International Conference on OPERATIONS RESEARCH
Mastering
complexity
(Germany, Munich,
1-3 September 2010)
Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber
Middle East
Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
The
topic "Operations Research in Life Sciences and Education -
Trends, History and Ethics" at OR 2010 in Munich - supported
by the three EURO Working Groups on Ethics and OR, Methodology of Complex
Societal Problems, and OR for Development. This brief survey is prepared in accordance with Report materials on
the Conference that was presented by authors group (Annette
Hohenberger, Giorgio Gallo and
Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber).
Our annual conference OR 2010 in Munich, organized by the
German OR Society (GOR), this time in collaboration with the Italian friends
from AIRO (Optimization and Decision Sciences), became a great success (http://or2010.informatik.unibw-muenchen.de/). One innovation consisted in the topic
"OR in Life Sciences and Education - Trends,
History and Ethics".
This topic consisted of the
following sessions:
We
sincerely thank all the Session Organizers and participants, and refer to
for more details.
In the following two Sections,
some impressions of the topic are given by reports about three Sessions which
were part of this stream.
Three
Sessions on topics "OR in Complex
Societal Problems I and II", "OR and
Ethics" (organizer is Dorien de Tombe); "OR
-
Responsibility, Sharing and Cooperation" (organizer
is Giorgio Gallo) were the subject of special
attention
Although, unfortunately, Dorien
DeTombe could not attend the conference, her two
sessions, "OR in
Complex Societal Problems I and II", "OR and Ethics" took
place as planned - thanks to her careful alternative planning. Cor van Dijkum
chaired the first session and I did the second. At the beginning of the first
session, Cor played a short video address that Dorien had prepared, in which she introduced the topic of
Complex Societal Problems to the audience. Then we had three presentations, two
on Climate Change (its cognitive aspects by Annette Hohenberger,
its complex societal aspects by Dorien DeTombe) and one on a complex model of communication
between General Practitioner (GP) and patient (Cor
van Dijkum and Niek Lam). Dorien's paper was presented in
the format of a video seminar that she had once taught to students at Middle
East Technical University (METU). Cor also
distributed the Power Point print-outs so that the
audience could follow her talk for as long as the remaining time allowed. He
also handed out copies of her 2008 Climate Change paper in the Journal of
Transformation and Societal Change. The second session was
thematically related to the first one. Continuity was
provided by the paper of Niek Lam and Cor van Dijkum in which they
elaborated on their previously introduced communicational model between GP and
patient, now in terms of its statistics and nonlinear differential equations.
The paper presented by Willi Weber, on behalf of his
collaborators, was dedicated to the study of
infrastructure facilities on the quality of primary education, mostly in Turkey,
by means of the Cross Impact Analysis (CIA). The last paper by Arnold Dupuy opened up a new thematic field. It gave a
model-theoretic and quantitative account of the Russia-Georgia Conflict 2008,
in terms of the Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model (TNDM), with the aim of
drawing realistic and unbiased lessons.
Overall, both sessions were
highly inspiring and went very well, despite Dorien DeTombe's absence. We would like to thank her for her
thoughtful arrangements. Thanks to her foresight, the two sessions were a great
success. Of course, we missed her inspiring presence and input very much. Next
year she will hopefully be able to attend again!
Critically, it should be remarked
that in each of the two sessions one paper could not be delivered because the
presenters did not come. In both cases, the authors came from countries far
away, from Peru and from Thailand.
This was a great pity. It shows that it is (still) difficult for foreign
researchers to attend a conference in Germany
or Europe, most probably due to visa or
funding problems. I also witnessed similar cases in other sessions. This shows,
on the one hand, that the OR conferences are a great magnet for scholars all
over the world but also, on the other hand, that more efforts need to be made
in order to help scholars from countries outside Europe to actually attend. At
the conference itself, it would have been helpful if the organizers had
informed the chairs of the sessions before which presenters could not come - as
far as the organizing committee has knowledge of these problems, of course.
This would have facilitated the re-scheduling of the order and the available
time for the remaining speakers.
I would also like to comment on the keynote talk of
Giorgio Gallo that he delivered in the plenary on September 03, on "Ethical
Implications of Complexity". I was very intrigued by this talk which struck me
as very scholarly - because it developed ethical implications from the OR
perspective itself - and at the same time very visionary - because it showed
with which other scientific fields OR shares commonalities in this respect:
with (practical) philosophy, economics, epidemiology, complexity theory (in a
broad sense), and political sciences. With the plenary talk Giorgio Gallo pointed
out on a large scale that ethical considerations are indispensable for OR but
also that OR is indispensable for ethics. After all, "Good OR" is the science
and practice of "Doing Good" (Cynthia Barnhart).
Session
on "OR - Responsibility, Sharing and Cooperation"
In this session, which I
have chaired, we had one no-show and a change in the speaker of another. The
result was that the session had 3 presentations, all
with Italian speakers.
The first was concerned
with a very important problem, the analysis of the phenomenon of inter-culture
in schools. A field research on a large sample of pupils from some Italian
schools has been preformed, based not only on statistical tools, but also on Saaty's Analytical Hierarchical Approach. The survey showed
that foreign students, even the ones born in Italy, have lower scholastic
success than the Italians. This result highlights the
relevance of the socio-cultural capital of the family with respect to the
scholastic success of the children. The authors conclude that the Italian
school still has to take further steps to give all the students equal chances
in education.
The second focused on the
use of archetypal mathematical models, called Policy Models, to summarize the
knowledge on some politically relevant situation, in order to provide guidance
in decision-making. These are models, which arise from the need to analyze and
to discuss archetypal situations or even specific concepts, all with ethical
contents and/or policy implications. They can be thought of
as a way to bring order to the complex multitude of interactions and processes,
which characterize real world situations and can be used by policy makers as a
base for policy decisions.
Finally, in the last, the
more technical one, models and algorithms for improving the efficiency of Solid
Waste collection have been presented. In this type of
problem decisions about the frequency of the service and the number of the bins
must be taken. Therefore, the joint solution of a
routing problem and proper allocation is required. The authors presented new
algorithms.
The fact that this new selected
topic of "OR in Life Sciences and Education - Trends, History and Ethics" was
presented at the Munich
conference, reflects the rapid changes which the
modern world is experiencing - as challenges and as chances. Our OR has
responded to these developments by offering a scientific forum to researchers
and engineers that provides and helps refine the
necessary methods. The foundation of corresponding EURO Working Groups and of
working groups of national OR societies have been milestones on this way. Those
changes are sometimes associated with issues such as global warming, financial
crisis, globalization, and swine flu. Furthermore, there are the UN Millennium
Development Goals, especially, the goal to fight poverty. Our new Selected
Topic invites colleagues from all disciplinary backgrounds to meet, to present
and further discuss how modern, interdisciplinary OR with its quantitative
methods may contribute to urgent problems of our societies, of nature and the
environment. Special emphasis is given to the
"human factor", the "social factor", to the improvement of
living conditions and to ethics.
