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TIMS ain't what they used to be
Conferences
69
CONFERENCES TIMS
ain’t what they used to be
Operations Research Society of America/The Institute of Management Sciences joint national meeting 13-15 November 1978, Los Angeles, USA said one speaker, waving the “This”, 2 15-page conference programme, “is why I don’t come to these meetings any more.” Scattered among the 250+ sessions were more grumbles (“They’ve confused more with better”), enough fuzzy flow charts and overcrowded block diagrams to produce severe eye strain, and a diverse range of topics (health planning, travel and tourism, chemical warfare, portfolio management) that illustrates how a discipline may evolve when it is defined by its methodology. This can be viewed either as the spread, or as the dilution, of OR/MS, and was the main concern of the plenary session. Futures methods The session on modelling the future dealt with work being done at the University of Southern California and gave delegates two new methods for their bag of tricks: scenarios and crossimpact analysis. Steven Alter, Centre for Futures Research, described an interactive cross-impact model. Originally the work was done with a model of the world food supply. This was linked to a cross-impact model which handled external trends and events (eg technical breakthroughs, natural disasters) and an interactive model that allowed policy changes to be made. The idea now is to replace the food model with a corporation’s own model, thus
FUTURES
February 1979
allowing planners to work through various assumptions and policy changes. Paul Gray, Graduate School of Administration, discussed Business scenarios and how they can be used to aid communications. He cited three case studies as examples in transport planning, aviation (“Aviation 2000” from The Futures Group), and manpower planning. Jack Nilles, Office of Interdiscipdescribed their linary Programs, technology assessment of the personal computer, which is being carried out for the National Science Foundation. The study will be completed in early 1981-which is an appreciable fraction of the time that personal computing has been in existence. Before the study is completed it may well be dealing with a billion-dollar industry. The speed of progress in personal computers “strikes terror into our hearts”, Nilles said. Their questionnaire, which is being sent out to users, identifies 11 makes of personal computer plus a further list of 18 peripherals or characteristics they might have (ranging from joy sticks and colour graphics to floppy disks and speech recognition), 23 applications (eg board games, text editing), and 14 computer magazines. The study will try to identify the trends and their impacts. The new technology holds out a complex intermingling of threats and promises. In education, personal computers will aid communication, the handiand allow students to buy capped, and use a range of educational packages (courseware) ; at the same time it is a threat to the formal education system and to teachers’ jobs. And what will h appen to computer crime when one-
70
Conferences
sixth of the population has a personal computer-and the best-educated sixth at that? A solution to dissolution? The plenary session ‘OR/MS evolution, revolution, or dissolution’ looked at the future of the field. Some felt that pure OR/MS was a thing of the past. “Perhaps in 25 years it will not be recognised as an entity”, said Roy Frick (Chief, US Airforce OR)-with the possibility that OR/MS professionals would be unemployed because industrial engineers and computer people will be doing the job. Some trends pinpointed by Robert Woolsey (Colorado School of Mines)
were the decline in gaming in the USA and the likely flowering of algorithms. The implementation of solutions was often neglected, and Woolsey championed the cause of the unusual but effective solution, like the one developed by the US Navy. In the early 1960s they lost their first nuclear submarine, the USS Thresher went down in the Atlantic. The inquiry cited poor welding as one cause. From then on, welders have enjoyed a special privilege: a free ride during the submarine’s sea trials. “They haven’t lost one since”, said Woolsey. Ralph Jones
Pushing the bicycle Transport and Road Research Laboratory (TRRL) symposium, “Cycling as a mode of transport”, Crowthorne, Berks, UK, 25 October 1978 In the late 1960s it was widely accepted in the UK that the continuing decline of bicycle use was an inevitable result of increasing levels of car ownership. Since then, a doubling of the annual sales of bicycles and a 17% increase in their usage has resulted in a major reappraisal of their role in urban transport. The latest step in this revival of interest was the TRRL conference, attended by 66 national and local government representatives, IO transport consultancy firms, and 22 other organisations. The main purpose was to enable the TRRL to give local authorities its latest analysis of cycle usage, safety, and law and, ostensibly, for the TRRL to obtain some response from the authorities.
One part of the TRRL analysis showed that, in a fifth of all local authority areas, more people cycled to work than used buses; and that bicycles were used for 5% of all trips in towns of small and medium size, mainly for the journey between home and work. Amongst these and many other statistics there was, however, no evidence to shed light on two of the most pertinent questions : l l
what causes different levels of cycle use, and can planning policies be changed to produce different levels of use ?
Present efforts (in the UK, USA, and to encourage cycling Netherlands) by segregating bicycles from motor traffic, were the subject of the second half of the conference. Britain’s main experiment, in the expanded town of demonstrated some Peterborough, methods of segregation, including the use of quiet residential streets, joint cycle and pedestrian paths, and signal control at intersections between cycle routes and busy main roads. It turns
FUTURES
February 1979
69
CONFERENCES TIMS
ain’t what they used to be
Operations Research Society of America/The Institute of Management Sciences joint national meeting 13-15 November 1978, Los Angeles, USA said one speaker, waving the “This”, 2 15-page conference programme, “is why I don’t come to these meetings any more.” Scattered among the 250+ sessions were more grumbles (“They’ve confused more with better”), enough fuzzy flow charts and overcrowded block diagrams to produce severe eye strain, and a diverse range of topics (health planning, travel and tourism, chemical warfare, portfolio management) that illustrates how a discipline may evolve when it is defined by its methodology. This can be viewed either as the spread, or as the dilution, of OR/MS, and was the main concern of the plenary session. Futures methods The session on modelling the future dealt with work being done at the University of Southern California and gave delegates two new methods for their bag of tricks: scenarios and crossimpact analysis. Steven Alter, Centre for Futures Research, described an interactive cross-impact model. Originally the work was done with a model of the world food supply. This was linked to a cross-impact model which handled external trends and events (eg technical breakthroughs, natural disasters) and an interactive model that allowed policy changes to be made. The idea now is to replace the food model with a corporation’s own model, thus
FUTURES
February 1979
allowing planners to work through various assumptions and policy changes. Paul Gray, Graduate School of Administration, discussed Business scenarios and how they can be used to aid communications. He cited three case studies as examples in transport planning, aviation (“Aviation 2000” from The Futures Group), and manpower planning. Jack Nilles, Office of Interdiscipdescribed their linary Programs, technology assessment of the personal computer, which is being carried out for the National Science Foundation. The study will be completed in early 1981-which is an appreciable fraction of the time that personal computing has been in existence. Before the study is completed it may well be dealing with a billion-dollar industry. The speed of progress in personal computers “strikes terror into our hearts”, Nilles said. Their questionnaire, which is being sent out to users, identifies 11 makes of personal computer plus a further list of 18 peripherals or characteristics they might have (ranging from joy sticks and colour graphics to floppy disks and speech recognition), 23 applications (eg board games, text editing), and 14 computer magazines. The study will try to identify the trends and their impacts. The new technology holds out a complex intermingling of threats and promises. In education, personal computers will aid communication, the handiand allow students to buy capped, and use a range of educational packages (courseware) ; at the same time it is a threat to the formal education system and to teachers’ jobs. And what will h appen to computer crime when one-
70
Conferences
sixth of the population has a personal computer-and the best-educated sixth at that? A solution to dissolution? The plenary session ‘OR/MS evolution, revolution, or dissolution’ looked at the future of the field. Some felt that pure OR/MS was a thing of the past. “Perhaps in 25 years it will not be recognised as an entity”, said Roy Frick (Chief, US Airforce OR)-with the possibility that OR/MS professionals would be unemployed because industrial engineers and computer people will be doing the job. Some trends pinpointed by Robert Woolsey (Colorado School of Mines)
were the decline in gaming in the USA and the likely flowering of algorithms. The implementation of solutions was often neglected, and Woolsey championed the cause of the unusual but effective solution, like the one developed by the US Navy. In the early 1960s they lost their first nuclear submarine, the USS Thresher went down in the Atlantic. The inquiry cited poor welding as one cause. From then on, welders have enjoyed a special privilege: a free ride during the submarine’s sea trials. “They haven’t lost one since”, said Woolsey. Ralph Jones
Pushing the bicycle Transport and Road Research Laboratory (TRRL) symposium, “Cycling as a mode of transport”, Crowthorne, Berks, UK, 25 October 1978 In the late 1960s it was widely accepted in the UK that the continuing decline of bicycle use was an inevitable result of increasing levels of car ownership. Since then, a doubling of the annual sales of bicycles and a 17% increase in their usage has resulted in a major reappraisal of their role in urban transport. The latest step in this revival of interest was the TRRL conference, attended by 66 national and local government representatives, IO transport consultancy firms, and 22 other organisations. The main purpose was to enable the TRRL to give local authorities its latest analysis of cycle usage, safety, and law and, ostensibly, for the TRRL to obtain some response from the authorities.
One part of the TRRL analysis showed that, in a fifth of all local authority areas, more people cycled to work than used buses; and that bicycles were used for 5% of all trips in towns of small and medium size, mainly for the journey between home and work. Amongst these and many other statistics there was, however, no evidence to shed light on two of the most pertinent questions : l l
what causes different levels of cycle use, and can planning policies be changed to produce different levels of use ?
Present efforts (in the UK, USA, and to encourage cycling Netherlands) by segregating bicycles from motor traffic, were the subject of the second half of the conference. Britain’s main experiment, in the expanded town of demonstrated some Peterborough, methods of segregation, including the use of quiet residential streets, joint cycle and pedestrian paths, and signal control at intersections between cycle routes and busy main roads. It turns
FUTURES
February 1979