Thoughts and observations about Operational Research, "The Science of Better", from my study in Exeter.
Thank you to South West Water (SWW) for the inspiration for this blog post. Like many homes in the UK, we have a water meter and pay for our water usage by the cubic metre. We pay quarterly, with a reading by SWW every six months and an estimated reading every three months. Over the past year (October - September) the annual usage was about 55 cubic metres; the meter is read to whole numbers of…
Back in the days when I was a postgraduate student of Operational Research, one of the compulsory modules was about communication. It was argued that people who do O.R. need to communicate their results with other people with clarity; that means explaining the results of O.R. studies to non-specialists. Then, when I taught O.R. to undergraduates, we agreed to introduce a short "CommSkills"…
My reading is often eclectic. I recently found an unusual book called: "Boring Car Trivia volime 2" by Sniff Petrol --- a pseudonym! This entry struck me: In the early 2000s a Mercedes-Benz engineer spent a year scouring the world for the best button action. The conclusion of his research was that the ideal button "throw" was 1.4mm and future Mercedes switches were designed accordingly. All Benz…
A couple of weeks ago, I spotted the book "Arriving Today" by Christopher Tims in our local library, and the blurb on the cover suggested that I might find it interesting to an O.R. reader. Essentially, the book is about the journey of a small item from manufacturer to customer in the 2020s, where so much commerce is done online. And in manufacturing, storage and transport, O.R. plays a part.…
There have been numerous books and research papers on aspects of stock control, starting with the classical EOQ model (economic order quantity) and developing modifications to that and other models. Stock control models have led to the concept of Just In Time production --- something which backfired during the COVID pandemic when supply chains were disrupted and demand for many items was more…
I have been quiet on this blog for a while, not that I have gone away, but there have been so many other matters to deal with. Hopefully I can get back to the coalface soon. But today I was startled by this amazing statistic: This company (a house agent) was so proud of their popularity that they could claim four-figure accuracy about their clients' delight. As usual, stop and think. The claim is…
When I studied Operational Research, one of the two professors in the O.R. Department at the University of Lancaster was Professor Alan Mercer. Anyone who knew Alan will know that he was in amazing character, and I am delighted that I co-authored one paper with him. [ https://doi.org/10.1057/jors.1978.188 ] (He wasn't my academic supervisor; I collaborated with him and his research associate…
There was a day, in my teenage years, when my parents bought a second car. I don't know whether they analysed that decision. It was probably prompted by the fact that my mother had passed her driving test (in the UK, in the fifties and sixties, not all married women could drive; driving cars was still a male preserve, and my mother, like so many others did not work after she was married). But…
Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the British government encouraged local authorities to develop traffic management schemes which would encourage "greener" transport. This led to several cities rapidly creating "low traffic networks" (described here ), sometimes with minimal public consultation. Here in Exeter, the response was to prioritise cycling over motorised transport, and several roads were…
One of the recurrent problems of managing queues is randomness. And when human beings are involved, there is nearly always some randomness. And that's why queues involving machines are easier to deal with; machines are more predictable! Until the problem is scheduling emergency maintenance, due to a particular kind of randomness called failure. Many analyses of control of human queues advise that…
It is traditionally known as Murphy's Law; if something could go wrong, it will go wrong. The inference from knowledge of this is to imagine what could go wrong, then plan to deal with that. And here's where O.R. has a role to play. Help people to make decisions, help them to evaluate strategies, help them to design better systems, and then help them to build protection around these pieces of…
The lockdown due to Covid-19 (Coronavirus) has led to a variety of Operational Research contributions and ideas. It is interesting to be on the sidelines and watch. One of the first problems for retailers was stockpiling - and toilet rolls disappeared off the shelves very quickly. The first analysis of this (from an O.R. perspective) was that there are two types of supply chain for toilet rolls.…
For a number of reasons, e-bikes have been on my mind this week. First there was an article by Simon Kuper of the (British) Financial Times ( here ) Simon argues that there is no multi-billion pound industrial lobby from bicycle manufacturers, in contrast to that for the motor industry. And therefore, moving people away from a car-centred transport pattern will affect GDP. He describes his…
In The Times newspaper today (7th December 2019), this short item caught my attention. Note the remark: "British queueing etiquette only really working in single file".
Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE Oh dear, I wonder if I can ever stop being someone who "wonders about it all"? (And that quotation is not original; one of my undergraduate tutors was the astronomer R.A. Lyttelton, and as students we were amused and impressed in equal measure that this was his hobby in "Who's Who" in the days of printed information like that.) We have just returned…
I had a chance encounter today on my morning cycle ride. Stopped at the traffic lights, the rider next to me was riding one of Exeter's fleet of e-bikes. I turned and asked if he used the scheme often, as it seems quite popular, and I haven't had a chance to talk to a user before. His reply was that he managed the company, so was committed to it. In the next minute we chatted about the expansion…
During 2019, Tina and I had two holidays cycling in France. (One was a circular ride around the Loire valley, the second was from Paris to Le Mont St Michel.) It was "lazy" cycling, around 60-70 kilometres per day and our luggage was carried between hotels. There was time for sightseeing and leisurely days - though we encountered gales and heavy rain on a few days, so on those days, we weren't…
Some years ago, I wrote a paper on dynamic programming and board games, which looked at a number of references in the O.R. literature to the topic. One game that I didn't mention, though it had been in my mind while I wrote the paper, is Scrabble. Each week, a columnist in The Times writes about aspects of the game, and last Saturday (7th September 2019) the problem he studied has aspects of…
Many years ago, when Tina and I were younger, we had camping holidays in Europe. On one of our visits to Germany we saw and bought a little kitchen gadget called an obst-entsteiner; the box still has the price (19.40 DM, as this was before the Euro became currency). What does it do? It removes stones from fruit, such as plums and cherries. Here it is: Today we stripped one of our plum trees of…
I opened the newspaper and looked at the map, with its accompanying story and picture, and thought: "There's a TSP solution in the map" (TSP = Travelling Salesperson Problem). But it was an intriguing problem. Let's start with a bit of background, though much of it is in the newspaper article pictured - with the map - below. The Lake District in north-west England is famed for its lakes…
I have noted before the problems of setting the "stop"/"go" sequences at traffic lights. When the media quote the average time that a resident of X (X may be a city or country) spends in queues each year, invariably traffic queues feature as a source of delay. So, the other day, I was stuck in a queue at one of Exeter's crossroads. It is one that I knew from my daily commute to the university, so…
I love the idea of surrogate measures. I love it where the "thing" (thing 1) you are trying to measure is hard or impossible to observe and/or quantify, and someone recognises another "thing" (thing 2) which can be measured and which is demonstrably correlated with thing 1. One needs to be aware of the value of surrogate measures in quantitative O.R. ... but also be wary of the dangers of relying…
Please note that this post is extremely frivolous. Just before Christmas 2018, Nav, one of the few other operational research scientists in Devon, posted in Facebook that he had spent over five hours in a telephone call. It was about his research, but I commented, tongue in cheek, that such a long wait on the telephone at that time of year meant that Santa Claus needed more elves to be call…
Once again, I have come across an amazing item of statistical idiocy. In "The Times" (very trusted newspaper) yesterday, we could read that 35% of marriage proposals happen in December and 1 in 6 couples get engaged on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. (The TV programmes must be so dull!) Read on and you find that the average ceremony costs £32,273. First, who needs to know the exact pounds? What…
About once a month, I walk with a small walking group. Earlier this year, while enjoying the wonderful landscape of Dartmoor, one of my fellow walkers turned and asked, "David, what is an algorithm?" He knew that algorithms affected his daily life, and his experience of the internet, but nobody had ever explained what an algorithm really was. My starting point was cookery recipes, as an example of…