Fabulous Operations Research Conference - EURO 2016 in Poznan, Poland

I would like to thank the organizers of the 28th European Operational Research (Operations Research) Conference in Poznan, Poland, taking place July 3-6, 2016, for the great organization, high quality scientific papers, venue, hospitality, and warmth extended to all the conferees.

It has been a wonderful experience since we arrived late on Saturday evening, having flown WizzAir from Luton London Airport to Poznan.

The venue is the Poznan University of Technology, which had big banners welcoming us on Sunday afternoon.

 The registration was also very smooth and friendly.

The opening ceremony was grand with even the university choir entertaining us and with both the EURO Gold Medal awarded to Professor Nesterov and Professor Queyranne with Professor Sisko receiving the Service Award.

Poznan is filled with operations researchers and just upon arriving we saw INFORMS Fellow Bob Fourer and Graham Rand, who was one of my hosts just last week at Lancaster University. The Old Town of Poznan is especially beautiful.

And when we are not being served delicious luncheons at the conference venue we have managed to sample a variet of peirogies as well as schnitzels in Old Town.

The coffee breaks are also spectacular with the conference organizers treating us to delicious pastries.

Another reason that this conference is extra special to me is that I can figure out alot of the Polish since my first language is Ukrainian, plus Springer has my new book, written with my former Isenberg PhD student, Dong "Michelle" Li, "Competing on Supply Chain Quality: A Network Economics Perspective," on display at its booth.

 I was honored that yesterday I had the chance to present our European Journal of Operational Research paper on food supply chains, that was published in 2013 and that was written with Professor Min Yu, also a former doctoral student of mine. I had been invited (one of two presenters) to speak on this work by the Editors of the journal, along with outgrowths of this research. Professor Roman Slowinski had earlier in the same session given a wonderful presentation on the success of this journal, which is one of my favorites, with over 3,000 paper submissions now per year! Professor Slowinski noted that our paper was selected because of the high citations that it has received and its impact.

Today was another very busy day, since I had two talks in a session organized by Professor Patrizia Daniele, a great collaborator of mine from the University of Catania in Italy. As for scheduling, my first talk this morning took place at the same time as a co-authored talk with my husband on the Braess paradox. My first presentation today was on cybersecurity with co-authors Professor Daniele and my doctoral student Shivani Shukla and my second presentation was on a game theory model for freight services in humanitarian/disaster relief. All these presentations are available for download on the Supernetwork Cemter website at the Isenberg School of Management.

Plus, I got to see two of my very successful former doctoral students, Professor Tina Wakolbinger and Professor Dmytro Matsypura and I took the photo of them with Professor Daniele below. Tina organized a very interesting session on humanitarian logistics, which we attended this afternoon after a yummy lunch that we ate outside.

It was also fabulous to see Professor Ariela Sofer who seems to have the same fashion sense as I do.

Another wonderful meeting was with Dr. Mauricio Resende of Amazon, who gave a keynote talk, and then hosted a tour of Amazon's fulfillment center in Poland.

And later today we will be hearing the Nobel Laureate n Economic Sciences Robert Aumann speak. This has been a conference that raises new standards for organization, attention to detail, and also scientific contributions. Many, man thanks to the organizers for such a wonderful conference!

It is great to be part of the Operations Research community and I even exchanged a few words with Melissa Moore, the Executive Director of INFORMS, who is also here.

Excited About Our 4 Talks on Food Supply Chains, Disaster Relief, Cybersecurity, and Even the Braess Paradox at EURO in Poland

While a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College during this Trinity term I have been very busy and have been having a fabulous time, making new friends, dining at delicious meals with Fellows, exploring Oxford and its beautiful university, doing research, giving invited talks, and now preparing presentations for the 28th European Conference on Operational Research (Euro 2016) to be held in Poznan, Poland, July 3-6, 2016.

Tis will be my first time in Poland and since I am of Ukrainian heritage this conference will be extra special.

Technically, one is only supposed to present no more than one paper at this conference but I have been very lucky in that I will be presenting three and a co-author will present another paper of ours.

The topics of our presentations are very exciting, I believe, and the talks are almost completed.

The first paper that I will present is, "Competitive Food Supply Chain Networks with Application to Fresh Produce," which was co-authored with Professor Min Yu, a former doctoral student of mine at the Isenberg School, and a wonderful collaborator.  This paper is an invited paper in a special session: Meet the Editors of EJOR. The Editors of the European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR) will discuss the journal and our paper was one of two selected as being impactful and highly cited. The paper can be accessed at: Competitive Food Supply Chain Networks with Application to Fresh Produce, Min Yu and Anna Nagurney, European Journal of Operational Research 224(2): (2013) pp 273-282. I will also discuss how our model is related to several other perishable product (and other) supply chain network models.

 On Tuesday,  which is July 4, I was to chair a session and have two papers in parallel sessions! The latter has also happened to me at INFORMS conferences but we will manage, since my collaborator and husband, Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney, will take my place and give the presentation below, while I am speaking on cybersecurity in another session. Our Braess paradox paper will be presented in a Graphs and Networks session.  As we state in the abstract for our paper, "Physical Proof of the Occurrence of the Braess Paradox in Electrical Circuits:" While primarily identified with tra ffic networks, the Braess Paradox has also been observed in telecommunications networks and in mechanical spring, fluid flow and nanoscale networks. The purpose of this work is to show that the Braess Paradox can be observed in macroscopic electric networks consisting of resistors and diodes. We first identify the electrical quantities that correspond to the flow and the cost on the network and illustrate the mapping of the cost functions to ideal electrical components. By writing Kirchoff's Law nodal equations for the electrical network, we illustrate how, by appropriate choice of component values, the Braess Paradox can be observed in the network. We show how the classic Braess Paradox examples can be cast into a form where they can be implemented as real electric circuits.

While my husband is speaking on our work on the Braess Paradox, I will be presenting the paper, "A Supply Chain Network Game Theory Model of Cybersecurity Investments with Nonlinear Budget Constraints," co-authored with Professor Patrizia Daniele and my doctoral student, Shivani Shukls. Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania in Italy organized the session: Recent Advances in Dynamics of Variational Inequalities and Equilibrium Problems 1. She is also a Center Associate of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of Management, that I founded almost 15 years ago! This paper, we are thrilled to announce has been accepted for publication and it can be downloaded from: A Supply Chain Network Game Theory Model of Cybersecurity Investments with Nonlinear Budget Constraints, Anna Nagurney, Patrizia Daniele, and Shivani Shukla, in press in Annals of Operations Research.

Professor Daniele also organized the session Recent Advances in Dynamics of Variational Inequalities and Equilibrium Problems 2. Although I was not originally scheduled to present in this session, a speaker cancelled and I was asked by Professor Daniele and the conference organizers whether I could present another paper. Of course, I responded positively. I will be presenting the following paper, which is now in press with Springer in the Dynamics of Disasters volume that I co-edited with Professors Ilias Kotsireas and Panos M. Pardalos. The volume contains 18 rigorously refereed papers and we are very pleased with the volume.  My paper can be accessed at: Freight Service Provision for Disaster Relief: A Competitive Network Model with Computations, Anna Nagurney, to appear in Dynamics of Disasters, I.S. Kotsireas, A. Nagurney, and P.M. Pardalos, Eds., Springer International Publishing Switzerland.

Looking forward to seeing many operations research colleagues from around the globe at EURO in Poznan, Poland, soon!

The Criticality of Transportation in Disaster Relief and Humanitarian Operations

The new semester has begun and I am delighted to again be teaching my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class at the Isenberg School of Management. As I mentioned in a previous post, I am also busy co-editing a volume on Dynamics of Disasters with two great colleagues.

A theme that is resonating time and time again with me when it comes to disaster relief and humanitarian operations is that of the criticality of transportation.

The below poster I have on my office door. It was prepared courtesy of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) when I was interviewed by Michael Breen for a Mathematical Moments podcast on my earlier research on humanitarian supply chains. The podcast can be accessed here.

Transportation is essential to disaster relief and humanitarian operations, which also includes recovery in the disaster management life cycle. Transportation is used in the evacuation of people, animals, etc., in anticipation of a disaster. It is fundamental to needs assessment at the disaster sites, once the disaster strikes, to determine the extent of casualties and survivors' demand for necessary relief supplies. It is even an essential component for supply collections from donors or places of procurement. Finally, transportation in often very challenging environments to points of demand can involve multiple different modes of transportation with great time pressures, followed by last mile deliveries. And, when it comes to recovery post a disaster, the removal of debris and detritus due to the sustained damage cannot happen without transportation, as well as the followup rebuilding. the former was a huge issue post the Haiti devastating earthquake of 2010, as vividly captured in a New York Times OpEd by our Georgia Tech operations research colleagues.

Given the importance of transportation in this space there have arisen partnerships between private companies and  humanitarian organizations as well as the well-known Denton Program, for private U.S. citizens and organizations to use space available on U.S. military cargo planes to transport humanitarian goods to countries in need. I am delighted that one of the highlights of my class will include speakers from the Westover Base in Chicopee who will be discussing military logistics and the Denton Program.

My most recent study, Freight Service Provision for Disaster Relief: A Competitive Network Model with Computations, to appear in Dynamics of Disasters, I.S. Kotsireas, A. Nagurney, and P.M. Pardalos, Eds., Springer International Publishing Switzerland, focuses on freight service provision, under competition, for  disaster relief. Therein, I argue the importance of capturing nonlinearities associated with transportation in humanitarian operations to capture congestion as well as competition and even material convergence.

Great PhD Student Research in Supply Chains, Transportation and Logistics

This week has been off to a great start and the theme is clearly that of great doctoral student research!


Yesterday morning, we heard that our paper, Supply Chain Network Competition in Price and Quality with Multiple Manufacturers and Freight Service Providers, Anna Nagurney, Sara Saberi, Shivani Shukla, and Jonas Floden, was published in the journal,  Transportation Research E 77: (2015) pp 248-267. 

Both Sara Saberi and Shivani Shukla are two of my doctoral students in Management Science at the Isenberg School. And, coincidentally, or, propitiously, Sara was discussing this very same paper in our doctoral seminar that afternoon so the work was really hot off the press! The publication of this paper is quite exciting, since it is Shivani's first refereed journal article as a doctoral student, and our collaborator is Professor Jonas Floden of the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg in beautiful Sweden. Professor Floden has become a wonderful collaborator of our supernetwork team since I am also a Visiting Professor there and the Swedes are excellent in transportation, including freight transportation, in both research and practice!

And, speaking of Gothenburg, today I heard from Dr. Niklas Arvidsson, who defended his PhD dissertation last year. I was a co-supervisor of his dissertation, with my colleague there, Professor Johan Woxenius, and enjoyed Skyping in for Niklas' dissertation defense.  Niklas did a wonderful dissertation, including a chapter on the milk run paradox, that I had even blogged about, and which was published in the journal Transportation Research A.  The great news that he shared with me today is the following: He received the message:   

I am very pleased to let you know that the committee decided that you are the winner of the first NECTAR PhD Award with your thesis “Essays on operational freight transport efficiency and sustainability”. You have written an excellent thesis, of an original nature and you have published various parts in high-quality journals. Congratulations!
 

Karst Geurs

Professor of Transport Planning

Chair of NECTAR - Network on European Communications and Transport Activities Research - www.nectar-eu.org

 Information on the NECTAR PhD award, which Niklas will be the first recipient of,  can be found here. He will receive the prize at the NECTAR conference at the University of Michigan in mid June.

Plus, just recently, my doctoral student, Dong "Michelle" Li, had her co-authored paper, A Supply Chain Network Game Theory Model with Product Differentiation, Outsourcing of Production and Distribution, and Quality and Price Competition, Anna Nagurney and Dong Li, appear in the  Annals of Operations Research 228(1), (2015) pp 479-503.

Michelle will be defending her doctoral dissertation proposal in early May  and Sara Saberi will be defending her  dissertation proposal in April.

So, I am a very proud academic Mom. and to make this even a more perfect week, on Friday, the great UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter and I are hosting an event on the Academic Job Process. Coming back to campus will be Dr. Amir H. Masoumi, who was my doctoral student and is now an Assistant Professor at Manhattan College in NYC, and Dr. Davit Khachatryan, who took several courses from me, and is now an Assistant Professor at Babson (after several years in consulting for PriceWaterhouseCoopers). Dr. Masoumi did an outstanding (alright, I am a bit biased) dissertation on perishable product supply chains in healthcare, and, together, with two other co-authors, including my great former doctoral student, Dr. Min Yu, now of the University of Portland, we wrote the book, "Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products."

Competing on Freight Service Quality in Supply Chains

Now is the time of the holiday season that freight carriers are extremely busy, with Christmas only 3 days away and with the memories of the delivery delays of Christmas 2013 still fresh.

In an article in today's New York Times, "Crunch Time for FedEx and UPS as Last-Minute Holiday Shipping Ramps Up," Hiroki Tabuchi writes that "UPS announced that it was hiring up to 95,000 seasonal workers, more than twice the number it employed last year. FedEx said it had hired 50,000 workers for the holidays. And both say they have invested heavily in infrastructure." The planning for this year reads like a large-scale military logistical operation with, according to the article,  FedEx saying that it has strengthened its contingency planning, after shippers were summarily slammed for delivery delays last holiday season.

Last year's delays were attributed to bad weather as well as a surge in online shopping after Thanksgiving. 

Last year's delivery debacles inspired us to work on time-based supply chain network competition and the outcome was the paper, Supply Chain Network Competition in Time-Sensitive Markets, Anna Nagurney, Min Yu, Jonas Floden, and Ladimer S. Nagurney, which was published in  Transportation Research E 70: (2014) pp 112-127. In the paper, we discuss that delays in holiday freight deliveries are not solely a US phenomenon but even happen in Sweden! We also highlight the use of alternative modes, notably, air freight, as was used to speedup deliveries of paraphernalia prroduced in China and associated with the Disney movie Frozen because of the immense demand in clothing and other gear. I can attest to this since one of my nieces had a full-fledged Frozen birthday party for her 7th birthday, complete with the Princesses Elsa and Anna making appearances!

According to the Times article, UPS also pressed retailers early for forecasts with its volume forecasting for this holiday season beginning as soon as its handlers got through last year’s chaos.
A company that did not forecast the demand for one of its products, is the iconic retailer, L.L. Bean of Maine. The demand for its boots has been astronomical (my daughter is one of the disappointed customers) with a backorder of 600,000 units (she hopes to get her pair sometime in February, way after Christmas). NPR had a nice segment on this topic and even noted the great Lafayette College vs. Lehigh U. 150th  football rivalry game at Yankee Stadium that I was at and blogged about. 

L.L. Bean sent us a letter explaining the situation with a gift of a boot keychain, which is now hanging on our tree.

Freight services are a critical component of effective and efficient supply chains and, oftentimes, they are taken for granted. During the holiday season they are challenged to the max. Since I love logistics and care about not only the quality of products but also the quality of freight service provision, out latest paper is on precisely that topic: Supply Chain Network Competition in Price and Quality with Multiple Manufacturers and Freight Service Providers, Anna Nagurney, Sara Saberi, Shivani Shukla, and Jonas Floden.

Happy Holidays, everyone, and may your packages arrive in time and in good shape!