OR/MS research in disaster operations management

Disasters are large intractable problems that test the ability of communities and nations to effectively protect their populations and infrastructure, to reduce both human and property loss, and to rapidly recover. The seeming randomness of impacts and problems and uniqueness of incidents demand dynamic, real-time, effective and cost efficient solutions, thus making the topic very suitable for OR/MS research. While social sciences and humanities literatures enjoy an abundance of articles on disaster management, the OR/MS community is yet to produce a critical mass. In this paper, we survey the literature to identify potential research directions in disaster operations, discuss relevant issues, and provide a starting point for interested researchers.     

Fisheries management and operations research

Fisheries are subject to a deep-rooted problem of economic inefficiency, often referred to as the fisheries problem. The fisheries problem derives fundamentally from inappropriate social institutions controlling the fishing activity, the foremost of which is the common property arrangement. Fisheries management consists of replacing these institutions with more appropriate ones. Which institutions are most appropriate depends on the social objectives of the fisheries. There are strong economic arguments for the view that there should be only a single objective, namely to maximize the present value of the flow of benefits from the fisheries. In reality, different interest groups often push for several, often conflicting, objectives. In that case a multi-objective programming approach may be appropriate.     

A summary of OR/MS software on microcomputers

This paper provides a summary of some OR/MS software for microcomputers. Lists of packages in many management science techniques are included. A bibliography of other papers is also included. We also summarize the general features of packages in each category. Finally, we mention a few sources to help the reader keep up with the developments in this area.     

A summary of OR/MS software on microcomputers

This paper provides a summary of some OR/MS software for microcomputers. Lists of packages in many management science techniques are included. A bibliography of other papers is also included. We also summarize the general features of packages in each category. Finally, we mention a few sources to help the reader keep up with the developments in this area.     

Ethics in OR/MS: past,present and future

The pervasiveness and impact on society and on every day human life of technology has led to a growing awareness that science and technology cannot be considered above or beyond the realm of value judgements and hence of ethics. This is especially true for Operations Research/Management Science (OR/MS), that particular science which is concerned with methodologies for scientifically deciding how to design and operate man-machine systems in an optimal way, usually under conditions requiring the allocation of scarce resources. Here we try to give a historical account of the growing interest for ethics within the OR/MS community from its birth to present days. Starting from attempts to define models and codes of ethical behaviour in our profession, the OR/MS community has arrived at more fundamental questions about the ethical responsibility it faces in a world of growing inequalities and in which the ever greater stress that human activities impose on the environment puts at risk the very survival of human kind. This paper appeared in 4OR 2, 95–110, 2004.     

Issues in the use of ratings-based versus choice-based conjoint analysis in operations management research

Conjoint analysis has played an important role in helping make a number of operations management decisions including product and service design, supplier selection, and service operations capacity. Many recent advances in this area have raised questions about the most appropriate form of conjoint analysis for this research. We review recent developments in the literature and provide new evidence on how the choice between ratings- and choice-based conjoint models might affect the estimates of customer demand used in operations management models.     

中国运筹学发展研究报告

运筹学是自20世纪三四十年代发展起来的一门新兴交叉学科,主要研究如何应用数学和计算的理论与方法对社会系统和工程系统做出最优或满意的决策。为了更好地推动中国运筹学及相关领域的研究和应用,学会组织国内运筹学领域的部分专家,并参考了国内外运筹学多个分支代表性人物对运筹学的起源和发展的回忆与评述,共同完成了此报告。报告概述了运筹学的主要特征和方法,简述了运筹学的发展历程,剖析了运筹学研究中的成功经验,综述了运筹学几个主要分支的发展状况,介绍了运筹学中十几个有代表性的难题,展望了运筹学未来发展的方向。希望此报告能引起读者进一步思考运筹学的本质,运筹学是如何成长和将如何发展,并在一定程度上推动中国运筹学更好地发展。     

军事运筹学的过去、现在和未来

军事运筹学是从20世纪初发展起来的一门跨领域交叉学科,主要研究解决军事问题的定量分析和决策优化的理论和方法,以做出最优或满意的决策. 回顾军事运筹学的发展历程和国内军事运筹学的发展状况,简要介绍军事运筹学的主要理论方法和研究内容,展望军事运筹学未来发展趋势.     

Globalization, social development, and operations research: an exploration of strategies for success

This paper argues that in today’s world order, policy-making takes precedence over analytical and technical models that have historically formed the mainstay of Operations Research. The structural and human dimensions of this transition is discussed in the form of six Policy Imperatives aimed at the creation of a world order that makes it more humane and less vulnerable to failure. It is proposed that though OR occupies a prominent role in developmental initiatives, in order for its successful implementation in meeting social goals, the context in which it is invoked must be conducive to social transformation. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on Operations Research for Development (ICORD) held December 27–30, 2002 at Anna University, Chennai. The author would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of anonymous reviewers. He would also like to thank Professor K.S.P. Rao of Anna University for his gracious assistance.     

Emergency response in natural disaster management: Allocation and scheduling of rescue units

Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes, cause tremendous harm each year. In order to reduce casualties and economic losses during the response phase, rescue units must be allocated and scheduled efficiently. As this problem is one of the key issues in emergency response and has been addressed only rarely in literature, this paper develops a corresponding decision support model that minimizes the sum of completion times of incidents weighted by their severity. The presented problem is a generalization of the parallel-machine scheduling problem with unrelated machines, non-batch sequence-dependent setup times and a weighted sum of completion times – thus, it is NP-hard. Using literature on scheduling and routing, we propose and computationally compare several heuristics, including a Monte Carlo-based heuristic, the joint application of 8 construction heuristics and 5 improvement heuristics, and GRASP metaheuristics. Our results show that problem instances (with up to 40 incidents and 40 rescue units) can be solved in less than a second, with results being at most 10.9% up to 33.9% higher than optimal values. Compared to current best practice solutions, the overall harm can be reduced by up to 81.8%.     

A multi-agent optimization formulation of earthquake disaster prevention and management

Natural earthquake disasters are unprecedented incidents which take many lives as a consequence and cause major damages to lifeline infrastructures. Various agencies in a country are responsible for reducing such adverse impacts within specific budgets. These responsibilities range from before to after the incident, targeting one of the main phases of disaster management (mitigation, preparedness, and response). Use of OR in disaster management and coordination of its phases has been mostly ignored and highly recommended in former reviews. This paper presents a formulation to coordinate three main agencies and proposes a heuristic approach to solve the different introduced sub-problems. The results show an improvement of 7.5–24% when the agencies are coordinated.     

Synergies between operations research and data mining: The emerging use of multi-objective approaches

Operations research and data mining already have a long-established common history. Indeed, with the growing size of databases and the amount of data available, data mining has become crucial in modern science and industry. Data mining problems raise interesting challenges for several research domains, and in particular for operations research, as very large search spaces of solutions need to be explored. Hence, many operations research methods have been proposed to deal with such challenging problems. But the relationships between these two domains are not limited to these natural applications of operations research approaches. The counterpart is also important to consider, since data mining approaches have also been applied to improve operations research techniques. The aim of this article is to highlight the interplay between these two research disciplines. A particular emphasis will be placed on the emerging theme of applying multi-objective approaches in this context.     

User-model interaction in decision support systems for risk management

This paper describes and evaluates three different approaches to building decision support systems: the Operations Research/Management Science approach, the Decision Analysis/Multiattribute Utility approach, and the Artificial Intelligence/Expert Systems approach. It evaluates the usefulness of the three approaches for risk management. In particular, it defines evaluation objectives of risk analysts, risk managers, and laypeople and provides a subjective assessment how the three approaches stack up against their objectives. The paper concludes that for most risk management applications a combination of the three approaches would be most desirable.This paper was written under contract No. 2709-85-05 ED ISP D of the European Atomic Energy Community, Commission of the European Communities, Joint Research Centre, Ispra Establishment, Ispra, Italy to the Gemeinschaft für Entscheidungs- und Risikoanalyse, Berlin, West Germany. It was prepared for presentation at the Conference on Operations Research and Multiattribute Decision Analysis held in Passau, April 20–26, 1986. The views and opinions expressed in this paper are solely those of the author.     

A review of trade credit literature: Opportunities for research in operations

Trade credit arises when a buyer delays payment for purchased goods or services. Its nature has predominantly been an area of inquiry for researchers from the disciplines of finance, marketing, and economics but it has received relatively little attention in other domains. In our article, we provide an integrative review of the existing literature and discuss conflicting study outcomes. We organize the relevant literature into seven areas of inquiry and analyze four in detail: trade credit motives, order quantity decisions, credit term decisions, and settlement period decisions. Additionally, we derive a detailed agenda for future research in these areas.     

运筹学中几种运输问题的求解方法探析

从目前研究生入学考试中出现的几种新的运筹学运输问题出发,探讨了各种运输问题与传统运输问题的差异。提出以传统运输问题为本,将非传统运输问题转化为传统运输问题借助表上作业法求解的思路。并针对6种不同的非传统运输问题分析了转化的过程和步骤,为运输问题的研究提供了新的内容.     

A review of recent research on green road freight transportation

Road freight transportation is a major contributor to carbon dioxide equivalent emissions. Reducing these emissions in transportation route planning requires an understanding of vehicle emission models and their inclusion into the existing optimization methods. This paper provides a review of recent research on green road freight transportation.     

FDI流入中国的原因分析

FDI流入我国,可提高我国经济效率,促进我国经济增长.因此,二十多年以来,我国不断为外商提供财政、税收、土地等方面的优惠政策以吸引外资的进入.但是,由资本的逐利本性我们可以认为外资流入中国并不只是受这些优惠政策的吸引.因此,我们有必要分析外资流入中国的真正原因,以便使我国政府可在引进外资时处于主动地位.本文通过定量分析与定性分析相结合的方法,得出中国经济的迅速增长是吸引外资流入的主要原因这一结论,并在此基础上对我国目前的利用外资政策提出一些建议,具有一定的现实意义.