many in our area of western Massachusetts and beyond without electric power.

I took the photos below this morning because the sun was shining and I had to venture out to see the white landscape that was beckoning to me.

Thanksgiving, with  all the planning, the travel, the cooking, and even the seating of the guests, not to mention what do to with leftovers, if there are any, is the "optimal" holiday for operations researchers at which we get to put all of our analytical tools into practice. For example, as the students in my Transportation & Logistics class know, one has to try an determine an optimal time for departure for the trip home given forecasts for traffic and associated delays. This past Tuesday there was a 60 mile backup on the MA turnpike from Logan Airport to Sturbridge as the Google map below shows (luckily, most of my students were headed east).

As for the plane flight cancellations and delays, the scenario was right out of one of my favorite Steve Martin movies, Planes, Trains, & Automobiles.

The planning and execution of the cooking of the big Thanksgiving meal is a perfect exercise in project planning, with the network tool of Critical Path analysis being especially useful. One needs to identify all the activities, construct the network project model, and then identify the time (longest path) for the completion of all the activities. This is so useful! Of course, the goal is to make sure that everything is completed just in time for the arrival of the guests!

Moreover, one of my former colleagues, rest his soul, Professor Joe Balintfy was an expert in food management science and menu planning, and his parties left a standard that I aspire to.

One previous Thanksgiving, at which we hosted a group of my Management Science doctoral students at the Isenberg School and their families, the weather was so warm, that after indulging in all the food we went out to play outside to burn off some of the calories!

With best wishes to everyone for a wonderful Thanksgiving!

In New England we are resilient and, as readers of my blog know, we have endured a once in a 500 years flood, a freaky Halloween snowstorm, and more!

Will Our Speaker Make It - Drama of Extreme Weather Events and Transportation Disruptions

*************An Update*******************

Dr. Laurie Garrow has had to cancel her presentation this Friday at the Isenberg School because of the major weather events in Atlanta and headed our way with thousands of flights cancelled.


The latest weather news is hard to miss with CNN's headlines with descriptions such as potentially catastrophic event. And this forecasted icestorm follows only two weeks after the snowstorm in Atlanta that brought the city to a halt with big political ramifications as well.

I am teaching my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class at the Isenberg School this semester and we certainly have had a lot of interesting real-life events to discuss, almost in real-time!

This Friday, we are to host Dr. Laurie Garrow of Georgia Tech, who is also the immediate Past President of the Transportation & Logistics Society of INFORMS.

She is to be speaking in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series, which I help our great students to organize.

Georgia Tech closed on Tuesday and I see that it is also closed today, Wednesday, February 12.

USA Today has the headlines:

Most Atlanta flights axed for Wednesday as cancellations soar

and I heard, yesterday,  from Dr. Garrow that several of her flights were cancelled on Delta for tomorrow, when she is planning on flying to our area so that she can speak on Friday. She managed to rebook and has reservations on a mid-afternoon flight. Now the weather in western MA will not be propitious tomorrow either.

 The costs to travellers this January because of the flight disruptions has been immense. 

We will have to wait and see -- Will the show go on? We were planning on a nice reception prior to her talk at the Isenberg School (some of you many have noticed that this Friday is also Valentine's Day).

We in operations research and management science are good at disruption management so, provided that UMass Amherst is still open, we hope to still have some event, if only a small substitute.

We will keep you informed and, in the meantime, stay safe, wherever you may be!