International OR2017 Berlin Conference Was Fabulous with 910 Participants from 46 Countries

Yesterday evening I arrived back in Massachusetts from the fabulous International Conference on Operations Research, OR2017 Berlin, in Germany.

The invitation to delivery a semiplenary talk at this conference I received back in November 2016 from Professor Jan Ehmke, a super creative, dynamic, and productive scholar in transportation and logistics and very well-known in our INFORMS community. Professor Ehmke was one of the two Chairs of the Program Committee, along with Professor Natalia Kliewer of the Freie University,  and was also on the Organizing Committee. It took me only about 24 hours to respond with a resounding, "Yes." I figured it was doable, although the dates of the conference September 6-8, 2017, coincided with the first week of classes at UMass Amherst. Professor Ehmke kindly scheduled my semiplenary on the Friday, the last day of the conference, so that I could meet with my Transportation & Logistics class students for the first class and a wonderful doctoral student covered the second class. (I am bringing back a lot of chocolates for the students). Also, I am delighted that we now again have a direct link from our local airport, Bradley in Hartford/Springfield, to Europe, with a daily flight to Dublin via Aer Lingus, which made the trip to Europe and back in 4 days manageable.

I gave Dr. Ehmke a list of topics that I could speak on and the one selected was: Blood Supply Chains: Challenges for the Industry and How Operations Research Can Help. 

So, after teaching my first class this past Tuesday, I was off to the OR2017 Berlin conference via Aer Lingus, with a short layover in Dublin, and I arrived Wednesday morning in Berlin. Accommodations were in the Harnack Haus, a historical scientific building, with additional rooms across the street and in proximity to the conference venue, which was the Freie University, in a green and stunning part of Berlin known as Dahlem.

 

 The main building there for the conference was the Henry Ford Building.

Shortly after registering at the guest house, and while marching with my luggage to the site of my room, I was greeted on the street by the Chairs of the conference: Professor Natalia Kliewer and Professor Rolf Borndorfer of the Freie University.

After freshening up, and, before going to the sessions, since the scientific program with a theme of the conference being: Decision Analytics for the Digital Economy, I treated myself to a marvelous lunch at the neighboring French cafe (several of us also indulged in some baked treats the day after).

The conference had numerous coffee breaks, receptions, a conference dinner, and even lunches, at which one could socialize and discuss with speakers their research.

 

 

Below is a photo taken with Professor Ehmke.

It was special to see my colleague from the University of Connecticut School of Business, Professor and now Associate Dean Robert Day, who also took advantage of our new air link to Europe.

I thoroughly enjoyed all the talks that I attended and, of course, the plenary and semiplenary talks, as well (although it was tough to decide which ones to go since the latter had multiple parallel ones).  The scientific quality of the presentations was uniformly excellent and I very much enjoyed talks from sustainability and logistics themes to social network models to machine learning and optimization.

I enjoyed speaking with Christian Rauscher, a Springer editor, and his colleague at the Springer display booth. I have seen Christian at wonderful Operations Research conferences around the globe.

Also it was a pleasure to see fellow INFORMS Fellow, Dr. Robert Fourer, who even came to my semiplenary talk.

Another wonderful experience was seeing the one and only Professor Marco Lubbecke from Aachen, who also gave a semiplenary talk and meeting Professor Jan Ehmke's dissertation supervisor at a sumptious breakfast: Professor Dirk Mattfeld.

Professor Stefan Zimmer was the chair of my semiplenary session and afterwards I was presented with a lovely gift of a personalized mug with the title of my talk on it and some yummy gummy bears inside.

After my presentation, I spoke with conferees from India who are also working on blood supply chains. Amazing to have 46 different countries represented at this conference!

And to make this conference experience extraordinarily special, while taking an exploratory walk after sessions on Thursday I saw the billboard of Angela Merkel below

and I came upon the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Freie University, where I had given an invited talk 15 years ago, when I was a Distinguished Chair at the University of Innsbruck under a Fulbright.

Coincidentally, when I received my PhD from Brown University in Applied Mathematics in 1983, with a specialty in Operations Research, John F. Kennedy Jr. received his undergraduate degree and his mother, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, was there (and my mother was thrilled). I have also met his sister Caroline Kennedy at an event at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University a while back.

This was my third trip to Berlin - in March 2015 I  gave a plenary talk at a physics conference entitled: Design of Sustainable Supply Chains for Sustainable Cities.

The OR2017 Berlin conference set new standards as to attention to detail and organization and I am very grateful for experiences that I will never forget.

Of course, I also had to indulge in some Wiener schnitzel, which will keep me fortified for quite a while, and it was as delicious as it looks in the photo below.

And, on my flight back from Dublin to Hartford/Springfield I rewarded myself by watching the movie Hidden Figures, about AfroAmerican female mathematicians who made an impact on the NASA space program. And, when the Euler method was mentioned as the method Katherine Johnson used to approximate a very important trajectory in a eureka type moment, I was thrilled. Our work on projected dynamical systems, which I had mentioned in my semiplenary talk, also involves a general iterative scheme, with a special case being the Euler method!

Plus, guess which books have been on my bedside stand?!

During OR2017 Berlin, we received messages that the INFORMS conference will take place at the originally scheduled dates in Houston, despite Hurricane Harvey, so I hope to see again many colleagues back in the US. And, strangely enough, the case study that I described in my semiplenary talk, based on our recently published paper, was focused on a blood service organization in Florida potentially merging with another organization under status quo and disaster scenarios, and now we await the brunt force of Hurricane Irma, the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic.

Operations Research has never been more important!

Latest on Blood Supply Chains

This has been an amazing day, with not only the solar eclipse taking place,

 

and we had a wonderful turnout to view the solar eclipse, organized by Finance Professor Ben Branch of the Isenberg School,

but we also had two papers published today: Supply Chain Network Capacity Competition with Outsourcing: A Variational Equilibrium Framework, Anna Nagurney, Min Yu, and Deniz Besik,  which was published in the September issue of the Journal of Global Optimization (JOGO):

and Mergers and Acquisitions in Blood Banking Systems: A Supply Chain Network Approach, Amir H. Masoumi, Min Yu, and Anna Nagurney, which was published in the November issue of the International Journal of Production Economics (IJPE).

There has been much going on in the blood services industry in the United States and in January I had an article on the topic published in The Conversation: Uncertainty in Blood Supply Chains Creating Challenges for the Industry, which was reprinted in many news outlets.

Our IJPE article provides not only a new blood supply chain network model that incorporates frequencies of activities such as collection, testing, and distribution, but it also introduces three synergy measures to determine whether or not a merger or acquisition in this industry would be effective.  The case study examines a recent pending merger uner both status quo and disaster scenarios. The IJPE article is already garnering attention and was featured in a news post at the Pamplin School of Business at the University of Portland, where one of my co-authors, Professor Min Yu, is a faculty member.  Below is a photo of the three authors of this paper, with the lead author being Professor Amir H. Masoumi of the School of Business at Manhattan College. Both Dr. Masoumi and Dr. Yu are Isenberg School of Management UMass Amherst PhD alums (and they were also my doctoral students, with whom I continue to collaborate through the Supernetwork Center).

And, I am very excited that I will be delivering a semiplenary talk: Blood Supply Chains: Challenges for the Industry and How Operations Research Can Help  at the International Conference on Operations Research in Berlin, Germany, September 6-8, 2017.  It is an honor to be on the list of semiplenary speakers at this conference, and great to see several friends on the list!

I have been hard at work on my conference presentation, which will describe the latest on blood supply chains from network optimization models to game theory models since this healthcare sector is faced with increasing competition.

Hope you can make it to the conference and, if not, I will be posting my presentation closer to the conference date.

Internet of Things, Network Economics, and Operations Research

Next week, while I will be speaking on cybersecurity at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, my collaborator on our NSF ChoiceNet project, and now NSF EAGER project, Associate Dean in the UMass Amherst College of Engineering Professor Tilman Wolf, will be flying to Berlin, Germany, to present our invited paper at the 1st IEEE International Conference on the Internet of Things Design and Implementation.

The title of our paper is below and it will be published in the Proceedings of the First IEEE International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI), Berlin, Germany, April 2016.

The abstract is as follows: Many solutions to important societal problems relating to the environment, health care, transportation, etc. seek to utilize the promises of the Internet of Things (IoT), where sensing, computation, and actuation merge the physical world with the computational world. To date, many such solutions have focused on a single problem domain and require dedicated sensor and actuator infrastructure. This vertical integration makes the development of innovative, novel solutions costly and difficult to deploy. An architectural approach to addressing this challenge is to enable horizontal integration, where sensors and actuators from different applications can interconnect with any computational IoT application. In order to isolate complexities and to support heterogeneous systems and software, it is necessary to provide clear abstractions. We present such abstractions in the form of a layered protocol architecture that describes the necessary interfaces. Beyond technical challenges for horizontal integration, this paper also addresses network economic considerations since the various entities owning and operating sensors and actuators need suitable economic motivation to participate in such an approach. We believe that this work provides a conceptual foundation for future, scalable IoT solutions.

In quantifying the synergy associated with horizontal integration, we have assumed that system optimization, in the form of total cost minimization, is the desired criterion. This reflects centralized decision-making. Earlier applications of synergy measures that I have done research on were in the context  of supply chain networks and included a means of evaluating mergers and acquisitions.

Since the costs on the links prior to horizontal integration in the Internet of Things (IoT) and post correspond to generalized costs, this gives us the flexibility to include risk measures, emission measures (if there are environmental concerns), and other relevant criteria, and, with appropriate extensions, even time.

Below are the networks corresponding to two applications prior to integration in our IoT framework that includes ideas from network economics and operations research.

 Also, we may have different degrees of horizontal integration:

The synergy measure is calculated as follows:

Interestingly, in supply chain network applications, thus far, the network topologies (see the references in a prior blogpost) have been less expansive than in the IoT context revealed here. Also, the added links in the horizontal integration cases corresponded to transportation activities and not data transfer activities as in the above network figures.

Wishing everyone at the IEEE conference in Berlin, Germany a very rewarding time!

Photos from the Great DPG Conference in Berlin

I made it back from the DPG Conference in  Berlin, Germany late last night via Heathrow to Boston Logan. The flights on British Airways were terrific as was the service and the dinner of chicken curry with chocolate mousse for dessert.

I blogged several times about this great conference which had an attendance of 6,000 and I especially enjoyed the sessions organized by the Physics of Socio-Economic Systems group.

Below I have posted some photos of the speakers and the ambience as well as some sights nearby that I thoroughly enjoyed.

I'd like to thank the organizers for inviting me to speak - I have a fabulous time professionally, culturally, and socially - hard to top.

  The Science

                                       The History and Culture

Auf wieder sehen und danke schon!