OR/MS Today - December 2000

December 2000

INFORMS News

OR Powers Energy Policy

President's Award salutes 30-year career of William Hogan

William W. Hogan of Harvard University, who has been at the forefront of applying operations research to important policy issues for almost three decades, particularly in the area of energy, was named the 2000 winner of the INFORMS President's Award. INFORMS President John Birge, speaking on behalf of a committee composed of himself and immediate past presidents Tom Magnanti and Karla Hoffman, made the presentation at the INFORMS meeting in San Antonio.

Although it has no formal description, the President's Award has been generally given to an operations researcher who has had significant impact and influence on society and the policies that govern our everyday lives.

Reading from the citation, Birge said Hogan drew upon his dissertation research in structured non-linear programs to contribute to the energy policy debate during the energy crisis of the mid-1970s. As director of the Office of Quantitative Methods and then as deputy assistant administrator for data and analysis of the Federal Energy Administration, Hogan led a team that developed sophisticated equilibrium models, known as the Project Independence Evaluation System (PIES). These models provided invaluable tools and analysis for evaluating government policies to encourage exploration of natural gas and oil by the U.S. petroleum industry.

In the late 1970s, while a faculty member of Stanford University, he founded the Energy Modeling Forum. He then joined the John F. Kennedy School of Government where he now serves as Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Public Policy and Administration and as Research Director of the Harvard Electricity Policy Group.

During the rapid restructuring of the electricity market, Hogan has played an important role in shifting government policy towards valuing market efficiencies. His research has focused in particular on network access and pricing issues, markets and market institutions, and reliability of the electricity market grid. The connection between prices and operating decisions often receives cursory treatment in the electricity restructuring process. Dr. Hogan has promoted the creation of pricing policies that allocate the use of scare transmission capacity in a near optimal fashion.

Hogan, citing teaching commitments at Harvard, could not accept the award in person, but he did speak to the audience via video. He said a continuing thread in his career of applying OR tools and techniques to energy policies has been a "consistent belief in the importance of what our profession can provide and a conscious effort to put these ideas into action."

Hogan noted that an underlying formal model and the knowledge of how to use that model in realistic applications "bestows a tremendous advantage on policy discussions. The framework of the model can bring order to an otherwise ad-hoc chaos."

Hogan said he was both grateful and surprised to receive the recognition because most of what he does "has always been slightly behind the curtain."

Summing up, Hogan said that "politics and policy are complicated, to be sure, but formal analysis can play an important role, and this role should be advanced by the improvement in our profession. It is hard to ask for more than to be viewed as having contributed to that progress."

Table of Contents

OR/MS Today Home Page

Lionheart Publishing, Inc.
506 Roswell Street, Suite 220, Marietta, GA 30060, USA
Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969
E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com
URL: http://www.lionhrtpub.com