TutORials in Operations Research
INFORMS book series captures fountain of knowledge from annual meetings.
By Paul Gray
The newest INFORMS publication is the book series "TutORials in Operations Research," which is published each year based on the tutorials offered at the Institute's annual meeting.
John D.C. Little long told us that the primary role of a professional society such as INFORMS is to disseminate knowledge among its members. Tutorials are a part of the lifeblood of our professional society. They stimulate people to examine problems they did not think about before. They tell members about developments in their own field about which they previously knew little. They help people tune to the state of the art and to what problems are not yet solved. No wonder tutorials are one of the major activities at the INFORMS annual meetings.
Each year, about 15 tutorials are offered at the INFORMS annual meeting. Although the attendance at tutorial sessions is among the largest — numbers around 200 are common — until two years ago, their important content was lost to the thousands of members who either could not attend the tutorial sessions or were unable to attend the annual meeting itself. Clearly, we as a society were squandering one of our treasures.
In 2003, Harvey Greenberg of the University of Colorado at Denver, well known as the founding editor of the INFORMS Journal on Computing (see story on page 38) and for the many other major services he performed as well as his contributions to O.R., was the Tutorials chair for the Denver annual meeting. He recognized this problem and decided to do something about it. He organized the TutORials in Operations Research series of books. His idea was that a selection of the tutorials offered at the annual meeting would be written up by their presenters and included in an edited book made widely available both through individual and library purchase.
Rather than relying on the fading memories of the relatively small percentage of INFORMS members who hear the tutorial presentation, through the book series the record is preserved accurately and permanently. The record also provides a foundation in a single place for studying a new area when it becomes important to the reader. To ensure its circulation, the book is issued shortly before the annual meeting and is available there.
The first volume, under the Springer imprint, appeared in 2004 and set the standard for succeeding volumes. Edited by Harvey Greenberg, the book was ready in time for the 2004 INFORMS annual meeting and could be purchased at the meeting. Unfortunately, because commercial pricing is high, only a small number of copies were produced and bought.
In 2005, Frederick H. Murphy, then vice president-publications of INFORMS, working closely with Harvey, convinced the INFORMS Board of Directors to bring the annual TutORials volume under the umbrella of the society. Harvey was appointed series editor. He, in turn, asked J. Cole Smith, Tutorials chair of the San Francisco Annual Meeting, to serve as editor of the 2005 volume, the first to be published by INFORMS. In doing so, he instituted the policy that the Tutorials chair also serves as the volume editor. As the result of a suggestion by Richard C. Larson, 2005 president of INFORMS, a CD version of the volume was also made available.
In mid-2005, nearing retirement, Harvey Greenberg asked to relinquish the series editorship. Paul Gray was appointed to replace him.
This year, the Pittsburgh meeting chair, Michael Trick, appointed three Tutorials co-chairs — Michael P. Johnson and Nicola Secomandi of Carnegie Mellon University and Bryan Norman of the University of Pittsburgh — who also serve as co-editors of the current volume. They assembled nine tutorials for this volume that, as in previous years, cover a broad range of fields within O.R. These tutorials include the following:
- Deterministic mathematical programming (2 papers)
- Mathematical programming under uncertainty (2 papers)
- Approximate dynamic programming
- Spreadsheet modeling for O.R. practice and research
- Production and inventory management
- Game theory applied to supply chain interactions
- Design of reliable supply chain networks
The authors are a truly diverse, international group that comes from major universities including (alphabetically): Cornell, Eindhoven (The Netherlands), Kent (United Kingdom), Lehigh, Massachusetts-Boston, Michigan, MIT, Northwestern, Rutgers, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of California-Santa Barbara and The Wharton School.
The 2006 volume, like its predecessors, serves as a reference guide to best practices and cutting-edge research in OR/MS; it is a "go-to" guide for operations researchers. The topics covered are consistent with the theme of the Pittsburgh annual meeting: a "renaissance" in operations research that resulted in new theory, computational models and applications that enable public and private organizations to identify new business models and develop competitive advantages.
The tutorial series greatly benefits from the work of its Advisory Board, consisting of Erhan Erkut (Bilkent University, Turkey), Harvey J. Greenberg (University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center), Frederick S. Hillier (Stanford University), J. Cole Smith (University of Florida) and David Woodruff (University of California-Davis).
We would be remiss if we did not acknowledge and thank Molly O'Donnell (production editor), Patricia Shaffer (director of publications) and the members of their staff at the INFORMS office who supervise the physical preparation of this volume and ensure TutORials in Operations Research is published in a timely manner.
TutORials represents the best that INFORMS has to offer: theory, applications and practice that are grounded in problems faced by real-world organizations, fortified by advanced analytical methods, enriched by multi-disciplinary perspectives and useful to end-users, be they faculty, researchers or practitioners.
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Paul Gray, professor emeritus and founding chair of Information Science at Claremont Graduate University, is editor of the TutORials in Operations Research book series.
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