bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Practice of Management Science—Minimizing the Environmental Impact of Territorial Corridors: A Case Study
Authors: Economides Spyros 
Published: October 2008

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that with appropriate assessment and quantification of environmental data and the subsequent utilization of a dynamic optimization process, the impact of territorial corridors on the environment—an issue of controversy between environmentalists and advocates of technological progress—can be minimized. The discussion deals with the data assessment process, the data management and the quantitative model that was used. A case study dealing with the determination of an optimal corridor for a high voltage transmission line is presented, and some of the management aspects relative to this case study are discussed.
Behavioral Science—On Radical Organization Workshops
Authors: Wynne Bye 
Published: October 2008

Late in 1976 about three dozen of us were participants in the “Second Annual Workshop of Radical Approaches to Organization Design”. Originating from within the TIMS College on Organization, this special interest group has evolved into a network of its own. At this point the only tie with existing professional societies is an economically dictated link. The large scale, scheduled, face-to-face workshops are defined in both time and place by the semiannual TIMS/ORSA convocations. What such a resource-rich group does and/or produces could be of interest as a phenomenon per se regardless of the substantive content produced. That is to say, both their process and product may be of interest to the Interfaces readership. For my own part, there is today only one other group—The Circle of Human Systems Management—which is as stimulating.
Management Science Roundup
Authors: Bucatinsky Julio 
Published: October 2008

—“Assessment of energy R&D programs for the Appalachian region”; —“From Mexico: A wheat distribution model”; —“Management science model used in Bell system corporate planning”; —“News: Gravitational models in product distribution”; —“News: Ship combat system”; —“News: Medical treatment and evacuation”; —“News: Police patrol operations”; —“News: Pricing of products in the solar array manufacturing industry”; —“Seen Elsewhere” with five overviews: (1) A Rachet Model of Advertising Carryover Effects (Journal of Marketing, February 1976, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 76–79) by Leonard J. Parsons (Claremont Graduate School); (2) Image inputs to a Probabilistic Model: Predicting Retail Potential (Journal of Marketing, July 1976, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 48–53) by Thomas J. Stanley and Murphy A. Sewall (State University of New York at Albany), (3) The State of Practice in Planning Systems (Sloan Management Review, Winter 1977, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 1–24) by H. Igor Ansoff (Vanderbilt University), (4) Production Performance and Customer Satisfaction: A New Concept (Journal of Marketing April 1976, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 11–16) by John E. Swan and Linda Jones Combs (University of Arkansas), (5) Articles from SIMSNIPS, February 1977 and May 1977: A Study of Buffer Management Policies for Data Management Systems, Simulating a Virtual Data Machine, Honeywell Time-Sharing System, Dynamics of a Crash Victim, Patient Admission as a Markov Decision Process, Gasoline-Consumption Model, Simulation of Alternate Pediatric Hospital Care Units, Volume III, Air Defense System, Dayton Aircraft Cabin Fire Model, Reference Scene, Growth, Water Planning, Wheat Yield, Undersea Oil Sites, Computer Workload, Airport Parking, Driver-Vehicle Behavior at an Intersection, Hotel Management, Fire Station Location.
Models with More than One Criterion-OR Why Not Build Implementation into the Model
Authors: Barton Richard F. 
Published: October 2008

As OR/MS model builders seek to have their efforts influence actual decisions to a greater degree, hope may lie in the developing interest in models of problems including many goals and criteria. More goals usually mean more complex alternatives, especially when aspects of implementation are included. Models of these problems also become more complex, so complex that traditional optimization by selecting one best alternative from a set of mutually exclusive alternatives is simply impossible due to lack of a single supercriterion as well as to human mental capacity limitations. In addition, lack of knowledge of the values appropriate to multiple goal problems—values that would help resolve conflict among goals by means of a model—suggests judgments of the constituent decision maker be included along with the model in the process of creating and evaluating alternatives as they are constructed by bits, pieces and parts. The result hopefully will reveal to the practicing decision maker what his workable alternatives really are because implementation is not only included but also evaluated.
Principles of Operations Research—2. The Pirandello Principle
Authors: Machol Robert 
Published: October 2008

This is the second of a series of articles on principles of Operations Research. As the reader will note, these are somewhat different from similarly titled subjects in the usual textbooks. The Pirandello Principle was named for Luigi Pirandello, 1867–1936, Italian novelist and dramatist. His philosophy, as espoused in numerous works, especially in “Right You Are If You Think You Are,” was that there is no absolute truth. In this particular drama, two protagonists who had drastically different interpretations of certain incidents agreed that, if they obtained certain additional information, they could resolve their differences. However, after the additional information was obtained, the situation remained as ambiguous as before; and so it remained as they gathered additional facts.
Behavioral Science—Measuring the Immeasurable or Credibility in the Public Sector
Authors: Wynne Bye 
Published: October 2008

Saul Gass, writing as president of ORSA, identified a central concern for the OR/MS field. He referred to “the difficulties that have been encountered in developing and implementing decision and other models for the federal government.” His specific finding was that far less than half of the models (supported by the federal government and costing several hundreds of millions of dollars) were used in decision-making. Gass next raised the related and more general problem, “what can the OR profession do to cause decision models to be more useful, more usable and of greater utility to the ultimate decision maker.” Then, in answer, he recommends a U. S. General Accounting Office publication which details a five-phase approach to model development. “These phases are: problem definition, preliminary design, detail design, evaluation, and maintenance.”
An Investigation of Decision Rules for Thoroughbred Race Horse Wagering
Authors: Vergin Roger C. 
Published: October 2008

As long as horses have raced, men have bet on the outcome. And, from the beginning of racing, some have sought means of outwitting other bettors and earning large profits from their bets. A large number and wide variety of books on handicapping horse races have been published. The authors almost invariably proclaim that following their suggested handicapping methods will lead to profits and often provide a series of simple rules or a “system” for beating the races. Anecdotal evidence is normally provided in support of the systems, but little systematic analysis of the systems has been published. In this report, several such systems are evaluated, the apparently successful parts of the evaluated systems are then incorporated into a new betting system, and the new system is given an independent test on two sets of races at two different race tracks.
Strategies for a Publish or Perish World or Why Journals Are Unreadable
Authors: Remus William 
Published: October 2008

To understand the articles which appear in professional journals, one must first understand the game that academics play to gain tenure and promotion. There usually are three criteria for gaining tenure and promotion: (a) Publications—this criterion is met by publishing articles in reputable journals. A reputable journal can be recognized by its academic orientation and tendencies toward mathematical obscurities, (b) Good Teaching—this criterion is met if the students do not physically throw the instructor out of the classroom (except in Sociology where this behavior may be considered as the students freeing themselves from a repressive society and hence a valuable outcome), (c) Community Service—this criterion is met by attending the department meetings. In heavily political departments, this criteria is met by not attending these meetings and avoiding political entanglements. Thus, in the treacherous dog-eat-dog world of publishing, it is essential for the academician to understand how to be top dog if he wants to keep his job. Many academicians fail to publish just because they do not know and/or use the time-honored success strategies for publishing. This no-holds-barred paper reveals these strategies and evaluates their effectiveness. Although the paper is addressed to the needs of the academician, as the strategies unfold, it will become apparent why the most reputable journals are often unreadable.
Information Systems in Management Science—Geometry of Information Systems. Part I
Authors: Vazsonyi Andrew 
Published: October 2008

This column advocates an unbounded and irrational faith in mathematical models. I believe, as stated repeatedly in these columns, that mathematical discourse is the way to combat semantic pollution, obtain understanding, and create insight to managerial situations. I also advance the proposition that the fields of mathematics traditionally used by management scientists are inadequate to deal with management information systems. Restricting the concept of the mathematical model to systems of equations or relations, as in mathematical programming or calculus, leads to failure. For example, I introduced the concept of function spaces to deal with certain aspects of information systems. Now I call attention to another field of mathematics which appears to be particularly suitable for dealing with management information systems. A system is, roughly speaking, an organized collection of men, machines and methods required to accomplish a set of specific functions and goals. Whatever definition of an MIS you accept, there is an immediate implication of structure, relations and hierarchy. Herbert Simon advanced the concept that systems are complex not because of the complexity of the elements constituting the system, but because of complex environmental relations. I want to show now that the relationships between the agents of a system can best be described by geometry, or more specifically by a branch of mathematics called topology. But first let us take a little historical journey on the application of geometry to management science.
The Practice of Management Science
Authors: Bleuel W. H. 
Published: October 2008

A major purpose of the College on the Practice of Management Science is to promote practice. Thus, one of its objectives is to develop a way to bring to public view good and useful OR/MS activity in industry, commerce, and government. Since there is a general feeling that practitioners do not normally publish their work, an attempt was made to devise a scheme which would provide a continuing positive incentive for publishing practice. Given that personal gain is a strong motivator, the prize competition was devised. By this method we can combine cash reward and professional recognition. Since the entry cost is simply the time to prepare an abstract and have it cleared for release, there is only the question of the level of reward necessary to draw forth reports on a large enough number of significant examples of practice. This edition of INTERFACES provides the reader with evidence by which he can judge the achievement of the goal in 1977. The articles included here are edited versions of the presentations which competed for the prize in 1977. They represent the final selection from a group of abstracts which were submitted in response to the call for entries. Specifically, they describe in each case a completed application of Management Science which has had a significant impact on the organization under study. As a result, they constitute a significant addition to the evidence of the value of Management Science in the real world.
The Pool Control System
Authors: Edelstein Martin , Melnyk Myron 
Published: October 2008

Hertz Rent-A-Car operates a substantial fleet of vehicles in more than 100 rental cities in the U.S. and Canada. Most of the important field operations are organized on a pool basis. In a pool, a group of cities, each run by its own management, shares a fleet of cars. The Pool Control System (PCS), a time-share based model-oriented system, helps answer these questions for each city for the next few days: How many cars will be needed? How many cars will be available or can be moved in from other pool cities? How many reservations can be accepted? How will the actions taken for any city on any day affect future days and other cities? The fluctuations in demand, the disparities in customer characteristics from city to city and day to day, and the interdependencies that exist between cities are accounted for by the PCS model which provides a detailed picture of the pool for the coming week. Assumptions can be easily modified to yield different pictures so that alternative strategies can be fully evaluated. PCS is run daily by local management in the major pools representing some 50 cities and over 60% of Hertz' domestic car rental fleet. It has been used most successfully in handling the Super Bowl, the Florida winter season, the Montreal Olympics, the West Coast summer peak and major conventions. Dramatic improvement in fleet utilization and control, as well as customer satisfaction, have all been attributed to the system. In a more general way, the basic concepts underlying PCS have impacted management's approach to decision making at all levels.
New Product Planning Decisions Under Uncertainty
Authors: Hudson Ronald G. , Chambers John C. , Johnston Robert G. 
Published: October 2008

New product decisions often must be made with considerable uncertainty relating to sales, product and process development outcomes, manufacturing costs, etc. Purchasing commitments (long and short-term) and product and process development decisions are required at early points in the product life-cycle and usually involve large expenditures. The authors describe how Management Science techniques have been used to assist in new product purchasing and development decision-making, where the new product required significant technological innovation and was being introduced into a market in which there was little previous experience. The project approach consisted of: (1) formulating deterministic economic and capacity models to simulate the consequences of alternative outcomes in the market and technical areas; (2) working closely with engineering, procurement, marketing and planning organizations to determine the range and likelihood of the input variables; (3) using the models to determine the sensitive variables and to place probabilistic ranges on the outcomes of interest; and (4) presenting the results to management so that decisions could be made relative to plant construction, purchase quantities, and alternative components/processes. Emphasis is placed on methodology and the way management scientists can effectively work with and assist decision-makers, rather than on the models and techniques employed.
Evaluation of the Effectiveness of a Model Based Salesman's Planning System by Field Experimentation
Authors: Fudge William K. , Lodish Leonard M. 
Published: October 2008

During 1975 twenty United Airlines' salesmen in New York and San Francisco participated in an experiment to evaluate the sales effects of supporting call frequency decisions with an interactive management science model. The CALLPLAN model [Lodish, L. M. 1971. CALLPLAN: An interactive salesman's call planning system. Management Sci. 18 (4, December, Part II) 25–40.] integrates judgemental sales response estimates to various call frequencies made by the salesman and his manager for each account into a mathematical program. Travel time, time per call, and account profitability are also considered. The model output is an account call frequency schedule which maximizes anticipated sales or profit subject to limited time available. Four passenger and one cargo sales representative utilized the model in each city. The users were initially skeptical of the system. However, after they used the interactive model, they realized that they were in control of it and viewed the experience as productive. The ten CALLPLAN participants were chosen randomly from ten pairs of salesmen who were Individually matched by local management using personal characteristics, compatability of territory size, revenue, and account mix. The remaining ten salesmen in the control group were told that they were participating in an experiment and each member manually estimated anticipated sales to compare with the CALLPLAN group. After six months the average CALLPLAN salesperson had 8.1% higher sales than his matched counterpart (t = 2.42, 9 degrees of freedom). The probability that such a large increase could occur by chance is less than 2.5%. Combining both judgemental and objective data with a mathematical program resulted in behavioral changes which significantly improved sales performance.
After 25 Years: A Survey of Operations Research Alumni, Case Western Reserve University
Authors: Rasmussen John J. , George Thomas 
Published: October 2008

As the Department of Operations Research at Case Western Reserve University entered its 25th academic year, it became apparent that a survey of past graduates would be valuable in planning for future academic excellence. In view of the fact that this Department is the oldest one of its kind in an academic institution, the significance of such a survey assumed special importance. Consequently, questionnaires were sent to alumni requesting factual and attitudinal responses in such areas as their educational background, curriculum studied, career path followed and utility of the degree. The questionnaire was designed by the authors in consultation with the Department Chairman. Mailings, together with telephone calls, brought 137 responses from the initial list of 221 alumni, or a 62 percent response rate. Of these 137, 81 had received the M.S. in O.R. as their highest degree from the Department, and 56, the Ph.D. degree.
The Value of the Simple Approach
Authors: Howitt W. S. 
Published: October 2008

In many OR problems there is a feeling at the end of the study that by the adoption of a simpler approach the task could have been completed with less effort than was actually applied. A survey was made of about 100 defence OR tasks carried out by Australian workers. The studiers' views on whether a simpler approach would have been preferable and the associated reasons were sought. These views are analysed and discussed. The survey supports the view that a simple approach is worthwhile in many military OR tasks. However, one class of problem was identified where a more comprehensive approach was preferred. Some hints on how to achieve a simple approach are given.
Management Science Roundup
Authors: Bucatinsky Julio 
Published: October 2008

In this issue four topics are presented: —From Ireland: Solar energy; —News: Nordic congress on O.R.; —Occupational training information system in Louisiana; —Seen elsewhere: (1) Views of Physical Distribution Managers (Business Horizons, April 1977, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 82–86) by James A. Constantin (University of Oklahoma), Ronald D. Anderson (Indiana University), Roger E. Jerman (Indiana University); (2) Leadership, Conflict, and Program Management Effectiveness (Sloan Management Review, Fall 1977, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 69–89) by Hans J. Thamhain (GTE Sylvania) and David L. Wileman (Syracuse University).
Computerized Costing Model for Inland Waterways Barge Transportation
Authors: Smith Marc L. , Metzner H. E. , Brooks W. A. 
Published: October 2008

Shippers and carriers are constantly in need of substantial amounts of transportation cost information: shippers are looking for the most economical means of moving freight; carriers need information to determine rates that attract or retain business. The model presented in this paper calculates the costs associated with shipping by barge via the Inland Waterways System. It does so with great improvements in time, money and accuracy over a previously used manual method.
Portfolios to Satisfy Damage Judgments: A Simple Approach
Authors: Levy Ferdinand K. 
Published: October 2008

In a recent article in this journal, Professors Arnold and Botkin describe a linear programming [Arnold, Larry R., Donal Botkin. 1978. Portfolios to satisfy damage judgment: A linear programming approach. Interfaces 8 (2, February) 38–42.] procedure which will provide a minimum lump sum damage award to a successful plaintiff in a tort. Arnold and Botkin's paper suffers from a flaw which might keep a court from adopting the model. This flaw amply demonstrates why management scientists often have a very difficult time “selling their wares” to either laymen (like the lawyers or judge in Arnold and Botkin's article) or to decision makers. That is, the authors use a pseudocomplicated (to the layman) linear programming model to determine a solution, when a trivial, easily explainable and comprehendable rule-of-thumb, as we shall show, will suffice.
Ferdinand Levy's Simple Approach: A Rejoinder
Authors: Arnold Larry R. , Botkin Donal 
Published: October 2008

We would first like to clear up a misconception that we evidently created [Arnold, Larry R., Donal Botkin. 1978. Portfolios to satisfy damage judgment: A linear programming approach. Interfaces 8 (2, February) 38–42.]. The concept that had not been formally accepted by the court was the use of a portfolio of bonds rather than bank savings. The issue of the method of generation of the portfolio of bonds is not relevant to the court. Rather, the court would require proof that the cash flows so generated would be sufficient to meet the requirements. We certainly share Professor Levy's desire for a simple and easy-to-explain method of generating such portfolios. However, we take issue with this particular method because of an assumption underlying yield to maturity (YTM).
Ten Ways to Get Rich in Consulting by Not Taking on Clients
Authors: Brown Robert G. 
Published: October 2008

Let us start by assuming that you are a competent, professional consultant in some field. You are thoroughly qualified in the content of whatever your speciality is. The natural aim of most consultants is to get rich by serving more clients, thus increasing their income. Another way to get rich might be to reduce costs, and hence increase profitability. There are at least 10 ways in which one can avoid the costs of taking on the wrong client, or taking on a client under the wrong conditions. The notions of “right” and “wrong” here are my own personal value system, as it has evolved over about 30 years of consulting. I have tried all of the “wrong” ways, innocently, from time to time. Perhaps that experience can help you to make different sorts of mistakes, or at least to be aware of what your own value system is.
Never the Twain Shall Meet? Perhaps They Already Have!
Authors: Lehrer Robert N. 
Published: October 2008

Our friendly Interfaces editor and I recently had a phone conversation—it seemed as though we spent the day talking, but actually it was only $23½ minutes. Gene's main harangue centered around the violence we in academia have done to the profession. To wit, if we don't mend our ways, our graduates will not find gainful (professional) employment. Gene does have a way of overstating things! Even so, he does make a few good points in his own subtle way. I have been invited to record a word or two about his good points, and I do so with considerable pleasure.