My Boston Globe Letter to the Editor

My Letter to the Editor, provoked by the front page article in last Sunday's Boston Globe on the closure of the Lake Champlain Bridge and the social and economic ramifications, is now online. I blogged about this article last week and also brought it to my transportation and logistics class last Monday to share with my students. Winter is approaching and when the lake is covered with ice, the ferries will not be able to provide an alternative mode of transportation. The closure of this bridge has added as much as three hours to citizens' commutes and played havoc on businesses and workers' and their families' schedules and routines.

My letter argues for appropriate education in infrastructure planning and management as well as teaching about the optimization of resources, including funds to improve our country's infrastructure. The letter also argues for the need for leadership to identify which links and nodes should be repaired and better maintained before our infrastructure deteriorates even further.

As I say in the letter: Before it is too late, the decision makers need to identify how to best maintain the critical and way-too-fragile networks upon which our society and economy depend.

We have the tools but, sadly, we lack the leadership.

Indeed, Patrick Qiang and I in our Fragile Networks book provide a wealth of methodological tools to help in the identification of the importance and ranking of bridges and roads. It is high time that our country appropriately invests (and repairs) our infrastructure!

E-Z Pass and Infant Health -- Keep the Traffic Moving and Improve Health!

I have devoted years of research and teaching to transportation, logistics, and networks, and the associated methodologies that can help in forecasting traffic flows and, what economists call negative externalities, which, in the case of traffic, include both congestion as well as pollution.

My two books that focus specifically on environmental issues are: Sustainable Transportation Networks and Environmental Networks: A Framework for Economic Decision-Making and Policy Analysis, the latter co-authored with K. K. Dhanda and P. Ramanujam. These two books develop a spectrum of models and associated analytics that can be applied to identify a priori the impacts (both cost-wise and environmental-wise) of changes to networks in the form of design changes or policies. These books also discuss paradoxes that arise in transportation and emphasize how important it is to capture the actual behavior of drivers, firms, etc.

A National Bureau of Economic Research study, Traffic Congestion and Infant Health: Evidence from E-Z Pass, by Janet Currie and Reed Walker, which was just released, concludes that reductions in traffic congestion generated by E-Z Pass reduced the incidence of prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2km of a toll plaza by 10.8% and 11.8% respectively. This is a terrific example of transportation technology in the form of electronic tolls having a direct, positive impact on community health.

Our most recent paper on transportation and environmental issues shows the impacts of road condition deterioration on environmental pollution. The paper, Environmental Impact Assessment of Transportation Networks with Degradable Links in an Era of Climate Change, is forthcoming in the International Journal of Sustainable Transportation.

Management of Water Resources, Optimization and Simulation

Tomorrow, November 6, 2009, we will be hosting Professor Richard Palmer, who is Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UMass Amherst, in our Fall 2009 UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series. He will be speaking at 11:00AM in the Isenberg School of Management and more information about Professor Palmer and his presentation, which will focus on optimizing water reservoir operations, can be found here.

Professor Palmer is relatively new to UMass Amherst having come from the University of Washington in Seattle. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University, which, coincidentally, is the same institution at which my doctoral dissertation advisor, Professor Stella Dafermos, received her PhD. In fact, they both received their PhDs from the very same department. Professor Palmer has done a lot of award-winning, fascinating research on the modeling of water resources and management and will be speaking tomorrow on both the use of optimization techniques and simulation in reservoir operations.

We are delighted that he accepted our invitation and we are certain that we will learn a lot from his presentation.

Last week we did not have a speaker (Professor Palmer is the fourth speaker in our series this Fall) and an undergraduate student of mine sent me a message that he was so disappointed since he learns so much from our speakers and he organizes his Fridays around the lectures. This was such a kind and thoughtful message to receive and makes the work involved in organizing, hosting, and following through with the Speaker Series all the more worthwhile! Also, I very much believe that great speakers spark students' interests in a discipline and that is one reason that I continue (for 11 semesters now) to be so involved in this Speaker Series in Operations Research / Management Science.

I would also like to bring to your attention the upcoming talk on November 20 by Professor Sam Bowles, whose co-authored article just appeared in Science on October 30, complete with a commentary co-authored by Professor Daron Acemoglu of MIT, who kicked off our Fall 2008 Speaker Series! NSF even released a press release about this research and you can read more about it here.

On December 4, we will be hosting the talk of Professor Brain Levine of the Computer Science Department who will speak on cyberforensics.

These talks are open to the public. The UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter does a wonderful job of helping me to organize this Speaker Series.

Celebrating Sports, the World Series, and the Isenberg School of Management

Sports are an activity that brings people together -- from the players to their families, the coaches and staffs, and, of course, the fans. Sports illustrate the best in all of us, from meeting tough challenges, under, sometimes, grueling and difficult conditions, to outstanding teamwork and good sportsmanship. They also provide a means of escape and entertainment (as great literature does).

Being a professor at the Isenberg School of Management, among its many positives, is that, besides such terrific departments as Finance and Operations Management (my home), Accounting, Management, and Marketing, we also have the Hospitality and Tourism Management department, the Resource Economics department, and one of the top (if not the top) Sports Management department in the country! Plus, in that department there are even a few Yankees fans.

Now that the Yankees have won their 27th World Series and NYC is celebrating tomorrow with a parade on Broadway, as a transplanted New Yorker (via Yonkers), I must say that this is a time to celebrate the Yankees victory!

As an operations researcher, we could say that we were expecting such a win, since Professor Bruce Bukiet of the New Jersey Institute of Technology computed a 70% chance that the Yankees would beat the Phillies in the World Series as reported last week on ScienceDaily.com

For those of you who are interested in learning more about the analytics behind baseball, you may wish to listen to the excellent podcast on Running the Numbers in Time for the World Series in which Professor James Cochran of Louisiana Tech University is interviewed by Barry List of INFORMS. Other podcasts on different topics are also available on that same link.

For now, let's celebrate the specialness and uniqueness of sports!

Knowledge networks and Cyber security

Last week the Computer Science Department at UMass Amherst hosted a national meeting on Cyber security. UMass Amherst was selected as the site for this meeting by the Institute for Information Protection (I3P.org), which is a consortium of leading universities, national laboratories, the Department of Homeland Security, and nonprofit organizations.

More information about the two day meeting is available here.

The presentation that I prepared for this meeting was entitled: Identification of Vulnerabilities in Fragile Network Systems: Transportation Networks, the Internet, Financial Networks, and Electric Power.

The conference brought together 40 researchers for presentations, brainstorming sessions, business and research discussions, as well as social events, including a lovely dinner at the Amherst Women's Club (and for some of my colleagues in engineering and computer science this was the first time that they were in that beautiful building). I had the pleasure of meeting some truly brilliant and extremely nice representatives of this consortium from Dartmouth, CUNY, the University of Virginia, IUPUI, Idaho, and the Department of Homeland Security.

In this impressive group were also researchers whose work I had been citing and whose work Patrick Qiang and I reference in our Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World book! I could not resist a photo op!

I had become very interested in cyber security while researching the book, Supernetworks: Decision-Making for the Information Age, which I co-authored with June Dong. Our supernetwork team was then selected as one of the nine teams in the US to take part in the National Science Foundation program, Management of Knowledge Intensive Dynamic Systems. The research that we conducted under this project is now being used in many fascinating areas, including cyber trust research. I am pleased to share with you the link to our most recent paper on knowledge networks, which is co-authored with Patrick Qiang. The paper, A Knowledge Collaboration Network Model Across Disciplines, will be presented at a conference at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

Cyber security research spans different disciplines, and it is extremely important, fascinating, and timely. It is an honor to be included in this truly innovative group.

Another Critical Link is Closed and Citizens Pay the Price

With all the attention the closure of the San Francisco Bay bridge has been getting you may have missed another bridge closure on the opposite side of the US -- that of the Lake Champlain bridge that connects Vermont with New York State. The bridge was closed on October 16, 2009, and it is uncertain whether it will even be able to reopen after the winter. It is a truss bridge and its design is similar to the Minneapolis bridge that collapsed in August 2007, with 13 deaths resulting. The Lake Champlain bridge is a critical link. Its closure has resulted in commuters having to add 90 minutes to their commutes or to wait as much as three hours for a ferry to shuttle them across the lake. Small business owners are losing thousands of dollars a day and healthcare workers are having difficulty reaching the hospital that they work in.

The pain and suffering and economic and societal losses are graphically depicted in the article, Lake Champlain Bridge, in the Boston Globe. This is another example where deferred maintenance and inattention to the nation's transportation infrastructure has now yielded substantive losses. It also shows that the networks upon which our society and economy depend are more than just the ties that bind but they are the channels and routes of people and goods flows. Transportation planners and government officials should have realized the importance of the Lake Champlain bridge, whose removal has resulted in rerouting of thousands of commuters, who have had to add substantively to their commutes and/or switch their modes of transportation entirely.

A few brave souls are even now crossing Lake Champlain by kayaks!

Some quotes from the article that are haunting:

It is so much more than a bridge.

We feel like we're cut off from the world.

As for the stimulus funds, it is now being reported that over half of the jobs saved were in education; see the coverage in this article, Schools are where Stimulus Saved Jobs, in the New York Times. The funds were also used to shore up, temporarily, many public universities.

Educational institutions need to enhance their programs associated with network infrastructure.

As more and more schools try to develop "revenue-generation" programs, due to serious pending financial shortfalls, after the stimulus funds run out, as reported in today's New York Times, attention should be given to develop programs that truly help our country to rebuild its infrastructure from its educational institutions to its transportation systems, the financial system, manufacturing and logistical networks, healthcare, the Internet, as well as our energy networks. Stop-gap, "trendy" programs are just quick fixes, if they are fixes, at all.

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?!