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Five finalists will compete for the top prize in this “superbowl” of OR practice, showcasing analytics projects that had major impacts on their client organizations. The finalists will be honored and the winner announced at a gala awards ceremony and banquet on Monday evening (admission to this event is included in your registration fee).
2007 Franz Edelman Award Competition & Reprise of the 2006 Wagner Prize Winner Click the title for an abstract of the talk. 2007 Edelman Competition
9:10am-10:00am In 2005 Coca-Cola Enterprises distributed 2 billion physical cases (42 billion bottles and cans), representing 20 percent of Coca-Cola Company’s volume worldwide. On a typical day in North America, over 7,000 routes to 80,000 customers are dispatched, employing over 200 dispatchers located in 28 dispatch hubs to perform this critical role. The goal was to considerably reduce costs without complex infrastructural or organizational changes. Higher consumer variance due to promotions also required a more dynamic approach to cost reduction. Coca-Cola Enterprises optimized its product delivery network by implementing a trip optimization solution and a phased move from rigidity to flexibility. The solution saves $45 million a year and considerable service improvements. 10:30am-11:20am Since 2001, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) Aircraft Repair and Service Center (ARSC) and the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University have embarked on a series of OR model based projects for efficient supply chain management. These projects provided critical decision support for planning various repair and maintenance activities at ARSC. The establishment of the OR cell within ARSC demonstrates the sustainability of these OR initiatives. The quantifiable benefits of these projects include reductions in inventory by 20-70% for 41 critical parts; 10% savings in repair costs by using maintenance information for component repair planning; a successful planning of the conversion of the HH-65 aircraft from a "B" to "C" version, thus enhancing the safety and capability for Coast Guard missions; and a 50% increase in throughput of the HH-60 Programmed Depot Maintenance (PDM) line resulting in a reduction in deferred depot maintenance burden from a peak of $23.6M to $6.5M. The increased throughput also prevented grounding of nine HH-60 aircraft with a replacement value of over $270M, but more important, it maintained USCG's mission readiness. ARSC has been transformed from a "data rich and knowledge poor" decision support culture to an "OR ingrained" decision making environment. 11:30am-12:20pm Supply chain risks due to product demand, component cost and availability uncertainties can have a significant impact on a manufacturing company's top-line and bottom-line performance. The Procurement Risk Management (PRM) Group at HP has employed operations research to develop and implement a mathematical model, business process and software in order to measure and manage supply chain risks. In FY'06, the PRM process and software helped manage over $7 billion of HP's spend, resulting in material-cost savings of $128M. Over the past six years, more than $425 million in cumulative total cost savings have been realized using the PRM approach. 2:00pm-2:50pm The PIN Incentive Planning System assists automakers in the planning of pricing and promotional decisions, which amount to about $45 billion annually for the U.S. auto industry. The approach is based upon a random effects multinomial nested logit model of consumer choice of a product (e.g., Hyundai Tucson), acquisition (cash, finance, lease) and program type (cash back, promotional APR, etc.). The model is estimated by hierarchical Bayes methods on new car sales data available at J.D. Power and Associates. Industry-wide, annual savings in the order of $2 billion have been realized, with DaimlerChrysler executives alone estimating annual benefits at $500 million. 3:30pm-4:20pm As the world's oldest, largest and the best private cancer center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) seeks next-generation cancer treatment advances to treat their patients in the best possible ways. The team has devised sophisticated optimization modeling and computational techniques to implement an intra-operative 3D treatment planning system for brachytherapy (the placement of radioactive "seeds" inside the tumor) that offers a much safer and more reliable treatment. The system eliminates pre-operation simulation and post-implant imaging, saving an estimated $459 million per year on prostate cancer alone. Quality-of-life is improved through drastic reduction (45-60%) of complications due to plans that deliver less radiation to healthy structures. This has a profound impact on the cost for interventions to manage side effects. The system removes the operator-dependent quality associated with planning, and has the potential to establish "standard" quality-assurance guidelines. 4:30pm-5:20pm The blocking problem is critical to designing the operating plan of a railroad. It determines how to consolidate numerous shipments with different origin-destination pairs into blocks of shipments to minimize their intermediate handlings as they travel from their origins to their destinations. The railroad blocking problem is a very large-scale multi-commodity flow network design and routing problem containing billions of decision variables. Its size and mathematical difficulty preclude solving it using a commercially software package. Ahuja and his team developed a Very Large-Scale Neighborhood (VLSN) Search algorithm to solve the railroad blocking problem convincingly. This algorithm is very flexible and can handle a variety of practical and business constraints that are necessary to generate an implementable solution. It has been used by several US railroads in developing their operating plans and has been licensed by some of them. This presentation describes the blocking algorithm, presents computational results on the real-life data and outlines areas for future research. Ravindra K. Ahuja is a Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and also the President & CEO of Innovative Scheduling, Inc. Ahuja made significant contributions to both theory and practice of operations research. He is a coauthor of the widely-used book Network Flows: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications, which won the 1993 Lanchester Prize, and has written two textbooks on developing decision support systems that promote integration of operations research and information technology techniques. His practice-oriented research won the INFORMS 2003 Pierskalla Award for best contribution of Operations Research in Health Applications, and the 2006 Daniel H. Wagner Award for Excellence in Operations Research Practice. His current research focuses on developing network models for solving planning and scheduling problems arising in transportation, and packaging them within web-based interactive decision support systems. The blocking problem is one of the several intractable network problems in railroad scheduling he has successfully solved with his associates.
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