Because It's Valentine's Day!

After a departmental meeting to evaluate PhD applicants, I came home to a bouquet of roses. They are so beautiful and bright and such a contrast to our white snowy landscape outside I thought I would preserve the beauty in the photograph below.

 

For those of us who love logistics and supply chains, the following graphic was brought to our attention through The Operations Room blog:  Supply Chain 24/7 (The Logistics of Delivering Fresh Roses In Time for Valentine’s Day, Feb 13:

More about  this special day on Dr. Laura McLay's highlights on operations research and finding love.

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!

Lean In -- Inaugural Women of Isenberg Conference Was Terrific!

Although the weather this morning was frigid that did not stop about 150 of us from attending the 2014 Inaugural Women of Isenberg Conference, which took place at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst.

It was a terrific event and brought together undergrad and grad students, alums, faculty, and staff to hear from outstanding female professionals, including the Keynote Speaker, Susan C. Hammond.

Our Undergraduate Dean, Dr. Linda Shea, had opening remarks, which set the wonderful tone for the day.

There was also a panel this morning of 4 Target employees. Target was one of the sponsors.

I very much enjoyed the morning session on Lean In and it was great to see former students, one of whom, Christina Calvaneso, drove up this morning from NYC.

I took copious notes and enjoyed the sharing of professional stories and pearls of wisdom.

Some of my favorites:

• Define your own success;
• Don't undervalue yourself and others;
• Write thank you notes;
• Look for mentors and use them;
• Don't work in environments that violate your values;
• Have goals, take on hard challenges, be patient, and put in the work, and
• Build and surround yourself with a great team.

Also, students were told to take advantage of all the great clubs and leadership opportunities. This very much resonated with me since I have been serving as the Faculty Advisor to the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter for a decade now.

Below are some photos that I took at this very special conference:

The food was also great.

And, for those of you who may be wondering, there were a few males in attendance, including several husbands who came to support their spouses who gave talks.

Congratulations to the organizers and especially to the Isenberg Women in Business, which did a great job in the planning and execution of this event!

Congrats to 2014 Newly Elected National Academy of Engineering Members - a Great List with Operations Research represented

After teaching my Humanitarian Logistics and healthcare class this morning I heard the great news.

Today the National Academy of Engineering announced its 2014 list of newly elected members and what a terrific list it is! 


Time to celebrate.

On the list are several individuals that are well-known in Operations Research and Analytics circles and I am so happy for them -- they are great individuals. Their citations are below


Dr. Carlos Daganzo, Chancellor Professor of the Graduate School, and retired Robert Horonjeff Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Berkeley.  For engineering contributions to traffic, transportation, and logistics systems and operations.


Dr. Brenda Dietrich,  IBM Fellow and vice president, and chief technology officer for Business Analytics Software, IBM, Somers, N.Y.  For contributions to engineering algorithms, frameworks, and tools to solve complex business problems.


Dr. Wallace Hopp, senior associate dean for faculty and research, Herrick Professor of Business, professor of technology and operations, and professor of industrial and operations engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  For creating and applying fundamental engineering principles governing the underlying behavior of manufacturing systems and supply chains,


Dr. Alex "Sandy" Pentland, Toshiba Professor of Media, Arts, and Sciences; and director, Human Dynamics Laboratory and Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.  For contributions to computer vision and technologies for measuring human social behavior.
 
Dr. Daganzo is the recipient of the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science, which he received at the INFORMS Minneapolis Meeting in October 2013.

Both Dr. Dietrich and Dr. Pentland have spoken in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series at the Isenberg School of Management plus they were plenary speakers at the First Northeast Regional INFORMS Conference held at UMass Amherst in May 2011, which I helped to organize with Dr. Hari Balasubramanian of UMass Amherst and Dr. Les Servi of MITRE. A blogpost and photos are available here.

I have also interacted with Dr. Pentland on other occasions, including the SBP set of conferences in which I served as a tutorial chair for several years and he gave a fabulous tutorial!

Special congrats also to Dr. Hopp for his great work and much-deserved recognition.

*******Plus, an update from the INFORMS homepage, congrats  also to INFORMS member:  Dr. Stephen Boyd,  Samsung Professor in the School of Engineering; and professor, Information Systems Laboratory, department of electrical engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.  For contributions to engineering design and analysis via convex optimization.********

Emergency Management and Business Continuity at Universities - An Amazing Lecture

When is the last time that you sat at the edge of your seat listening to a guest lecture?!

This morning, I had the privilege and honor of hosting Mr. Jeff Hescock, the Director for Emergency Management and Business Continuity at UMass Amherst. This is just one of his titles since he also continues in his role at the President's Office (the UMass President, that is, Dr. Robert Caret, who oversees our 5 campuses).

Mr. Hescock was a guest lecturer in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class at the Isenberg School and today he spoke on Emergency Management.

 His lecture was so fascinating that I asked him for permission to post his slides, which he gave, and which you can download and view here.

Mr. Hescock spoke on the various phases of emergency management and then discussed his experiences after the Boston marathon bombings on April 15, 2013, when it became known that one of the suspects was a UMass Dartmouth student. He spoke on the evacuation of that campus and also on the ultimate capture and arrest in Watertown and how Boston and surrounding areas were, literally, on lockdown. I will never forget this terrorist attack and blogged about it since I knew two runners at the marathon and also Dr. Pierre Rouzier, a UMass Amherst doctor, who has assisted in multiple Boston marathons, was at that one, too, and saved lives. He will be speaking to my students in my class later this month.

Mr. Hescock spoke about how important it is to protect the academics, research, and reputation of a university and the roles that emergency management plays in these. We learned so much from him and how he acts as a coordinator with student services, housing, food services, UMass police, etc., in the case of an emergency. He spoke about "table-top" planning and scenario exercises and also real-life simulations.. There will be a shelter simulation at the Mullins Center in April and we hope to be able to attend and experience that.

Interestingly, he also spoke about grant-writing in order to cover costs of various training exercises, which are so important. I also found it fascinating to hear him speak about cybersecurity -- clearly critical for business conitnuity in a university.


If you have a chance, do look at his presentation.


The photos below were taken this morning during and post his lecture.

 

 
 Many, many thanks to Mr. Hescock for sharing with us today his incredible expertise and practical know-how in keeping universities safe and secure.

Do You Know Where Your Meds and Other Products Came From - Information Asymmetry in Quality

I am excited about speaking at the upcoming  Learning and Intelligent Optimization (LION 8)  Conference in Gainesville, Florida later this month, especially since the snow is again falling in Massachusetts with more to come!

I am also excited because this will be the first time that I will be presenting the paper, "Equilibria and Dynamics of Supply Chain Network Competition with Information Asymmetry in Quality and Minimum Quality Standards," joint with one of my doctoral students, Dong "Michelle" Li.

Quality of products, especially those that one ingests, from pharmaceuticals to food and even, in a sense, human blood (and I am not talking about vampires here), is a topic of great concern and one that we have been researching for a while now.


Do you know where your medicines, for example,  are coming from?
 

As we noted in our earlier paper,  Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Networks with Outsourcing Under Price and Quality Competition, Anna Nagurney, Dong Li, and Ladimer S. Nagurney, International Transactions in Operational Research 20(6): (2013) pp 859-888, up to 40% of the drugs that Americans take are now imported, and more than 80% of the active ingredients for drugs sold in the United States are outsourced, often to countries such as India and China. The problem is that there may not be sufficient oversight and lack of quality standards.


Furthermore, the manufacturing of products, including pharmaceuticals, may take place in multiple manufacturing plants, so one may have no idea as to the place of production or the level of quaality!


In our new paper, which focuses on quality competition under information asymmetry, we were inspired by the work of the Nobel laureate George Akerlof and his classical paper 1970 paper (which got rejected 3 times by journals, before it finally got accepted and for which he earned the Nobel prize):  "The market for `lemons': Quality uncertainty and the market mechanism," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84(3), 488-500. Akerlof shared the Nobel with Professor Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Spence.

In our paper, we construct a  supply chain network model with information asymmetry in product quality. The competing, profit-maximizing firms with, possibly,  multiple manufacturing plants, which may be located on-shore or off-shore, are aware of the quality of the product that they produce but consumers, at the demand markets, only know the average quality. Such a framework is relevant to products ranging from certain foods to pharmaceuticals. We propose both an equilibrium model and its dynamic counterpart and demonstrate how minimum quality standards can be incorporated. Qualitative results as well as an algorithm are presented, along with convergence results. The numerical examples, accompanied by sensitivity analysis, reveal interesting results and insights for firms, consumers, as well as policy-makers, who impose the minimum quality standards.

Specifically, we find from the computations the following.  Since consumers at the demand market do not differentiate between the products from different firms, and there is information asymmetry in quality between the firms (sellers) and the consumers (buyers) at the demand market, the average quality level at the demand market, as well as the price, which is determined by the quality levels of both firms, is for both firms' products. Firms  prefer a higher average quality, since, at the same demand level, a higher average quality results in a higher price of the product.

However, once a firm increases its own quality level, of course, the average quality level and, hence, the price  increases, but its total cost will also increase due to the higher quality. Furthermore, the price increase is not only for the firm's own product, but also for its competitor's product. If a firm increases its own quality, both the firm and its competitor would get the benefits of the price increase, but only the firm itself would pay for the quality improvement. Thus, a firm prefers a “free ride,” that is, it prefers that the other firm improve its product quality and, hence, the price, rather than have it increase its own quality.

Consequently, a firm may not be willing to increase its quality levels, while the other firm is, unless it is beneficial both cost-wise and profit-wise. This explains why, as the minimum quality standard of one firm increases, its competitor's quality level increases slightly or  remains the same.

When there is an enforced higher minimum quality standard imposed on a firm's plant(s), the firm is forced to achieve a higher quality level, which may bring its own profit down but raise the competitor's profit, even though the latter firm may actually  face a lower minimum quality standard. When the minimum quality standard of a firm increases to a very high value, but that of its competitor is low, the former firm will not be able to afford the high associated cost with decreasing profit, and, hence, it will produce no product for the demand market and will be forced to leave the market.

The above results and discussion indicate the same result, but in a much more general supply chain network context, as found in Ronnen (1991), who, in speaking about minimum quality standards,   noted that: ``low-quality sellers can be better off ... and high-quality sellers are worse off." Also the computational results support the statement on page 490 in Akerlof (1970) that ``good cars may be driven out of the market by lemons." Moreover, our results also show that the lower the competitor's quality level, the more harmful the competitor is to the firm with the high minimum quality standard. The implications of the sensitivity analysis for policy-makers are clear -- the imposition of a one-sided quality standard can have a negative impact on the firm in one's region (or country). Moreover, policy-makers, who are concerned about the products at particular demand markets,  should prevent firms located in regions with very low minimum quality standards from entering the market; otherwise, they may not only bring the average quality level at the demand market(s) down and hurt the consumers, but such products may also harm the profits of the other firms with much higher quality levels and even drive them out of the market.

Therefore, it would be beneficial and fair for both firms and consumers if the policy-makers at the same or different regions or even countries could impose the same or at least similar minimum quality standards on plants serving the same demand market(s). In addition, the minimum quality standards should be such that they will not negatively impact either the high quality firms' survival or the  consumers at the demand market(s).

60 Years of Urban Travel Forecasting - Traffic Continues to Fascinate

It is hard to miss all the recent news about transportation and traffic,  including the (in)famous so-called "traffic study" in New Jersey that closed lanes, which, in turn,  resulted in huge traffic jams on the George Washington bridge connecting the state of New Jersey with New York, lasting 4 days, and which has now even made international news as reported by the BBC.   The lane closures, it  seems, were instrumented under the guise of studying traffic flows, but, in reality, it is being alleged, they  were to punish the mayor of Fort Lee for "misallegiance." The scandal has even damaged the reputation and standing of the governor of New Jersey, Mr.  Christie,  a potential candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

Who would have thought that traffic mis(management) could be a political weapon or even the downfall of government officials?!

Travel forecasting, that our New Jersey "leaders" might have benefited from, has actually been studied for over 60 years!

And, there is a new book being written, a U.S. - U.K. collaboration between Professors David E. Boyce and Huw Williams, which, I am told, is nearing completion on this very topic. I was contacted by Professor Boyce a few weeks ago to review Chapter 7 of the book, which, I believe, will be published by Edward Elgar Publishing, and should be about 700 pages! Chapter 7 is on Transportation Network Equilibrium, a topic very near and dear to me. What I especially like about this chapter (and book) is the tracing of the intellectual history of the various discoveries in terms of mathematical model building and algorithms, coupled with tensions between academics and practitioners, in a sense, in that the former want to get the latest advances into practice as soon as possible with many challenges along the way.

Professor Boyce is a great colleague and mentor, and renowned in transportation circles, having received  the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science. He is also an INFORMS Fellow and an RSAI Fellow. I have not (yet) met his co-author,  Professor Huw Williams, although I know of his work. Last Fall, Boyce gave the talk, Urban Travel Forecasting: A 60 Year Retrospective, at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, and  he gave me permission to post it on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website, since I found it so fascinating. He has been periodically, as time passes, updating this talk.

You can access his presentation, in pdf format, here.

Seeing photos of such luminaries as Martin Beckmann, Dan McFadden at the Nobel ceremonies with Moshe Ben-Akiva,  John Wardrop, plus Michael Florian in the slides (with a surprise photo of Suzanne Evans and me), was a great trip in nostalgia. And, I also enjoyed David Boyce's great sense of humor as the two slides below, taken from his talk, reveal.

And, for all those researchers and practitioners out there in operations research, and transportation science, see what remains to be done below!

And for a musical rendition of the New Jersey traffic jam,  enjoy the video with Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Fallon below.
http://www.latenightwithjimmyfallon.com/video/bruce-springsteen-and-jimmy-fallon-gov-christie-traffic-jam-born-to-run-parody/n45079/