INFORMS News: IBM research center wins Wagner Prize

By C. Allen Butler

The IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center won the 2010 Daniel H. Wagner prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice. The prize-winning paper, “OnTheMark: Integrated Stochastic Resource Planning of Human Capital Supply Chains,” describes the development and implementation of an integrated suite of operations research (O.R.) models and methods, called OnTheMark (OTM), that supports the effective and efficient management and planning of human capital supply chains.

Much research has been done, and many products exist, for dealing with a traditional manufacturing supply chain. Conceptually, it is easy to view the hiring, training, assigning and job planning of employees as a supply chain problem. However, the model of human resources as a supply chain is quite different from classical supply chain models and introduces a number of new and interesting problems.

OnTheMark addresses these problems and consists of novel solutions for: (1) the statistical forecasting of future resource demand and requirements; (2) a new form of risk-based stochastic resource capacity planning; (3) the stochastic modeling and optimization/control of supply evolutionary dynamics over time; (4) a new form of optimal multi-skill supply-demand matching; and (5) the stochastic optimization of business decisions to manage resource shortages and overages. These O.R. models and methods have been developed and integrated to optimize the performance of an IBM business line within the information technology services industry, and various applications beyond the internal IBM deployment are on the horizon.

The OTM suite is implemented within an end-to-end solution that has been, and continues to be, deployed as a critical part of the human capital management and planning process within IBM, providing the fact-base to drive better business performance. These O.R. models and methods include important contributions in the areas of stochastic models and stochastic optimization/control, as well as the innovative use and integration of these models and methods in human capital management and planning applications.

Heng Cao, Jianying Hu, Chen Jiang, Tarun Kumar, Ta-Hsin Li, Yang Liu, Yingdong Lu, Shilpa Mahatma, Aleksandra Mojsilovic, Mayank Sharma, Mark Squillante and Yichong Yu authored the prize-winning paper.

The Wager Prize is sponsored by CPMS, the Practice Section of INFORMS. The first-place award of $1,000 is made possible by endowments from Metron Inc., Daniel H. Wagner Associates, Inc. and Applied Mathematics, Inc.

The prize is in memory of the late Dr. Daniel H. Wagner. While president of his own practice-oriented consulting firm, Dr. Wagner brought many high-quality mathematicians into the operations research community, leading to significant applications for U.S. Navy, U.S. Coast Guard and many other organizations. The prize honors Dr. Wagner by emphasizing qualities he respected in his colleagues: the ability to innovate and to communicate clearly and effectively.

The 2010 competition marked the 10th competition since the inaugural event in 1998.

The winning authors will reprise their presentation at the upcoming INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research in April in Chicago. Video of IBM’s winning presentation as well as the other finalist presentations can be seen at the INFORMS Video Learning Center: a brief login is required. A special issue of Interfaces will publish the winning paper, along with those of the other four finalists:

• Hannah K. Smalley, Pinar Keskinocak, Georgia Institute of Technology, Faramroze G. Engineer, University of Newcastle, and Larry K. Pickering, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “Universal Tool for Vaccine Scheduling: Applications for Children and Adults”
• Casey Chung, Blockbuster Distribution, Milind Dawande, Chelliah Sriskandarajah, and Divakar Rajamani, School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas: “A Short-Range Scheduling Model for Blockbuster’s Order Processing Operation”
• Ramasubramanian Sundararajan, Tarun Bhaskar, Abhinanda Sarkar, Sridhar Dasaratha, Debasis Bal, Jayanth K Marasanapalle, GE Global Research, India, Beata Zmudzka, and Karolina Bak, GE Capital, Bank BPH: “Marketing Optimization in Retail Banking”
• Nazrul Shaikh, Vittal Prabhu, Pennsylvania State University, Danilo Abril, Esteban Rodríguez, David Sánchez, Jorge Arias, and Germán Riaño, Kimberly-Clark Corporation: “Kimberly-Clark Latin America builds an Optimal Scheduling System”

Allen Butler (Allen.Butler@va.wagner.com) is the president of Daniel H. Wagner Associates and chairs the Wagner Prize Committee.

2011 Wagner Prize: call for abstracts

The 2011 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice has issued a call for abstracts closing on May 1. The competition will be held at the 2011 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Charlotte, N.C. The prize is awarded for a previously unpublished paper describing a real-world application of operations research. The criteria for selection include mathematical innovation and clarity of exposition (in contrast to the Franz Edelman Award, which emphasizes financial and organizational impact).

For details on the application process, visit www.informs.org/wagnerprize, and follow the Application Process link on the right side of the page, or contact the prize chair and president of Daniel H. Wagner Associates, Allen Butler, at Allen.Butler@va.wagner.com.