From Supply Chain Optimization Summit in Seattle to ACEC in Boston to Big Book Launch in Chicago - What an October!

The new academic year is in full swing and it is a very special time of the year in New England with the fall foliage in its full splendor.

This month of October is jam-packed with so many exciting events that I am taking part in and am very much looking forward to.

Tomorrow (I turned down a trip to France), I will be teleconferencing in for a habilitation defense in France. I am on the candidate's habilitation committee, which required the reading of a professional dissertation, his book, and several papers of his. A habilitation is even higher than a PhD and several countries expect this achievement before one can supervise doctoral students and proceed higher on the academic ladder.

Thursday, the Isenberg School is hosting Marc Schneider, the CEO of the fashion house Kenneth Cole Productions. Marc is an Isenberg School alum and will be speaking to my Logistics and Transportation class. On Friday, my Operations and Management Department will be having its Advisory Board meeting and speed mentoring event. That afternoon I will also be taking part in a networking event organized by the Computational Social Science Institute (CSSI) at UMass Amherst that I am an affiliate of.

This weekend, I will be flying to Seattle, as an invited faculty participant of the First Amazon Supply Chain Optimization Summit. There will be about 30 faculty taking part in this 2-day summit from across the globe and we are even getting a tour of the fulfillment center, complete with Kiva robots.  The list of invited participants contains many well-known INFORMS members so it will be a nice small-scale reunion before our INFORMS conference in Philly at the end of the month.

Upon my return, I will teach my Logistics and Transportation class and then will be heading to Boston for the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC) conference.  I am an invited speaker and will give the presentation, "The Application of Supernetworks to Critical Infrastructure from Transportation to Electric Power." This conference overlaps, in part, with the Head of the Charles regatta, for all the rowing fans out there!  Since my college room-mate at Brown University  was on the women's crew team and now my daughter is President of her college crew  and also the cox for two men's boats, I will have to check out the regatta. (And there is a chance that my daughter may be coxing an alum boat from her college).

The following week, I am flying to Chicago, where I have the great pleasure and honor of being one of three panelists at the big book launch of the Boyce and Williams book, which is a scholarly masterpiece: "Forecasting Urban Travel," published by Edward Elgar. This will be a truly celebratory event.

And the week afterwards,  colleagues, students, and I will be off to the INFORMS conference in Philadelphia.

Never a dull moment or day in academia!

What if Your Plane Was Hit by Lightning and a Highly Perishable Product

This past Tuesday, April 2, I was trying to get back from Oklahoma City to Amherst, Massachusetts.

I had had a fabulous stay at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, during which I gave two  lectures as part of a Dream Course there. I wrote about the outstanding hospitality of my hosts in a post.

The weather in Oklahoma on April 1 was delightful -- warm and sunny,  but,  on my flying day back, it was fray and stormy, and I had heard thunder since about 4AM that night.

When I got to the Oklahoma City airport, courtesy of my wonderful host, Professor Janet K. Allen, I saw that my flight to Dallas was delayed and that I would not be able to make the connecting flight to Bradley airport in Hartford/Springfield.

So I agreed to be rerouted to Chicago O'Hare.

The lightning was continuing and as I stood in line waiting to get a sandwich I started a conversation with the lady in front of me who asked where I was flying to. She then told me that a plane that had just flown in from Chicago had been struck by lightning.

I wandered over to my gate and saw no plane, but, given my endless academic curiosity, I proceeded to investigate. She had also told me that there were long lines and that the airline was offering vouchers (I would not mind seeing Hawaii again).

The Southwest plane below was the one that had been struck by lightning as it was descending into the Oklahoma City Airport, and the mechanics could not start working and checking it out until the lightning was more than three miles away, for safety reasons.

The passengers had seen a bright flash of light in the plane when the lightning struck.

Many nervous passengers that were scheduled to fly on the above plane to Chicago were milling around Gate 18 whereas others were being rerouted.

A woman with an infant against her chest approached the gate agent.  I was going to talk to him since as a professor,  who teaches a course in transportation and logistics, among other operations-type courses, I wanted to gather more information that I could share with my students. I dug up this article from Scientific American on what can happen when lightning strikes a plane.

The woman said that she was traveling, via Chicago, on Southwest,  to Manchester, New Hampshire, where she was relocating to, and on the plane above, with the other cargo, was about a 4 month supply of breast milk.

Breast milk is a perishable product and, I thought to myself, having just had our latest book, Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products, published, that this "product" has similar characteristics to that of human blood -- you have to give it willingly and it is ingested into another human body. Blood supply chains are one of the case studies in our book.

The mother was panicky. She had done her homework and had about a 10 hour time window in which to get her very valuable packages back into the freezer.  I could really empathize and, being a problem-solver, I offered some suggestions.

In about 40 minutes or so, the plane was cleared for flying and the passengers had boarded (but two who were having lunch were not let back on board once the doors were shut).

And  I went to thank the Southwest gate agents when I heard that the plane from Chicago to Manchester would be held for the mother, her baby, and their valuable cargo!

In my research, I came upon this interesting post about shipping perishables, including blood and breast milk, in disasters, such as Haiti.

About an hour later, I got on my American Airlines flight to Chicago and eventually made it back to Massachusetts. On my leg from O'Hare to Bradley I was seated next to an executive and we talked non-stop. He had been to 116 countries and was in Vienna, Austria when I had been there in March. We discussed everything from our favorite cities to the US healthcare system and how he, at age 72, cannot even think of retiring since work is so interesting. He works in the international insurance business so we also talked about trust, reputation, and the importance of meeting people face-to-face -- and, hence, one of the reasons we fly so much!

Supernetwork Center Associates will be at the POMS Conference in Chicago

The POMS (Production and Operations Management Society)  Annual Conference takes place next week in Chicago, Illinois, April 20-23, 2012.

The theme of this year's conference is Socially Responsible Operations.


The Virtual Center for Supernetworks Center Associates will be well-represented at this conference,

Below is a list of the papers that members of our team will be presenting:

Supply chain network design of a sustainable blood banking system (A. Nagurney and  A. H. Masoumi),

A supply chain network oligopoly model for pharmaceuticals under brand differentiation andperishability  (A. H. Masoumi, M. Yu, and A. Nagurney),

The influence of technical, market and legislative factors of e-waste flows (F. Toyasaki, T. Wakolbinger, A. Nagurney,  and T. Nowak),

Multiproduct humanitarian healthcare supply chains: A network modeling and computationalframework (A. Nagurney, M. Yu, and Q. Qiang),

Global supply chain network competition under exchange rate uncertainty (Z. Liu).

Also, my doctoral student, Amir H. Masoumi, will be taking part in the POMS Doctoral Student Colloquium and Zugang Liu will be taking part in the Emerging Scholars Program. Amir will also be at the mini-conference on Humanitarian Operations and Crisis Management next Thursday in Chicago.


I am sure that the Chicago POMS Conference will be a great success.

Chicago as the Perfect Venue

I have been immensely enjoying the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming (ISMP), which is taking place in Chicago, August 23-28, 2009. The weather has been clear and crisp and the conferees, when time allows, are taking walks along Lake Michigan, marveling at the beauty of such architectural wonders as the Sears Tower, the Trump Tower, the Wrigley building, and, of course, the Chicago Art Institute (the second largest art museum in the US), and the Field Musuem (where tonight's conference banquet will be taking place). There are many pedestrians on the streets since the weather is simply gorgeous, the busses are running well, the trains and subways flowing on the Loop, and the boats sailing on sparkling Lake Michigan. I have also been very impressed by the lovely flowers and plantings plus the trees that line many of the streets in downtown Chicago, including the Magnificent Mile of Michigan Avenue. Of course, Chicago is a "foodie's" paradise!

The invited ISMP session that I organized took place this past Monday and was in the Telecommunication and Networks track of paper presentations. Dr. Mauricio Resende of AT&T Bell Labs was the organizer of this track and I thank him for this opportunity. The session was entitled, "Game Theory and Variational Inequalities," and I packed 4 papers into this session. The session took place in the Gleacher Building of The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, which is located in downtown Chicago, close to Lake Michigan. The room in which we spoke was gorgeous with two computer projector screens, three sliding white boards, and lovely corporate tables and dark green, padded chairs.

Yes, the session went overtime, but the audience was willing to give up a part of its coffeebreak -- a true compliment -- to listen to the last talk. As I wrote in an earlier post, two of my former PhD students, who are now professors, Dr. Patrick Qiang and Dr. Zugang Liu, gave talks in my session, with Dr. Qiang speaking on supply chain disruptions and performance and vulnerability analysis, and Dr. Liu giving a talk on our work on electric power supply chains integrated with fuel markets and a large-scale application to New England. I spoke on the Internet as a dynamic network and on network models of oligopolies with insight into the merger paradox.

We had terrific discussions with the audience afterwards.

I was especially gratified to receive an email message from one of the audience members, which said, Thank you for your beautiful and clear talk this afternoon. This message made my day.

Our presentations are available on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website.

The first paper that I presented was based on joint work with Professor David Parkes of Harvard University and Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania in Italy, and it was published in the journal Computational Management Science. I also included in my presentation additional results obtained with Professor Qiang, in a paper that has recently appeared in Netnomics. Specifically, we showed how, with the use of the new evolutionary variational inequality model of the Internet and the Nagurney-Qiang dynamic network measure, one can identify the most important nodes and links on the Internet and to even rank them!

The second paper, as I noted above, was on supply chain disruptions, and captured complex behavior in multitiered supply chain networks under cost and demand uncertainty. This paper is an invited chapter and will appear shortly in a Springer volume, edited by Professors Teresa Wu and Jennifer Blackhurst.

The third paper in the session, which I also gave, is in press in Computational Management Science. It extends my work in the network modeling of mergers and acquisitions to the oligopolistic domain, where there is competition among the firms.

Professor Liu gave a wonderful talk on our work on electric power modeling and analysis. The scope of the model, which is for New England, included over 500 power generators, and the model reproduced the actual electric power prices very well. This presentation was based on a paper that will appear shortly in the journal Naval Research Logistics. The articles on which our session talks were based are available here.

This was the 20th ISMP conference to take place with the zero-th one taking place 60 years ago -- also in Chicago! That one marked the historic event at which Professor George Dantzig (see his photo with me below) spoke on the simplex method of linear programming, a revolutionary algorithmic discovery that allowed for the optimal allocation of resources in numerous applications and that is used today by industry, government, corporations, and even the nonprofit sector.

Another aspect of a major conference that I appreciate is that you get to see fellow conferees on the streets of the major city, which is the site of the conference. A few years back I attended a Euro conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, which was considered the biggest scientific conference to that date in Iceland, and everywhere that we went we were greeted by "Hi" and "Hello" from colleagues from around the world.

In concluding this post, I would like to express my sincerest appreciation to Professor John Birge of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business for organizing such an outstanding conference! Coincidentally, we had the pleasure of hosting Professor Birge in our Spring 2008 Speaker Series.

Mathematical Programming Symposium in Chicago and Reflections

We are getting ready for the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming, which will be taking place in Chicago, August 23-28, 2009. This Symposium marks the 60th anniversary of the 0-th such symposium, which also took place in Chicago. The conference is held every three years.

I have organized an invited session on Game Theory and Variational Inequalities, which includes papers on dynamic modeling of the Internet, supply chain network disruptions and vulnerability analysis with performance assessment, mergers and acquisitions among oligopolistic firms and the merger paradox, and the modeling and solution of electric power supply chains with applications to New England. The presenters in this session are: Professor Patrick Qiang, Professor Zugang "Leo" Liu, and yours truly. I have posted the presentations on the Virtual Center for Supernetworks website.

This will be a very special conference for me. I recall my first Math Programming Symposium when I was a fairly fresh PhD and the conference was at MIT in Cambridge, MA. My dissertation advisor, Dr. Stella Dafermos of Brown University, had recommended that I attend this conference and I recall fondly my excitement about presenting a single-authored paper on computational comparisons of spatial price equilibrium problems (which later was published in the Journal of Regional Science). I have always loved working at the interfaces of operations research / management science and economics. Lo and behold, a few minutes into my presentation, who comes running into the room, but none other than Professor George Dantzig of Stanford University, who is considered the founder of "operations research." He apologized for being late, I caught my breath, and proceeded with my talk. Afterwards, Professor Dantzig came up to me and told me that he had been working on such problems and he thought that my approach was great. Needless to say, his support and special thoughtfulness and kindness I have carried forward with me from that moment on!

Above I include photos of Professor Dantzig with me taken a few years back and also a photo of Professor Stella Dafermos, two giants of operations research (although height-wise they were certainly not "tall"). You can read more about Professor Dantzig, who lived to the age of 90, here.

I am delighted that two of my recent PhD students, Dr. Qiang and Dr. Liu, will be with me at this Math Programming Symposium and will be presenting papers. How wonderful to have history repeating itself!