Optimization Workshop in Majestic Edinburgh, Scotland

I am spending 3 weeks in Europe engaged in some very serious conference" chaining." I have been blogging from different countries, beginning with Greece, where the Dynamics of Disasters conference that I co-organized with Professors Pardalos and Kotsireas took place in Kalamata.

Today we will be taking the train from Edinburgh to Glasgow, where the EURO 2015 conference will begin tomorrow.

While in majestic Edinburgh, which is breathtakig with its architecture (including the Edinburgh Castle), greenery of the Meadows,  stunning shops, multiple modes of transport (we arrived from London via Virgin Trains), and the conviviality of the people of Scotland. The food, I might add, has also been so delicious!

Of course, I would be remiss not to mention the great writers from this area, including for all the Harry Potter fans out there, J.K. Rowlings, and the cafe in which she did much of her writing of the first books. Also, Sir Artur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes books, also write in Edinburgh.

The photo above was taken in front of the cathedral prior to a ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica.

I was in Edinburgh to attend the EUROPT Workshop on Continuous Optimization.

It was great to see Panos Pardalos again who is also en route to EURO Glasgow.

I got a chance to enjoy some excellent talks, including a talk on closed loop supply chains in which several of my publications and my Network Economics book were noted. The finance risk sessions was also very good and the energy talks also very interesting. I could relate to these since my supernetwork team has done a lot of work on risk and supply chains and also electric power supply chains, even with data for all of New England!

Below are some photos taken at the great workshop. Special thanks to professor Julian Hall at the University of Edinburgh for being so responsive to my questions!

I will miss Edinburgh!

Supply Chain Network Quality, Sustainability, and Risk

The supernetwork team is very much looking forward to the 2014 INFORMS Annual Conference in San Francisco, which begins this coming Sunday!

I organized a session in the Network Optimization cluster: Supply Chain Network Competition: Advances in Models, Methods, and Applications, which will take place next Monday afternoon.

The session will feature talks on supply chain quality, sustainability, as well as risk associated with supplier selection (using supernetworks, of course)!

Three of the presentations have been completed and I include links to them below.

 Link to presentation on quality.

Link to first presentation on sustainability.

Link to second presentation on sustainability.

The final presentation in my session will be given by Professor June Dong (who was my first female PhD student at the Isenberg School of Management) and her collaborator, June Ma, who was a visitor at SUNY Oswego, where Professor Dong is a Full Professor, and who is with the Shengyang University of Science and Technology in China. Their talk is titled: "Supply Chan Supernetwork Model with Suppliers Risk Diversification."

Additional publication information on the first and third presentations above can be found below.

Equilibria and Dynamics of Supply Chain Network Competition with Information Asymmetry in Quality and Minimum Quality Standards, Anna Nagurney and Dong Li, Computational Management Science 11(3): (2014) pp 285-315.

Supply Chain Network Sustainability Under Competition and Frequencies of Activities from Production to Distribution, Anna Nagurney, Min Yu, and Jonas Floden, Computational Management Science 10(4): (2013) pp 397-422.

Professor Patrick Qiang's presentation is based on his paper, which is in press in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

Cybersecurity Risk Analysis for Enteprise Security - Great Presentations Now Online!

I would like to thank the Advanced Cyber Secuity Center (ACSC) for funding the second phase of our project at UMass Amherst, which focused on Cybersecurity Risk Analysis for Enterprise Security.

As part of the project, with Co-PIs Professor Mila Sherman and Senay Solak of the Isenberg School of Management and Professor Wayne Burleson of the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, we organized a workshop at the MIT Sloan School on September 19, 2014. I had blogged about the workshop and am delighted that the ACSC has now made all of our presentations online so that you can read and reflect at your leisure!

The full agenda is here.  I have posted the first page of each presentation below along with the link to the presentation in the order of presentations, so enjoy. Cybersecurity is not only a topic filled with  fascinating research questions but also one of great practical importance for businesses and organization and their very security.

Link to Guenther's presentation.

Link to Burleson's presentation.

Link to Clark's presentation.

Link to my presentation.

Link to Devadas' presentation which was part of a panel.

Link to Lo's presentation.

Link to Getmansky Sherman's presentation.

Link to Solak's presentation.

Cybersecurity Risk Analysis for Enterprise Risk Security - Photos from a Fabulous Workshop

Yesterday, we held our Workshop on Cybersecurity Risk Analysis for Enterprise Security, at MIT's Sloan School.

The event was sponsored through a grant that we received from the Advanced Cyber Security Center (ACSC): Professors Wayne Burleson of the College of Engineering, Mila Sherman of the Finance Department, and Senay Solak, and I of the Department of Operations and Information Management at UMass Amherst.

The workshop was fabulous with panelists and participants from the ACSC, academia, industry, and government. 

The Isenberg School posted a nice news release on our workshop.

Below, I capture some of the highlights through photos of the speakers, panelists, and venue.

Great to see my NSF project collaborator and PI, Associate Dean Professor Tilman Wolf, with a doctoral student that we are working with. (The commute from Amherst to Cambridge took us separately 3 hours.)

William Guenther, Chairman, CEO & Founder of Mass Insight, opening up the workshop

 

Charles Benway, Executive Director of ACSC, and Professor Wayne Burleson giving their Opening Remarks

The one and only Dr. David Clark, who is an Internet legend, thought-leader, and visionary, and Senior Research Scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, giving his keynote: The Foundations of Poor Cybersecurity, and with fans afterwards

I followed with my talk on Network Science and Economics, which can be downloaded, in its entirety, here.

During the breaks and lunch there were opportunities for further discussions

The Cybersecurity panelists sharing their insights with us

The one and only Professor Andrew Lo of the Sloan School giving his keynote during the lunch

 My great colleague and workshop co-organizer, Professor Mila Sherman

   The Risk panelists

My Operations and Information Management colleague, Professor Senay Solak, getting ready to give his great talk

The panelists on the Modeling and Optimization: Making Better Decisions for Cybersecurity panel that Senay and I moderated

The audience, venue. and our MIT technician (for some reason my talk would not project at first, and it is in pdf style, but we used a backup computer, and the show went on!)

And, as "icing on the cake," I got to meet a Wharton PhD, whose dissertation advisor was Dr. Pat Harker, then the Dean of Wharton. Pat is now the President of the University of Delaware. Her dissertation was on stochastic variational inequalities, so it was extra special to be able to talk with her!

Many excellent research questions were generated and I hope that the great momentum established continues given the importance of the issues raised and discussed!

In order to address the cybersecurity challenges we need private - public partnerships with academia, industry, and government,  such as the one that ACSC is building.

Thanks to everyone for such a rewarding day professionally and intellectually!

Network Economics of Cyber Crime

I have been working on network economics with interfaces to various applications for quite a while, with the first edition of my book on the topic being published twenty years ago!

About two years ago, we were approached to submit a proposal to the Advanced Cyber Security Center, which was soliciting proposals for its Prime the Pump Initiative and our project, Cybersecurity Risk Analysis and Investment Optimization, was funded.

Our project team is interdisciplinary, and consists of Professors Wayne Burleson of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mila Getmansky Sherman of Finance, Senay Solak, and yours truly of the Operations & Information Management Department, of the Isenberg School of Management, and Chris Misra, of the OIT Department -- all of us at UMass Amherst.

The Project Synopsis:

The vision of this project was to develop:

• rigorous models for cybersecurity risk,
• models for costs and benefits of various cybersecurity technologies,
• techniques for integrating  these models into higher level models that account for other risks and risk management expenditures.

I will be presenting an aspect of our research project at INFORMS Minneapolis in the presentation entitled: Network Economics of Cyber Crime with Applications to Financial Service Organizations.

 The presentation can be downloaded here.

The invitation to submit a paper to the invited session came from Dr. Alla Kammerdiner, whom I met at a marvelous conference in Yalta, Ukraine.

The session information is here.

Dr. Kammerdiner I wrote about earlier in this blog -- she had run the Boston Marathon that was the site for the terrorist attack last April 15.

Another presentation on our project, from a broader perspective, can be accessed here.

Blood Supply Chains and Humanitarian Logistics

In my previous post, I pointed to a guest lecture on Disaster Communications, given in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class at the Isenberg School of Management, by "the other" Professor Nagurney, my husband.

My students also had the privilege of learning about blood supply chains last week, both from an operations management perspective, as well as from a design (or redesign) operations research one.

The guest speaker on blood supply chains was one of my advanced doctoral students, Amir H. Masoumi, with whom I have co-authored two papers on blood supply chains. Amir has also taught the required Management Science course for our Operations Management majors and was nominated for a university-wide teaching award by the students.

Amir's presentation, "Supply Chain Network Operations Management and Design of a Sustainable Blood Banking System," was based on the two papers with additional material added to broaden the scope for the students and to bring issues of disasters and humanitarian logistics into this context. The framework that we developed for this most important perishable product in healthcare handles risk as well as demand uncertainty.

Our paper, Supply Chain Network Operations Management of a Blood Banking System with Cost and Risk Minimization, Anna Nagurney, Amir H. Masoumi, and Min Yu, is now published online in the journal, Computational Management Science. Our paper, Supply Chain Network Design of a Sustainable Blood Banking System, Anna Nagurney and Amir H. Masoumi, is in press in the edited volume, Sustainable Supply Chains: Models, Methods and Public Policy Implications, T. Boone, V. Jayaraman, and R. Ganeshan, Editors, Springer, London, England, 2012. This book is in the International Series in Operations Research & Management Science.

The new course on Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare has been a wonderful experience for the students, the instructor, as well as the guest speakers.

Supply Chain Disruptions, Congestion, Risk, and Foreign Affairs

Kyle Johnson, who was a Jack Welch Scholar at UMass Amherst, and graduated from the Isenberg School with a degree in Operations Management, and now works in high tech recycling, sent me an email message this past week that he thought of me when he was reading an article in Foreign Affairs and provided me with the link to it.

The article, "Japan's Disaster and the Manufacturing Meltdown -- What the Earthquake and Tsunami Revealed About Globalization," by Marc Levinson, highlights the dangers of single sourcing that the Japan triple disaster has painfully shown, which has impacted the automotive and high tech industries severely. Levinson also noted his 2008 article in Foreign Affairs, in which he presciently wrote:

“Congested shipping lanes and highways make transit times uncertain,” “and this uncertainty hurts profits.” Moreover, the push for ever-greater port security will further slow transit; physical inspection of shipping containers could delay delivery by two to three days or more. “Even if the proportion of containers pulled out of the flow of traffic is small, importers will be forced to reckon with the possibility that their goods might be delayed in transit. In some instances, importers will adjust by keeping more stocks in their U.S. warehouses at any one time.”

Just think of all the time that is now being spent to check for radiation of goods being imported from Japan!

In 2009, Drs. Qiang, Dong, and I wrote the article, Modeling of Supply Chain Risk Under Disruptions with Performance Measurement and Robustness Analysis, which appeared in the book, Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability: Tools and Methods for Supply Chain Decision Makers, T. Wu and J. Blackhurst, Editors, Springer, Berlin, Germany, pp 91-111. Our study extended previous supply chain research by capturing supply-side disruption risks, transportation and other cost risks, and demand-side uncertainty within an integrated modeling and robustness analysis framework. Moreover, we included congestion in the model and proposed a weighted performance measure to evaluate different supply chain disruptions.

Highlights of other research on supply chain risk I wrote about in an earlier blogpost, which was motivated by, in part, the frustration at the developing events in Japan and the suffering of the people there.

In our Fragile Network Economy, the identification of the performance of supply chain networks prior to disruptions and the determination of which nodes and links really matter needs to be done before disasters strike!

Lean manufacturing may be more than short-sided, it may be, frankly, foolish.