Scenes from Montreal Including Bicycles

I am back from a wonderful conference at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where the weather was delightful until we were ready to board the puddle jumper airplane (where each passenger gets her own aisle and window seat). A red alert was issued because the sky had turned black and the grounds crew can't be out on the tarmac if there are lightning strikes within 5 miles.

Although we had boarded the Air Canada plane, our pilot let us take a vote (how civilized) as to whether we wanted to wait on the plane before the alert was lifted or to go back to the waiting area. Luckily, the pilot's vote had more clout (the vote was split and one passenger was neutral) so we marched back in, caught some dinner, and two hours after the scheduled departure time we were off and had a bumpless flight.

I had spoken to my husband earlier and there had been a hailstorm in Amherst with our yard almost white.

Montreal is an amazing city and I managed to get a good deal of walking in -- caught a parade on Saturday of "twins," with one duo dressed up as a bride in white and a bride in black, and with bagpipers and even bands of twins -- very festive and fun.

What impressed me, as well, was the number of bicyclists, even around 6:30AM, with nice bicycle lanes and bicycles to rent (a bit like Paris).

However, this past Sunday, a tunnel collapsed around 9:15 AM (the Ville-Marie) tunnel and 15 tons ended up on the ground with, amazingly, no injuries. There has been a lot of pres recently about the bad state of infrastructure in Montreal due to salting of the roads and bridges in the winter resulting in deterioration of the infrastructure and insufficient funds invested for maintenance and repair. I heard that this is rather "local" to Montreal, however, and having been to Toronto and Waterloo last April was impressed by the quality of the roads there.

The last photo above is of the red alert light at the Montreal airport outside of our gate.

How ISO New England Ensures Electric Power Reliability for New England

The Independent Systems Operator (ISO) for New England has a tough job. It works to ensure the reliability of electric power for all of New England. I recently wrote about electric power network modeling.

Today's Boston Globe has a nice article on ISO New England that quotes Dr. Vamsi Chadalavada. In the article, the importance of weather forecasting is noted as well as demand management when the need for electric power, as we had recently due to the heat, gets too high. My daughter personally experienced the demand management when she was sent home early from her summer job last Friday because her school, where she is working, agreed to reduce power use by shutting off the air conditioners.

We had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Chadalavada as well as Mr. Richard Brooks in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speakers Series. Mr. Brooks spoke on smart grid development whereas Dr. Chadalavada gave us an overview of New England's power system and markets.

As for some of the challenges and opportunities regarding the smart grid, a summary of the highlights of Mr. Brooks visit and talk at the Isenberg School can be found here.

INFORMS Combined Colloquium Application Deadline is Tomorrow

INFORMS (The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) organizes a series of colloquia in conjunction with its annual meeting, which, this year, will take place in Charlotte, North Carolina in mid-November.

The colloquia options are for Teaching Effectiveness to which tenure-track or even tenured faculty can apply, as well as two for doctoral students: Future Academician and Future Practitioner.

One can obtain so much valuable information from taking part in these organized colloquia and they also provide excellent opportunities for networking.

The deadline is tomorrow, July 30, 2011.

I have had many of my doctoral students take part in the colloquia over the years and they have all very much enjoyed them.

More information can be found on the INFORMS conference website here.

Looking Forward to the Integrated Risk Management Conference in Operations and Global Supply Chains

I am very much looking forward to the Integrated Risk Management Conference in Operations and Global Supply Chains that begins this weekend at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

This conference is being organized by Professors Mehmet Gumus and Saibal Ray and is co-hosted by the Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, and the Olin School of Business, Washington University in St. Louis.

According to the conference announcement, this two-day conference features a single track of fourteen talks and six poster presentations that combines technical presentations, industry practices, and discussions on relevant challenges and approaches in the topic area. Detailed information about the conference can be found here with the conference program located here. Those who would like to attend the conference can register before July 30, 2011 (at no registration fee since it is covered by the conference sponsors).

I will be speaking on Medical Nuclear Supply Chain Design: A Tractable Network Model and Computational Approach, co-authored with Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney (my husband, who has a PhD in physics). Our presentation is based on the paper that we recently wrote. This health care topic was also the subject of our published Op-Ed piece.

Isenberg School of Management Celebrates with its Graduates on the World Stage

This has been an amazing week.

As readers of this blog know, I have been awaiting a confirmed announcement from Deutsche Bank about one of our graduates, Anshu Jain, who received his MBA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1985.

Now it is official and Deutsche Bank has announced in a press release that Dr. Josef Ackerman, who has been at its helm for 10 years, is retiring and co-chairmen have been selected: Anshu Jain and Juergen Fitschen. As my colleague in the Finance and Operations Management Department, Professor Sanjay Nawalkha, who is now in India told me, Jain's selection has been front page news in India (and, I expect, will be at least front page business news soon in the US). You can read more about Mr. Jain here.

Also, Hina Rabbani Khar, a graduate of our Hospitality & Tourism Management Program, was last week sworn in as Pakistan's Foreign Minister (essentially Pakistan's Hillary Clinton). She is this country's first female foreign minister and, at age 34, its youngest. You can read more about her here. The media in the Asian subcontinent has been heavily covering her appointment to this high position.

The Isenberg School of Management houses seven departments: my Department of Finance and Operations Management, the Accounting Department, the Management Department, the Marketing Department, as well as the Sports Management Department, the Hospitality & Tourism Management Department, and the Resource Economics Department. It is under the leadership of Dean Mark Fuller, who became our new Dean on August 1, 2009. He is also the holder of the Thomas O'Brien Endowed Chair (named after our long serving Dean whose hard work resulted in the naming and expansion of our School of Management).

The INFORMS Speakers Program and Social and Professional Networking

Wow -- now that was a great talk! I have heard such a comment after numerous speaker presentations organized through our UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. Many, from faculty to students to practitioners, over the years, have commented that these talks, which we schedule on Fridays, with lunch and further discussions to follow, were the highlights of their week.

In organizing a semester's worth of talks, we looked for speakers who could inform and educate a wide audience on timely topics of interest to the operations research / management science community.

We also availed ourselves of the INFORMS Speakers Program and I personally have greatly enjoyed being a speaker in this program, and have given talks in Dallas, Pittsburgh, and other locations, as a result of it. I especially enjoyed the mix of the audience participants from various industries and universities and the wonderful questions and hospitality of the INFORMS Regional and Student Chapters that have been my hosts. My professional and social networks have also grown from participation in this valuable program.

This year I have the pleasure of chairing the INFORMS Speakers Program Committee, with committee members: Dr. Tim Lowe of the University of Iowa and Dr. Les Servi of MITRE. We are working on enhancing this program by adding new speakers and expanding the program geographically and making it more diverse. We also hope to include more video resources and to enable speakers to edit their profiles.

Do stay tuned as we expand this valuable and exciting resource. The next issue of OR/MS Today coming out in August will include a profile of the INFORMS Speakers Program and some of the advantages of using a speaker through the program.

As for tips on how to run a successful speakers series, read more here.

I leave you with some photos above of several distinguished speakers who have graced our Speaker Series at UMass Amherst who are part of the INFORMS Speakers Program. I am sure that you can recognize them but, just to make sure, the above photos are of the visits of Professor Richard Larson of MIT, of Professor John Birge of the University of Chicago, and of Professor Sheldon Jacobson of the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign.

Thanks to all the speakers in our profession who take the time out of their very busy schedules to come and speak on our campuses and at other sites -- from corporations and beyond!

As the US Swelters, Electric Power Models Do the Job

Wherever you are located in the United States, you are most likely enduring record-breaking temperatures.

These record-breaking temperatures are putting extreme pressures on the generation of electric power due to the demand for running air conditioners, fans, etc.

In the area that I live in, the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts, yesterday was the second biggest drain on electric power ever in the region, according to ISO New England, the Holyoke-based company that operates the electric power grid for the six New England states and ensures its reliability.

Interestingly, other high demand days occurred in the summer of 2006 and that is exactly the data that Dr. Zugang Liu, now of Penn State University at Hazleton, and I used to develop our electric power supply chain network model, using data from ISO New England. The study, An Integrated Electric Power Supply Chain and Fuel Market Network Framework: Theoretical Modeling with Empirical Analysis for New England, was published in the journal, Naval Research Logistics 56: (2009) pp 600-624.

Specifically, we constructed a novel electric power supply chain network model with fuel supply markets that captures both the economic network transactions in energy supply chains and the physical network transmission constraints in the electric power network. The theoretical derivation and analyses were done using the theory of variational inequalities. We then applied the model to a specific case, the New England electric power supply chain, consisting of 6 states, 5 fuel types, 82 power generators, with a total of 573 generating units, and 10 demand market regions. The empirical case study demonstrated that the regional electric power prices simulated by the proposed model very well matched the actual electricity prices in New England. We also computed the electric power prices under natural gas and oil price variations. The empirical examples illustrated that both the generating unit responsiveness and the electric power market responsiveness are crucial to the full understanding and determination of the impact of the residual fuel oil price on the natural gas price. Finally, we utilized the model to quantitatively investigate how changes in the demand for electricity influence the electric power and the fuel markets from a regional perspective.

The theoretical model can be applied to other regions and multiple electricity markets to quantify the interactions in electric power/energy supply chains and their effects on flows and prices in
which deregulation is taking place.

Moreover, the general framework can also be used to assess new redesigns of the electric power grid, a topic, a fellow Brown University alum, Matt Wald, recently wrote on in The New York Times.