More Evidence of Our Fragile Networks -- the Bay Bridge

The San Francisco Bay bridge is still closed, days after 5,000 pounds of steel collapsed from it last Tuesday, causing havoc for commuters, who have had to determine new routes of travel to work (and back to their homes). This is another example of the fragility of the transportation network infrastructure in the United States, and one of the major themes of our Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies book.

CNN.com has provided an update to this important story.

The Europeans "get it" and are applying the measure that Patrick Qiang and I developed to determine the importance of various nodes and links in critical infrastructure networks, including transportation networks, the Internet, electric power distribution and generation networks and even financial networks.

For example, the Nagurney and Qiang measure has been applied to determine the efficiency of transportation networks in Germany and the ranking, in terms of importance, of various highways. It has now been proposed as a powerful tool in evaluating a proposed addition to the Dublin, Ireland metro in a very interesting article written by John Walsh. The article is contained in a glossy publication in the October 2009 issue of ERCIM, which focuses on Green ICT. The issue is in pdf format and may take a while to download but it is certainly worth the wait. More information about the ERCIM organization can be found here.

Those links in networks (think: roads, bridges in urban transportation networks; electric power lines, communication cables and fiber optic links in telecommunication networks, and even manufacturing and distribution channels in supply chains, including those in vaccine and medical ones) that are identified as most important from a network efficiency/performance standpoint, should be best maintained and protected since their removal or disruption will have the biggest impact on the system. At the same time, one can ascertain what improvements via the measure that we have developed will have the greatest positive impact.

What is the U.S. waiting for? What matters more than the infrastructure that our society and economy depend upon?!

Happy Birthday to the Internet!

CNN.com has a wonderful interview with Dr. Leonard Kleinrock. Dr. Kleinrock, a professor at UCLA, is sometimes referred to as a Father of the Internet and today marks the 40th anniversary or birthday of the message that he sent from the first node of the net at UCLA to Stanford. His interview illustrates his love of tinkering and his fascination with figuring out how things work but my favorite quote in the interview comes at the end of it and it is:

Life is one big puzzle for me in the positive sense. There are a lot of things to play with. And they pay me for it.

One can read more about Professor Kleinrock, who has received numerous awards, and those of us in operations research and engineering are also well aware of his numerous contributions to queuing theory, in this interesting article.

H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine supply chains

The New York Times has had excellent coverage on the H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine production problems, which have resulted in shortages throughout the US with citizens clamoring for information and long lines at vaccination stations, where they can be located, assuming that any vaccine has been delivered. The article, Shortage of Vaccine Poses Political Test for Obama, emphasizes the political ramifications of the government's overoptimistic projections of vaccine availability. It also links to another article that documents the problems encountered, still ongoing, with the vaccine supply chain from the manufacturing through the distribution and delivery.The technologies of vaccine production have, for the most part, not changed over decades and require the growing of the vaccines in eggs. Yields may be quite uncertain and that was the case for the H1N1 vaccine. On top of this problem, there were insufficient dispensers available, where and when needed, for both the nasal mist variety and the inoculation one, which demonstrates not only poor planning but inadequacies in this critical needs supply chain. Vaccine producers are now an oligopoly and there are only a few firms involved in producing for the US population.

Both China and Australia have been giving their citizens the H1N1 vaccine for awhile now. It is very frustrating that in the US better emergency preparedness was not done for vaccine production and distribution. Citizens do not need the added anxiety in this economic climate.What pleases me is that some school districts have realized that closing schools may be in the best interest at this time to assist in the minimization of flu transmission and in the recovery of those who are sick. Indeed, President Obama has declared a national emergency because of the swine flu but some school districts are still reluctant to close the schools and some are not even informing parents as to the seriousness of the spread of the flu.


The US must invest in its vaccine supply chains and begin to regain its manufacturing strength and know-how. This is an issue of not only emergency preparedness, healthcare, but also one of national security.

The outstanding talk that Professor Jose Holquin-Veras gave last Friday in our Speaker Series on emergency logistics has now been made available and can be found, in pdf format, here. We thank him for trying to educate FEMA post-Katrina and we hope that others can learn before it is too late. We also extend our sincerest thanks for making his presentations slides available.

If I had the resources available I would make sure that all of the talks in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series are videotaped and put online. Coincidentally, last May, I was invited to give a talk on global supply chains and vulnerabilities at the University of California Davis, just as the swine flu was breaking out last Spring. I decided to minimize the risk and my talk was videostreamed. It is now available online, thanks to the Institute for Transportation Studies there. It was certainly an interesting experience to give a talk to an audience thousands of miles away!

We have been conducting research on network design for such problems and have completed a study. The paper is now in the refereeing stage.

Was the Operations Research Crew Scheduling Program Just Too Interesting?

According to CNN.com as well as the New York Times, the reason that the Northwest pilot and first officer were unreachable for about 90 minutes on last week's flight from San Diego to Minneapolis (and overshot their destination by about 150 miles before turning around) was that they were engrossed in the crew scheduling software on their laptops.

Since Delta merged with Northwest, there have been obvious issues regarding the retraining of personnel (I have had long discussions with stewardesses on flights during which I was told how different the philosophies were of these two airlines pre-merger as well as the number of stewardesses that would assist on a flight).

According to news reports, the first officer was assisting the pilot with the crew scheduling software and clearly the subject was of sufficient fascination for both that they did not realize that they were to be piloting an airplane! Those of us who work in operations research are well aware of the underlying mathematical models and, coincidentally, today I was teaching integer programming models in my graduate class at the Isenberg School.

Of course, these two have now lost their pilot licenses. I remember a colleague of mine, Dr. Richard Stone, who is a Lanchester Prize winner and early in his career taught at the Kennedy School at Harvard and then left to join the Operations Research group at Northwest Airlines. You can read about some of his relevant activities here.

It is rather ironic that O.R. (operations research) which focuses on optimization of business processes, including crew scheduling, may have had a role to play in this major human error and only because the software was clearly so interesting that it was an obvious distraction to the flight crew. Why were there no "bells and whistles" in the automatic pilot software when the plane overshot its destination, I wonder?!

As for the merger of Delta and Northwest, locally, we lost our direct flight from Bradley airport (Hartford/Springfield) to Amsterdam, which was a terrific asset while we had it for about a year and a half.

I have done research on mergers and acquisitions in oligopolies, which airlines are, and you can find my latest paper on the subject, which is in press in the journal Computational Management Science here.

Where's the Beef and the Tolls? Teaching Transportation and Logistics is Never Dull

Teaching my undergraduate transportation and logistics class is NEVER dull. Today, I began my day with a lecture in this class on tolls, unbeknowest to me, that a huge accident had taken place earlier in Weston, Massachusetts at the toll plaza. Several tractor trailers crashed into one another, including one carrying over 46,000 pounds of beef (and that is the one that overturned). A car was also involved in the chain reaction accident. Beef was all over the road (quite frankly, not a pleasant sight)!!!

As our Boston press reported, the "bad" news was that the accident occurred and that the beef was lost to human consumption (let's hope). The "good" news was that for 3 hours, the police just waved through the vehicles and no tolls were collected for them. The Massachusetts turnpike authority had gotten so much flack for horrendous delays on the Pike last Easter that a new rule had been passed and to minimize further delays the traffic is just waved through until the incident is declared cleared up.

Now the state officials are worried about the loss of income due to the tolls that were not paid and are hoping to get compensation through insurance.

Interestingly, I had shared with my students this morning some horror MA tollbooth stories, including one that resulted in the death of a friend's mother.

Indeed, teaching this transportation and logistics class is never dull. Just this week, my students also got to hear about the Northwest flight from San Diego that overshot its destination of Minneapolis by 150 miles (still no complete story as to what exactly transpired in the cockpit during the 90 minutes that no traffic controller could reach them). Even the President was notified as to this very suspicious activity. Interestingly, one week prior many of our colleagues were flying back from the INFORMS conference in San Diego!

Last year, one of the hot topics in the news was the pirates affecting maritime transport off the coast of Africa; now we have wandering pilots and beef spillages at toll booths.

Emergency Logistics: A Speaker who Inspired

Today we had the distinct privilege and honor of hosting Professor Jose Holquin-Veras of RPI in Troy, New York, who delivered the talk, Emergency Logistics Issues Impacting the Response to KATRINA: What Went Wrong? What Could we do to Avoid a Repeat? as part of the UMass Amherst Fall 2009 INFORMS Speaker Series. Professor Holquin-Veras arrived in time for the special reception that the Student Chapter that helps me to organize this series had prepared to celebrate its summa cum laude award which it received in San Diego on October 13, 2009. Before his presentation, which took place today at 11AM at the Isenberg School of Management, he chatted with the chapter officers and the guests who had come to the reception.

It was wonderful to have faculty and students, both undergraduate and graduate, not only from the Isenberg School, but also from the College of Engineering as well as from the Department of Economics in attendance. There were also guests from the community. I always say that if one has an outstanding speaker talking on a fascinating subject, the room will fill up, and Professor Holquin-Veras was simply terrific!

He shared with us his on-site experiences and knowledge gleaned from numerous interviews as well as data analysis on the disaster that was Katrina as well as on the second-tier disaster that followed with the material convergence. He spoke about the complete lack of emergency preparedness at local, regional, and national levels, and how Walmart, luckily, had identified the pending humanitarian disaster and had relayed trucks with supplies. We learned that 40 commodities are essential and how important it is to develop models for humanitarian logistics that identify the appropriate objective function to optimize, which he stated could be done with economic valuation to capture the social costs that should be minimized (and the associated suffering). Humanitarian logistics operations and supply chains are completely different from commercial supply chains and, ironically, in the former there is a great deal of competition among existing emergency service providers. The demands aren't known in the case of disasters and the convergence of material creates serious congestion (he spoke of tuxes being delivered, coats to warm climates, and totally useless materials).

How do we quantify the social costs and the priorities of deliveries in such situations where time is such an essential element and there is most likely chaos in locations that require the deliveries? Why were the emergency providers not trained in humanitarian logistics? Critical supplies were not prepositioned. Hopefully, the government has learned from the numerous mistakes made and the serious shortcomings that resulted in so much pain, suffering, and loss of life.

To the rapt audience, Professor Holquin-Veras also talked about the importance of mathematical modeling and in identifying appropriate metrics for humanitarian logistics operations. He also emphasized that the problems are nonlinear (as opposed to linear). At lunch, he offered life lessons and stressed the importance of doing research and valuing the long-term.

So many came up to me after Professor Holquin-Veras' talk and visit to thank me for helping to host him. I say thank you to Professor Holquin-Veras for educating us on a topic of great importance.

I hope that more universities will undertake the research and educational challenges surrounding emergency logistics and preparedness.

Juggling by an Academic Couple

Academic as well as any working couples with children have learned how to juggle and to make the most of all the constraints imposed on them. Some academic couples (including some of my former students) are quite lucky and have found positions in neighboring colleges/universities or even in the same department! Others that you may have heard of juggle their positions and commutes across the country or even across the Atlantic Ocean earning more frequent flier miles than pilots!

My husband and I have been offered positions (excellent ones) elsewhere but, for various reasons (and we still wonder) we have stayed at our respective institutions (for now), which means that he has the long commute. Besides commuting, however, as academics, we go to conferences to present our work and at such venues one learns from other colleagues and also has opportunities for networking.

Last week I was at the INFORMS conference in San Diego and this week my husband spoke at the Frontiers in Education (FIE) conference in San Antonio. If one has children, one may end up, literally, "passing the parcel" to each other at the airport. Now that our daughter is a teenager with numerous activities at her prep school (and beyond) the logistics of daily life can get very complicated. There is something to be said about living in a city where there is a lot of access to public transportation so that youth can learn to navigate such systems and be more mobile and independent. However, since we live in Amherst and activities are spread out such an approach is not feasible. So, we attempt to optimize within all of our constraints.

The FIE conference, according to my husband, was really professionally and personally rewarding. He even saw a colleague from England who he had not seen in 20 years. More information about the conference can be found here. The paper that he presented was entitled, Software Defined Radio in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Curriculum.

Above I have posted some photos that he took in San Antonio, including a photo of the Alamo and the River Walk, as well as one of him holding my latest book, Fragile Networks, which was displayed at the Wiley booth at the conference.

En route back, at the Baltimore airport, he even saw a colleague of mine who had just given a seminar at the University of Maryland. It is fairly common for professors to get hearty "hellos" in airports around the world! Thanks to Southwest's seating system, they were able to sit next to each other on the flight back to Hartford/Springfield.