Sir Alan Wilson, Regional Science, Operations Research, and the Future of Cities

I returned last night from Europe where I spent the last 3 weeks at 3 different conferences and transiting between them. During this period I was privy not only to major current events but also history in the making since I was in Greece during the financial crisis (and ultimate bailout)  and even in Vienna where US Secretary of State John Kerry helped in the successful Iran nuclear negotiations.

This past week, I had the pleasure of taking part in the EURO 2015 conference in Glasgow, Scotland, which I have blogged about, and, on Tuesday, I was privileged to hear Professor Alan Wilson  of the University College London deliver his keynote talk on the Future of Cities in the beautiful Barony Hall, which was packed. He is the Professor of Urban Regional Systems. His extensive, wide-ranging contributions are both in research as well as in administration.

Sir Wilson began his talk by stating that "he secretly thought that he always was an Operations Researcher," and then stated that he is an Operations Researcher.

Coincidentally,  I know of his work through Regional Science and both Sir Alan Wilson and I were elected Fellows of the RSAI (Regional Science Association International) in the same year - in 2007!

Sir Wilson's passion is cities, since he is concerned with the biggest of big problems.

I so much enjoyed his plenary talk in which in emphasized nonlinearities, complex systems, and the high level of interdependencies in cities (just think of population and infrastructure, for example). He also emphasized the importance of transportation and networks and how infrastructur ties issues of population with the economics of cities.

He stated that his view as a math modeler is "to explore different futures for cities."

In his plenary, he also mentioned the role of engineers in transportation planning in the US so I have to note again the recent book by Professors David Boyce (who is both an INFORMS Fellow and an RSAI Fellow) and Huw Williams, Forecasting Urban Travel, which I have written about on this blog.  You can view Professor Boyce's presentation on 60 years of travel demand forecasting in which he notes the work of Alan Wilson here. 

Those of you who were listening closely to Sir Alan Wilson's plenary lecture, may have heard him mention Professor Suzanne Evans. Back in 2003, at a Regional Science conference, Suzanne Evans, joined me, Professor David Boyce, and Hani S. Mahmassani (well-known in transportation science and OR ) on a panel to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of the network classic, Studies in the Economics of Transportation, by Beckmann (who was on my dissertation committee at Brown University), McGuire, and Winsten. You can see photos and presentation if you scroll down on this page.

Sir Wilson, in his ketnte, emphasized 6 challenges of cities in the United Kingdom, and stated that the challenges also apply to other cities and I agree. Specifically, he noted the challenges as being: people (demography), city economcs, the environment and sustainability, urban form (land use and green belts, which I am so passionate about), infrastructure, and governance.  He noted that the UK is very centralized and cities are pushing for more decentralization and autonomy.

As a math modeller, Wilson emphasized the high dimensionality of the problems associated with cities and discussed various scenarios for the future of London with powerful graphical displays. One scenario was what would happen if  "we killed off the car." Since I have done a lot of work on projected dynamical systems, I enjoyed hearing him speak about Lotka-Volterra dynamics (and relationships even to retail and hospitals), path dependence on initial conditions, forecasting challenges, and the importance of capturing uncertainty in dynamics.

And, since I had been in London, just a few days before travelinng to Edinburgh and then Glasgow, I have to include in this post one of my favorite green spaces in a city - Hyde Park in London.

Many thanks to the organizers of the great EURO conference in Glasgow for bringing to us such outstanding plenary speakers and many other presenters. It was an honor and delight to take part in it!

Is this a Scientific Guinness World Record -- Attendance at 50 Consecutive Annual Meetings of the Same Conference!

I don't think that Guinness in its compilation of World Records has a category for this achievement but perhaps it should.
In November, Professor David Boyce, who is both an INFORMS Fellow and an RSAI Fellow, will be attending his 50th consecutive North American Regional Science conference, which will take place in Atlanta, Georgia. His first such conference was in 1964! Walter Isard was the founder of Regional Science and he passed away in 2010 at age 91.
 
David reflected on his Fifty Years at the North American Regional Science Meetings (we are assuming that he will be there in Atlanta and 49 consecutive meetings is an achievement, as well). in an essay published in the NARSC newsletter in which he wrote:
I attended my first Meetings of the Regional Science Association in November 1964 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. At the time I was a graduate student focused on my thesis research, and working full time on the side to support my expanding family. Through careful planning, and extraordinary good luck, I have not missed the North American Meetings since. If my luck continues to hold, I will attend my 50th consecutive North American Meetings next November in Atlanta.

I have wondered out loud to a few people what I might do to commemorate this event. The likely answer is nothing unusual: give a 20-minute talk, and say hello to the many colleagues I have met over the years, whose friendship I cherish. This invitation to write a few lines for the first newsletter of the North American Regional Science Council presents an unexpected opportunity to say more on this occasion that may interest younger readers, as well as remind some of my contemporaries about the meetings back then.

Given Professor Boyce's outstanding scientific contributions, his mentorship and advocacy of numerous students and professional colleagues, and his impact on transportation and regional science globally, I had to do something to honor this very special person.


So, I asked the Program Chair of the NARSC conference, Dr. Peter Stenberg, and its Executive Director, Dr. Neil Reid, whether I could organize a special session in honor of Professor Boyce, and they both agreed. The response was wonderful and below I have the information on the session, which will take place at the NARSC conference on Friday, November 15, 2013, from 10:30AM-12:30PM. And, if you see Professor Boyce, in the meantime, congratulate him on his stamina, dedication, and as, he even acknowledges, "luck."

Session: In Honor of Professor David E. Boyce – His 50^th NARSC Conference – His Scholarship and Mentorship

Organizer: Anna Nagurney, John F. Smith Memorial Professor, Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Paper #1: Conventional Transportation Planning Models: Review and Prospects for Alternatives

Presenter: Tschangho John Kim, Endowed Professor Emeritus, Urban and Regional Systems, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; email: tjohnkim@illinois.edu

Paper #2: A Corridor-Centric Approach to Planning Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure

Presenter: Marco Nie, Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois; email: y-nie@northwestern.edu

Paper #3: David Boyce, RSAI Archivist

Presenter: Kieran Donaghy, Department Chair, Department of City & Regional Planning, Cornell University, Ithaca, NewYork; e-mail: kpd23@cornell.edu

Paper #4: Shrinking Global Population - a Futuristic Scenario or a Current Challenge 

Presenter: Hillel Bar-Gera, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; email: bargera@bgu.ac.il

David Boyce has served as a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania (1966-1977), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1977-1988), and the University of Illinois at Chicago (1988-2003). He is a Fellow of the Regional Science Association International (2002), the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (2003), and the American Society of Civil Engineers (2009), and is an Emeritus Member of the Transportation Networks Committee of the Transportation Research Board. He has published over 190 journal articles, books, book chapters and reports.

Symposium on Transportation Network Design and Economics

On January 29, 2010, the Symposium on Transportation Network Design and Economics will take place at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. This symposium has been organized by Professors David E. Boyce and Hani S. Mahmassani to honor and celebrate the visit of Professor Martin Beckmann to Northwestern. The symposium program is now available.

Professor Beckmann is the only living author of the classic book, Studies in the Economics of Transportation, published in 1956 by Yale University Press, and co-authored with Bart McGuire and Chris Winsten. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of this classic book, in 2005, we organized several sessions at the San Francisco INFORMS meeting and both Beckmann, and McGuire (who died two months after), came to the sessions and took part in the festivities. Please click here for those talks and many photos as well as for a link to the classic book, which is now available online.

Professor Beckmann was on my doctoral dissertation committee at Brown University, which was chaired by Professor Stella Dafermos, and I remember so well the question that he asked after my defense plus the party that I gave in Barus and Holley (that well-known engineering and physics building at Brown) afterwards. Beckmann, a true cosmopolitan and lover of travel and terrific food, especially enjoyed the European tortes that I had prepared for the occasion (although we were quite poor grad students at that time and did not have all the right utensils for slicing). He took advantage of a plastic spatula to do the job.

Professor Beckmann, I hear, will be traveling by train to Northwestern, from Providence, Rhode Island, and the day before the symposium, will be speaking on his reflections of the classic book (BMW).

Boyce, Mahmassani, and I wrote a journal article on the impacts of BMW, which was published in Papers in Regional Science in 2005 .

At Northwestern, I will be speaking on some of my latest work and will be delivering the paper, Supply Chain Network Design Under Profit Maximization and Oligopolistic Competition.

I am very much looking forward to this symposium, which will honor the work of a truly great scholar and human being.

For those who would like to see additional photos of Professor Beckmann, who, as Professor Boyce, was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science, please click here. These photos were taken in various locations around the globe, including Australia and Sweden.