Letters to the Editor
O.R.'s Role in 'The Box'
To the Editor:
I was pleased to see E. Andrew Boyd's essay in the August issue of OR/MS Today ("The Box that Changed Our Lives," page 72). I read it several times, looking for some indication of the importance of the role played by operations research in the design and development of containers and container systems. Members of INFORMS and other readers of the magazine would be interested in learning about that role.
In his book "The Box," Marc Levinson describes the very early O.R. work carried out by Matson Navigation Co. (and later by its subsidiary, Matson Research Corporation) on the selection of container size, placement on ships and locking systems (see pp. 59-67). In his bibliography, Levinson also cites the first technical publication on the selection of the container size: Weldon, Foster L. (1958), "Cargo Containerization in the West Coast-Hawaii Trade," Operations Research (6), pp. 649-670.
Foster Weldon was a founding member of the Operations Research Society of America [ORSA, which merged with The Institute of Management Sciences to form INFORMS in 1995]. He left the faculty of Johns Hopkins University to lead the research and development effort on containerization at Matson Navigation Company. One of the first people he hired was Lloyd Yates, another founding member of ORSA who left the Operations Research Office at Johns Hopkins to join Weldon's research group. This group later became Matson Research Corporation, which, under Elliott Schreier, carried out contract research for Matson and other companies.
The 1958 paper cited above is a fine example of commercial O.R. work carried out during the 1950s and 1960s. In it, Weldon defines the major problem (optimizing container dimensions), examines the parameters and their limitations, and considers the effects of each on total transportation costs. Cargo volumes and densities in each direction, weight limitations, highway regulations, and road and rail height and width limitations are all considered. The paper reads well today; it can be considered as a technical supplement to "The Box."
Levinson cites another seminal paper by Weldon, published the following year: Weldon, Foster L. (1959), "Operational Simulation of a Freight Fleet," in Research Techniques in Marine Transportation, Publication 720, National Research Council, pp. 21-27.
Matson was an early user of computer simulation in an age of slow computers and small memory capacity. Clearly O.R. as practiced at that time played a very important role in the transportation revolution that Levinson describes.
Ernest Koenigsberg
Berkeley, Calif.
Ernest Koenigsberg is professor emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley and a former vice president and technical director of the Matson Research Corporation.
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