Cyberspace
One World for OR/MS
By ManMohan S. Sodhi
A German shepherd walks into a telegraph office and writes out the message that he wants to send, "Woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof!" The telegraph clerk points out that there are nine words in the telegram and with the cost being the same for up to ten words, he would be happy to add one more "woof" without extra cost. The dog, puzzled, replies, "Thanks, but then it wouldn't make any sense!"
Living in London, I try to take comfort in this story in the hope that an increasingly divided up world is divided up by no more than one "woof." Of course, in London the world seems less torn as this is the most international of all cities in the world. It is so international that it can be confusing trying to guess students' nationalities. For instance, I like to pay special attention to my American students because they are far from home and the British academia system is amazingly complex. So when I heard the rather drawn-out Southern Californian accent of one of my students, I asked him which city he was from in the States. No, he was French. "But you have an American accent?" I persisted. "Yes, I grew up in Singapore," he explained.
OR/MS and statistics-related courses are not highly popular in U.K. business schools although at least they continue to be part of the curriculum. (I teach supply chain management and technology management myself.) So it is nice to get a request from students for electives in quantitative modeling that go beyond the introductory courses. The August 2002 issue of ORMS Today had articles about how to teach OR and what type of OR to teach in the business school, and I will be looking at these approaches. Our elective(s) would be hands-on and cover a broad range of techniques from statistical modeling, dynamic modeling, optimization modeling and decision modeling. Modeling is both a science and an art, and OR modeling, with its emphasis on "building something that works," has a rightful place in business schools (see the discussion by Zipkin [1]).
Another way to "teach" OR here in the United Kingdom is through undergraduate dissertations. Our undergraduate students write dissertations; one student is doing her dissertation on the use of systems science, including OR, in Sweden. Her motivation is that she is tired of hearing that systems and OR are on their way out, so she wants to document their use in industry, especially in consulting and in some of the better-known Swedish companies like Ikea.
There are plenty of OR-type courses in the United Kingdom. As in most of the world, it is called operational research rather than operations research. The following is an edited Google-based sample of Web sites pertaining to teaching OR, along with some other links:
The Operational Research SocietyI wanted to do a similar list of Web sites of OR departments in Iraqi universities, but there does not seem to be much on the Web. This is not surprising since the previous war and the sanctions began in 1991 before the Web became big. Still, I have provided a list of universities along with e-mail contact information for those interested (see table). You can also visit www.uruklink.net/eindex.htm for links to some of the universities.
www.orsoc.org.uk
London School of Economics - Operational Research Department
www.lse.ac.uk/collections/operationalResearch
Imperial College - John Beasley's OR-Notes
www.ms.ic.ac.uk/jeb/or/contents.html
Strathclyde Business School - Management Science; MENTOR project
www.managementscience.org/index.asp
Liverpool University - Mathematical Sciences
www.liv.ac.uk/maths/SOR
Learning and Teaching Support Network - Maths, Stats & OR
www.ltsn.gla.ac.uk
Sourthampton - Maths, Operational Research Homepage
www.maths.soton.ac.uk/or
Edinburgh - Operational Research and Management Science
www.maths.ed.ac.uk/EdinORMS
Brunel University - Computational Optimization and Modelling
www.brunel.ac.uk/depts/ma/research/com
Warwick Business School - Operational Research & Systems Group
www.wbs.ac.uk
University of Sheffield - School of Health and Related Research - Operational Research
www.shef.ac.uk/~scharr/or/index.html
Cranfield University - Defence Academy UK, Military OR
www.rmcs.cranfield.ac.uk
Interestingly, I discovered that the dean of the management school at Ittihad University in the Emirates (UAE) is an Iraqi with a Ph.D. in OR (from Southampton) and has written a few OR textbooks in Arabic.
Maybe there is more than a single "woof" that separates the peoples of the world. Maybe that is why we take comfort in OR and in mathematics, the universal language in which all OR modelers of the world can communicate. "Woof, woof, woof!"
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References
- Zipkin, P., 2000. Chapter 2, Foundations of Inventory Management, International Edition, McGraw-Hill, Singapore.
Mohan Sodhi (M.Sodhi@city.ac.uk) is a member of the operations management faculty at Cass Business School in London.
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