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The future of operations research is bright
282
European Journal of Operational Research 38 (1989) 282-285 North-Holland
The future of Operations Research is bright * Alexander H.G. RINNOOY
KAN
Econometric Institute, Erasmus University Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, Netherlands
Abstract: The paper discusses ways in which O R has fulfilled the hopes of the past, is achieving success in the present, and exhibits exciting and demanding challenges for the future.
Winning an award such as the E U R O Gold Medal seems to confer the automatic right not only to express publicly one's opinion on past, present and future of the world in general and one's discipline in particular, but also to have it listened to, if not in concentration, then at least in reasonable silence. In this way, each member of the audience adds an appropriate personal sacrifice to the joint sacrifice symbolized by the Gold Medal. N o n e the less, rituals have to be taken seriously by victims and executioner alike. Let me therefore offer you a few observations on the state of Operations Research, under a title that is meant to reflect disagreement with the famous article by Russell Ackoff [1].
1. Operations Research: the two extremes The March 1986 issue of the American Journal of Management Studies featured an extensive survey among 253 middle level executives of American firms. Of these, 64 percent had never heard of Operations Research. Of those who had, more than 90 percent could not mention a single technique or concept from the discipline. Of those who could, less than 10 percent could think of anything except linear programming or simulation. Around the same time, the controller of a multinational conglomerate described in an interview * This note contains the literal text of the acceptance speech the author held at the ceremonial reception of his award. Received September 1986
his excellent experience with a few Operations Research graduates that he had recently hired. He found them to be broadminded, unusually sharp, and generally willing and able to deal with a wide range of very different problems within his organisation. Neither of these two stories will come as a great surprise. Of course, the first one was totally made up, including the name of the nonexistent journal. This will not come as a shock to those who calculated that the final category of Operations Research fans who knew more than two techniques could contain at most 0.9 manager. The second story, however, is true, to the extent that I was the interviewer. In fact, the controller next expressed his disappointment that these useful Operations Researchers were not trained at my university. He was delighted to hear that they were available there as well, be it under the different name of ' m a n a g e m e n t econometricians' that history has forced upon us. All of this goes to show that neither of the two extreme perspectives on our discipline reflected by these stories carries much novelty by itself. If there is anything worrying, then, about the state of Operations Research, it is perhaps that our discipline seems to spend such an inordinate amount of time and effort on worrying about itself. No self respecting professional journal in our field seems to be able to function without the occasional stern editiorial pointing out that all is not well with the relationship between theory and practice. In every issue of Interfaces, at least two authors worry publicly about the future of the discipline, while the rest of them quietly document the multimillion dollar savings produced by their
0377-2217/89/$3.50 © 1989, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)
A.G.H. Rinnooy Kan / The future of OR is bright
work. Indeed, a worrying acceptance speech along these lines is probably what most members of the audience were waiting for.
2. Concerns about the future What are the typical ingredients of such worrying statements? Let me list a few. Some practitioners worry about the fact that Operations Research is not sufficiently visible and that the field has never delivered on the promises made in the sixties. Some educators worry about declining student numbers, as they see the best and the brightest move over to computer science. Some researchers worry about declining funds for an area in which, they fear, all the major problems have been solved and in which each new discovery only adds epsilon to the store of available knowledge and insight. And some editors worry about the high rate of rejection of their journals and about the profusion of the short technical note in which another i is dotted or t crossed. It is not hard to have a discussion with a subset of these worriers and to emerge with a gloomy view of the future of our profession. None of these worries is totally without foundation. Thus, the lack of visibility of Operations Research exists and is exemplified by the interview that I mentioned earlier; at the very least, the profession has undersold its successes. But, I should add, the successes are undeniably there. Similarly, the move towards computer science by funding agencies and bright students alike is of justifiable concern especially to our American colleagues. But, as I will argue, the very existence of computer science provides us with opportunities that far outnumber these threats. Finally, the preoccupation of many researchers with detailed and highly specialized theoretical questions indeed does little to make our journals more readable. But, I should add once again, at the same time it is a sigh of maturity of a scientific discipline in which there are plenty of challenges left. Let me briefly elaborate on these three points. In doing so, I am at least living up to my abstract, in that they correspond to the promises of the past, the achievements of the present and the challenges of the future.
283
3. Promises of the past Operations Research has undersold its successes. This is perhaps a point that requires little elaboration. Indeed, what one finds again and again is that the lack of visibility of the discipline is partially explained by the fact that many of its first contributions have now become so commonly accepted that they are no longer associated with the discipline from which they originated. Hence, the very success of the discipline ironically enough leads to the threat of its disintegration. This is true within large organizations where central Operations Research groups are turned into separate profit centers or are even dissolved entirely: the Operations Research approach is being decentralized and now occurs much closer to the roots of the organisation, where local eccentricities can be more easily respected. The same phenomenon occurs within the allocation of research funds as well: techniques that were once regarded as the unique domain of Operations Research are now commonly accepted among so many neighbouring disciplines that funds for their further refinement carry more and more different labels. This suggests that what is called for is better public relations. Although PR for OR may sound distinctly undignified, a campaign along those lines should not be confused with glossy brochures, full page adds and a catchy tune. One feature of it might be to ensure that every secondary school pupil with the required basic training in mathematics gets exposed to some essential ideas from Operations Research, with proper emphasis on where the ideas come from and how they can be extended and applied. Our professional societies could play an important role in stimulating the development of the appropriate educational material, as their mathematical counterparts are already doing. It is an activity that, by the way, has led to some very fine textbooks, But this is not the only audience that should be approached more actively: the profession would also benefit from more exposure in industry and trade journals. The expository talent required for these two activities right now is primarily drawn to publishing in our own journals. We need incentives, in the form of prizes and g r a n t s - - a prize for the best expository paper, the best secondary school teaching module, the best documented case s t u d y - - t o encourage this kind of diversification.
284
A.G.H. Rinnooy Kan / The future of OR is bright
As we seek to document and get proper credit for the successes of the discipline, we will find ourselves essentially recording its intellectual history, and this is another activity that is sadly neglected, perhaps especially in Europe. We are reaching the point where the founding fathers of our discipline, the true old soldiers of Operations Research, are fading away, and soon nobody will be left of those who were actively involved in the first years of an intellectual effort with strong European roots. In this context, it is appropriate to mention the recent death of Martin Beale, one of the finest examples of a truly interdisciplinary reasearcher who possessed a rare combination of theoretical acumen and practical intuition. I am sure that many of you feel as privileged as I do to have known and listened to Martin Beale, a grand old man in the best sense of the word. It would be appropriate for the European O R societies to ensure that his name is not forgotten, perhaps by a regular memorial lecture during the E U R O meetings. Generally, the societies should in my view seek to stimulate the thorough documentation of the history of our field. Our regular journals could play a useful role in this respect; the English O R Society is already devoting space to occasional historical reviews. But it should be possible to obtain funds to commission a broader historical study, and it should be done quickly now that the main actors can still be consulted. 4. Achievements of the present If anything, an increased awareness of the past will illustrate how much the present condition of Operations Research has been influenced by the spectacular developments in information technology over the past four decades. Many people have witnessed the entire transformation from the days that simplex tableaus were calculated by hand by two different teams to eliminate error, to the current microprocessor craze through which we do not only process our calculations but our words and messages as well. Is computer science just threatening to take our money and our best students? Perhaps, but not irrevocably so, and it is only fair to say that the current success of Operations Research, at least in The Netherlands, can be explained at least partially by its riding the coattails of computer science.
Our fellow traveller's role with respect to computer science can be one that yields enormous mutual benefits. We have already witnessed the large extent to which the application of Operations Research techniques was made possible through the development of fast computational tools, and as such, we have only scratched the surface of what parallel and distributed computation still have to offer. But other benefits have been equally substantial. Direct managerial use of the Operations Research approach would be unthinkable without recent developments in data base management and management information systems. Interactive decision support systems rely extensively on graphic software, and future d r e a m s - - s o m e might say: illusions--of Operations Research expert systems will rest on the foundations laid in place by the artificial intelligence community. And on the theoretical side, modern combinatorial optimization is inconceivable without the fundamental insights in the design and analysis of algorithms that come from theoretical computer science. But the traffic goes in the other direction as well. Of course, Operations Research offers a direct contribution to computer science in the analysis of operating systems and computer architectures. But in a different way, Operations Researchers are in a position to offer an even more important contribution as intermediaries between the computer scientist or general information technologist on one hand, and the modern manager on the other hand. That there is a gap that has to be bridged here is hardly disputable: many organizations are finding out the hard way that there is more to automation than the purchase of a number of microprocessors, and that it requires all the cheerfulness of Charlie Chaplin to keep smiling throughout. There is an enormous shortage of expertise to bridge that gap: expertise according to which the development in information technology and their consequences for the organisation can be evaluated; expertise according to which the organisation can be properly transformed and adapted. My university, the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, is involved in an effort to set up a educational curriculum through which such expertise can be acquired, but we all feel that in the educational effort alone we are entering virgin territory. Of course, Operations Researchers cannot claim
A.G.H. Rinnoov Kan / The future of OR is bright
unique competence as intermediaries between users and designers. But if, indeed, the trend continues, then in a few years not only the large but also the middle size organisation will have automated its primary administrative functions. And then, not only the large but also the middle size organisation will turn towards the automation of more complicated, tactical planning activities. If that estimate is correct, then the true b o o m years of Operations Research are still ahead of us - - provided that we succeed in spreading the message that automation of production, inventory, distribution and financial planning is precisely what we have been working on for years and precisely what we are good at. It is not hard to emerge from phantasies such as these whith an extremely positive view of our professional future.
5. Challenges of the future This, then, leads to the future of the profession, and to a position of emphatic disagreement with those who claim that all major theoretical problems have essentially been solved. If anything, recent developments underline the vitality of our area as a scientific discipline by showing how little we know the answer to some very fundamental questions. For example, forty years after the creation of our most basic technique, we still find new and better ways to look at linear programming. Should our perspective on linear programming be combinatorial, inspired as it might be by the rapid pace at which discrete optimization continues to develop? Or should it be based on a continuous, nonlinear programming approach, as the work by Khachian and Karmarkar suggests? We simply do not know, and yet the ultimate answer will have an impact on the entire field of optimization, the most basic of all our tools. But the challenges of our discipline are not only methodological ones. For example, we are only beginning to relate production, inventory, scheduling and distribution decisions to each other, with proper attention for the stochastic representation of the uncertainties occurring in each of them. What could be a more natural challenge for the model builder than that? Inevitably, the research that will address these issues will involve sophisticated mathematics. By itself, that is nothing to worry about. Almost each mature discipline develops a mathematical specialization: mathematical physics, mathematical biology, mathematical psychology and mathematical
285
sociology, mathematical economics and econometrics - - what is so remarkable about the rise of the mathematics of Operations Research? It is an entirely natural development, as long as we remember that it does not represent our entire discipline and as long as our scholars have the good taste to engage in mathematical work that focuses on relevant models and not on sterile abstractions. What should worry us is the apparent existence of incentives for mediocre mathematics in which a complicated notation just serves to disguise the poverty of the underlying ideas. Let us discuss then, by all means, what the relevant mathematical questions are. But more importantly, let us never pretend that all relevant questions are mathematical. For instance, what will happen if tactical, short term planning procedures have been automated and organizations scrutinize their long term planning problems? Will our profession have anything of substance to offer them beyond what is available today?
6. Conclusion As you will have been noticed, my view of the future is colored by naive optimism rather than by sophisticated gloom. I would like to believe that a proper historical respect for the past and a proper interpretation of the present will lead us to a bright future for Operations Research, a future that is not past, as Russel Ackoff would have us believe, but just ahead and within easy reach. I would like to think of Operations Researchers ten years from now, carrying out their tasks as intermediaries and interpreters between the disciplines of mathematics, computer science and business management, equipped with a uniquely distinguishing set of tools and range of expertise, trained within a network of educational exchange in and outside Europe, and functioning within a truly international p r o f e s s i o n a l c o m m u n i t y through which research, consultancy and permanent education are organized. I trust that in 1996 one of them will still have the unique privilege to appear in front of the profession to receive its special award, the Euro Gold Medal.
References [1] Ackoff, R.L., "'The future of Operational Research is past", Journal of the Operational Research Society 30 (2) 93-104 (1979).
European Journal of Operational Research 38 (1989) 282-285 North-Holland
The future of Operations Research is bright * Alexander H.G. RINNOOY
KAN
Econometric Institute, Erasmus University Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, Netherlands
Abstract: The paper discusses ways in which O R has fulfilled the hopes of the past, is achieving success in the present, and exhibits exciting and demanding challenges for the future.
Winning an award such as the E U R O Gold Medal seems to confer the automatic right not only to express publicly one's opinion on past, present and future of the world in general and one's discipline in particular, but also to have it listened to, if not in concentration, then at least in reasonable silence. In this way, each member of the audience adds an appropriate personal sacrifice to the joint sacrifice symbolized by the Gold Medal. N o n e the less, rituals have to be taken seriously by victims and executioner alike. Let me therefore offer you a few observations on the state of Operations Research, under a title that is meant to reflect disagreement with the famous article by Russell Ackoff [1].
1. Operations Research: the two extremes The March 1986 issue of the American Journal of Management Studies featured an extensive survey among 253 middle level executives of American firms. Of these, 64 percent had never heard of Operations Research. Of those who had, more than 90 percent could not mention a single technique or concept from the discipline. Of those who could, less than 10 percent could think of anything except linear programming or simulation. Around the same time, the controller of a multinational conglomerate described in an interview * This note contains the literal text of the acceptance speech the author held at the ceremonial reception of his award. Received September 1986
his excellent experience with a few Operations Research graduates that he had recently hired. He found them to be broadminded, unusually sharp, and generally willing and able to deal with a wide range of very different problems within his organisation. Neither of these two stories will come as a great surprise. Of course, the first one was totally made up, including the name of the nonexistent journal. This will not come as a shock to those who calculated that the final category of Operations Research fans who knew more than two techniques could contain at most 0.9 manager. The second story, however, is true, to the extent that I was the interviewer. In fact, the controller next expressed his disappointment that these useful Operations Researchers were not trained at my university. He was delighted to hear that they were available there as well, be it under the different name of ' m a n a g e m e n t econometricians' that history has forced upon us. All of this goes to show that neither of the two extreme perspectives on our discipline reflected by these stories carries much novelty by itself. If there is anything worrying, then, about the state of Operations Research, it is perhaps that our discipline seems to spend such an inordinate amount of time and effort on worrying about itself. No self respecting professional journal in our field seems to be able to function without the occasional stern editiorial pointing out that all is not well with the relationship between theory and practice. In every issue of Interfaces, at least two authors worry publicly about the future of the discipline, while the rest of them quietly document the multimillion dollar savings produced by their
0377-2217/89/$3.50 © 1989, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)
A.G.H. Rinnooy Kan / The future of OR is bright
work. Indeed, a worrying acceptance speech along these lines is probably what most members of the audience were waiting for.
2. Concerns about the future What are the typical ingredients of such worrying statements? Let me list a few. Some practitioners worry about the fact that Operations Research is not sufficiently visible and that the field has never delivered on the promises made in the sixties. Some educators worry about declining student numbers, as they see the best and the brightest move over to computer science. Some researchers worry about declining funds for an area in which, they fear, all the major problems have been solved and in which each new discovery only adds epsilon to the store of available knowledge and insight. And some editors worry about the high rate of rejection of their journals and about the profusion of the short technical note in which another i is dotted or t crossed. It is not hard to have a discussion with a subset of these worriers and to emerge with a gloomy view of the future of our profession. None of these worries is totally without foundation. Thus, the lack of visibility of Operations Research exists and is exemplified by the interview that I mentioned earlier; at the very least, the profession has undersold its successes. But, I should add, the successes are undeniably there. Similarly, the move towards computer science by funding agencies and bright students alike is of justifiable concern especially to our American colleagues. But, as I will argue, the very existence of computer science provides us with opportunities that far outnumber these threats. Finally, the preoccupation of many researchers with detailed and highly specialized theoretical questions indeed does little to make our journals more readable. But, I should add once again, at the same time it is a sigh of maturity of a scientific discipline in which there are plenty of challenges left. Let me briefly elaborate on these three points. In doing so, I am at least living up to my abstract, in that they correspond to the promises of the past, the achievements of the present and the challenges of the future.
283
3. Promises of the past Operations Research has undersold its successes. This is perhaps a point that requires little elaboration. Indeed, what one finds again and again is that the lack of visibility of the discipline is partially explained by the fact that many of its first contributions have now become so commonly accepted that they are no longer associated with the discipline from which they originated. Hence, the very success of the discipline ironically enough leads to the threat of its disintegration. This is true within large organizations where central Operations Research groups are turned into separate profit centers or are even dissolved entirely: the Operations Research approach is being decentralized and now occurs much closer to the roots of the organisation, where local eccentricities can be more easily respected. The same phenomenon occurs within the allocation of research funds as well: techniques that were once regarded as the unique domain of Operations Research are now commonly accepted among so many neighbouring disciplines that funds for their further refinement carry more and more different labels. This suggests that what is called for is better public relations. Although PR for OR may sound distinctly undignified, a campaign along those lines should not be confused with glossy brochures, full page adds and a catchy tune. One feature of it might be to ensure that every secondary school pupil with the required basic training in mathematics gets exposed to some essential ideas from Operations Research, with proper emphasis on where the ideas come from and how they can be extended and applied. Our professional societies could play an important role in stimulating the development of the appropriate educational material, as their mathematical counterparts are already doing. It is an activity that, by the way, has led to some very fine textbooks, But this is not the only audience that should be approached more actively: the profession would also benefit from more exposure in industry and trade journals. The expository talent required for these two activities right now is primarily drawn to publishing in our own journals. We need incentives, in the form of prizes and g r a n t s - - a prize for the best expository paper, the best secondary school teaching module, the best documented case s t u d y - - t o encourage this kind of diversification.
284
A.G.H. Rinnooy Kan / The future of OR is bright
As we seek to document and get proper credit for the successes of the discipline, we will find ourselves essentially recording its intellectual history, and this is another activity that is sadly neglected, perhaps especially in Europe. We are reaching the point where the founding fathers of our discipline, the true old soldiers of Operations Research, are fading away, and soon nobody will be left of those who were actively involved in the first years of an intellectual effort with strong European roots. In this context, it is appropriate to mention the recent death of Martin Beale, one of the finest examples of a truly interdisciplinary reasearcher who possessed a rare combination of theoretical acumen and practical intuition. I am sure that many of you feel as privileged as I do to have known and listened to Martin Beale, a grand old man in the best sense of the word. It would be appropriate for the European O R societies to ensure that his name is not forgotten, perhaps by a regular memorial lecture during the E U R O meetings. Generally, the societies should in my view seek to stimulate the thorough documentation of the history of our field. Our regular journals could play a useful role in this respect; the English O R Society is already devoting space to occasional historical reviews. But it should be possible to obtain funds to commission a broader historical study, and it should be done quickly now that the main actors can still be consulted. 4. Achievements of the present If anything, an increased awareness of the past will illustrate how much the present condition of Operations Research has been influenced by the spectacular developments in information technology over the past four decades. Many people have witnessed the entire transformation from the days that simplex tableaus were calculated by hand by two different teams to eliminate error, to the current microprocessor craze through which we do not only process our calculations but our words and messages as well. Is computer science just threatening to take our money and our best students? Perhaps, but not irrevocably so, and it is only fair to say that the current success of Operations Research, at least in The Netherlands, can be explained at least partially by its riding the coattails of computer science.
Our fellow traveller's role with respect to computer science can be one that yields enormous mutual benefits. We have already witnessed the large extent to which the application of Operations Research techniques was made possible through the development of fast computational tools, and as such, we have only scratched the surface of what parallel and distributed computation still have to offer. But other benefits have been equally substantial. Direct managerial use of the Operations Research approach would be unthinkable without recent developments in data base management and management information systems. Interactive decision support systems rely extensively on graphic software, and future d r e a m s - - s o m e might say: illusions--of Operations Research expert systems will rest on the foundations laid in place by the artificial intelligence community. And on the theoretical side, modern combinatorial optimization is inconceivable without the fundamental insights in the design and analysis of algorithms that come from theoretical computer science. But the traffic goes in the other direction as well. Of course, Operations Research offers a direct contribution to computer science in the analysis of operating systems and computer architectures. But in a different way, Operations Researchers are in a position to offer an even more important contribution as intermediaries between the computer scientist or general information technologist on one hand, and the modern manager on the other hand. That there is a gap that has to be bridged here is hardly disputable: many organizations are finding out the hard way that there is more to automation than the purchase of a number of microprocessors, and that it requires all the cheerfulness of Charlie Chaplin to keep smiling throughout. There is an enormous shortage of expertise to bridge that gap: expertise according to which the development in information technology and their consequences for the organisation can be evaluated; expertise according to which the organisation can be properly transformed and adapted. My university, the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, is involved in an effort to set up a educational curriculum through which such expertise can be acquired, but we all feel that in the educational effort alone we are entering virgin territory. Of course, Operations Researchers cannot claim
A.G.H. Rinnoov Kan / The future of OR is bright
unique competence as intermediaries between users and designers. But if, indeed, the trend continues, then in a few years not only the large but also the middle size organisation will have automated its primary administrative functions. And then, not only the large but also the middle size organisation will turn towards the automation of more complicated, tactical planning activities. If that estimate is correct, then the true b o o m years of Operations Research are still ahead of us - - provided that we succeed in spreading the message that automation of production, inventory, distribution and financial planning is precisely what we have been working on for years and precisely what we are good at. It is not hard to emerge from phantasies such as these whith an extremely positive view of our professional future.
5. Challenges of the future This, then, leads to the future of the profession, and to a position of emphatic disagreement with those who claim that all major theoretical problems have essentially been solved. If anything, recent developments underline the vitality of our area as a scientific discipline by showing how little we know the answer to some very fundamental questions. For example, forty years after the creation of our most basic technique, we still find new and better ways to look at linear programming. Should our perspective on linear programming be combinatorial, inspired as it might be by the rapid pace at which discrete optimization continues to develop? Or should it be based on a continuous, nonlinear programming approach, as the work by Khachian and Karmarkar suggests? We simply do not know, and yet the ultimate answer will have an impact on the entire field of optimization, the most basic of all our tools. But the challenges of our discipline are not only methodological ones. For example, we are only beginning to relate production, inventory, scheduling and distribution decisions to each other, with proper attention for the stochastic representation of the uncertainties occurring in each of them. What could be a more natural challenge for the model builder than that? Inevitably, the research that will address these issues will involve sophisticated mathematics. By itself, that is nothing to worry about. Almost each mature discipline develops a mathematical specialization: mathematical physics, mathematical biology, mathematical psychology and mathematical
285
sociology, mathematical economics and econometrics - - what is so remarkable about the rise of the mathematics of Operations Research? It is an entirely natural development, as long as we remember that it does not represent our entire discipline and as long as our scholars have the good taste to engage in mathematical work that focuses on relevant models and not on sterile abstractions. What should worry us is the apparent existence of incentives for mediocre mathematics in which a complicated notation just serves to disguise the poverty of the underlying ideas. Let us discuss then, by all means, what the relevant mathematical questions are. But more importantly, let us never pretend that all relevant questions are mathematical. For instance, what will happen if tactical, short term planning procedures have been automated and organizations scrutinize their long term planning problems? Will our profession have anything of substance to offer them beyond what is available today?
6. Conclusion As you will have been noticed, my view of the future is colored by naive optimism rather than by sophisticated gloom. I would like to believe that a proper historical respect for the past and a proper interpretation of the present will lead us to a bright future for Operations Research, a future that is not past, as Russel Ackoff would have us believe, but just ahead and within easy reach. I would like to think of Operations Researchers ten years from now, carrying out their tasks as intermediaries and interpreters between the disciplines of mathematics, computer science and business management, equipped with a uniquely distinguishing set of tools and range of expertise, trained within a network of educational exchange in and outside Europe, and functioning within a truly international p r o f e s s i o n a l c o m m u n i t y through which research, consultancy and permanent education are organized. I trust that in 1996 one of them will still have the unique privilege to appear in front of the profession to receive its special award, the Euro Gold Medal.
References [1] Ackoff, R.L., "'The future of Operational Research is past", Journal of the Operational Research Society 30 (2) 93-104 (1979).