E-News Blog

Monday Interactive Session

Nico M. van Dijk,

Blood Platelet Optimization for Blood Bank Donated blood platelets have a limited shelf time. Outdating, shortages, age, and costs are to be minimized. Three phases are shown over six years.

1. The development of combined dynamic programming and simulation.
2. Its application and implementation to Dutch blood banks.
3. Its extension to transportation and hospitals.

 Tuesday Interactive Session

Apurva P. Samudra

We present an optimization-based framework for computer-aided molecular design. Group contribution methods are used to predict thermodynamic properties. We decompose the problem by decoupling the composition and the structure of the molecule. Compositions are found by solving transformed group contribution-based MILP. The structure generation problem is formulated as finding all trees with given degree sequence and solved using special weight-based cuts. Weights based on prime numbers handle the chemical redundancy efficiently and effectively.

Susan DeVore, President and CEO of the Premier Healthcare Alliance (a network of healthcare providers in the United States), started her talk by displaying some startling facts about the current state and history of healthcare in the United States. For over a decade, healthcare costs have been rising at one to two and a half percentage points faster than GDP growth despite failing to achieve commensurately positive matches in life expectancy and infant mortality. Going down a deeper level of granularity, she exposed the fastest area of spending growth, which is spending on chronic ailments (e.g., diabetes), and mentioned that the current objective of healthcare reform is to implement a mechanism of carrots and sticks to make it as painful as possible to remain on this track while generating incentives for healthcare providers to improve efficiency through innovation. Read More.

Perhaps aware that his lecture title might sound less than thrilling to some, Yves Crama opened his lecture on Boolean methods with a list of Belgium's triumphs: chocolate, beer, Smurfs, 520 days without a government, and Boolean functions. Crama presented a brief introduction to the theory and applications of Boolean functions as part of the IFORS Distinguished Lecture series. Read More.

There is no doubt - analytics are here. The word "analytics" is nowadays on everyone's lips, no matter whether it is industry or academia, big or small organizations, finance groups, or marketing departments. With the increased availability of data, there is a significant increase in the demand for analytic tools to build descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive models to transform data into improved decision making. Read More.

The International Honor Society of Operations Research and the Management Sciences, Omega Rho for short, has inducted Barry Nelson, the Walter P. Murphy Professor and Chair of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University, as their 45th Honorary Member. He gave a high-level overview for simulation non-experts on the beauty and pitfalls of simulation models, highlighting several categories for consideration. Read More.

The incumbents in the energy industry are on course toward a radically new "transformative" normal as characterized by James Rogers, Chairman and CEO of Duke Energy. Rogers started out by laying out some common misconceptions of transformation within the context of the energy industry. According to him, the process of transformation has little to do with process improvements or productivity gains but is what happens when people see the world through a new lens and absorb different perspectives. Read More.

The Emergence of Big Data by Belleh Fontem

In laying out a vision for the future of data analytics, Keith Collins, CEO and Senior Vice President of SAS Software, used Ray Kurzweil's singularity concept (the accelerating pace of technology and the eventual merging of man and machine) as an analogy for a point in the distant future when data mining and modeling will converge in a seamless construct. Read More.

Salah E. Elmaghraby, professor at North Carolina State University, presented the first plenary talk of the conference on Sunday morning. Elmaghraby led us on what he referred to as a "guided tour" of activity networks, which he likened to a museum tour - you are not shown every picture and statue, but rather an overview of the highlights. Activity networks is a "very wide field," covering such subjects as routing and scheduling, transportation modes interaction, air traffic control, and social group interactions. The focus of Sunday's talk was project planning and control. Read More.

Soak in the flavor of the meeting with over 200 photos (and more on the way). It's not too late. Send us your Annual Meeting photos or videos at photosandvideo@mail.informs.org, and we'll post them for all to see.

Read the recap of INFORMS great Annual Meeting in the Queen City of the South. Great Southern hospitality was capped off by Duke Energy's visual tribute to INFORMS. (In case you are wondering, that is "INFORMS blue" lighting up Duke Energy's downtown headquarters.) Standing-room-only plenary and keynote talks, well-attended and high-quality technical sessions, vibrant interactive/poster presentations, robust and friendly subdivision events, great social gatherings, and an overall atmosphere of energy and excitement - this meeting had it all. Although not the record holder for attendance (Austin 2010 has that honor), preliminary numbers for Charlotte are just shy of the record, with 4,499 total attendees. Congratulations to the Organizing Committee, under the leadership of General Chair Cem Saydam and Program Chair Brian Denton, for putting the whole package together with such style. If you could not attend, you'll get the flavor of the meeting by perusing the 57 blog posts and hundreds of tweets from our more socially networked colleagues. Also, visit the four issues of eNews Daily, the official daily newsletter of the Annual Meeting, and it will seem like you were there!

The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences annually awards the INFORMS Prize for effective integration of OR/MS and advanced analytics into organizational decision making. The award is given to an organization which has repeatedly applied the principles of OR/MS and advanced analytics in pioneering, varied, novel, and lasting ways.