RICHARD C. LARSON
Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Services Industries: Some Insights Provided by Operations Research
Over the past 100+ years, economies of the developed world have moved seismically from agriculture (over 50% of U.S. employment in 1900), to manufacturing and now to services (typically 80% of current jobs). Operations Research (O.R.), often aided by IT and data analytics, has played and continues to play a vital role in policy and decision making in services. Presenting recent examples, we range broadly from (1) urban O.R., to (2) pandemic influenza and vaccine allocation modeling, to (3) modeling the process of science/engineering PhD production and academic employment; to (4) queue performance inference made possible by recent results in data analytics. Two illustrative surprises: (a) We identify and interpret the high “birth rate” of university professors, the numbers of PhD students produced over a faculty lifetime; (b) We present an improved vaccine allocation policy that would have reduced the number of USA influenza cases by 5,000,000 in 2009, the year of H1N1 flu pandemic. We conclude with a discussion of needs to erase traditional academic silos when addressing the services industries, as most real problems are difficult and multi-faceted, requiring inter-disciplinary if not trans-disciplinary approaches, not unlike the multi-person teams put together in the 1940’s by our O.R. founders.
Over the past 100+ years, economies of the developed world have moved seismically from agriculture (over 50% of U.S. employment in 1900), to manufacturing and now to services (typically 80% of current jobs). Operations Research (O.R.), often aided by IT and data analytics, has played and continues to play a vital role in policy and decision making in services. Presenting recent examples, we range broadly from (1) urban O.R., to (2) pandemic influenza and vaccine allocation modeling, to (3) modeling the process of science/engineering PhD production and academic employment; to (4) queue performance inference made possible by recent results in data analytics. Two illustrative surprises: (a) We identify and interpret the high “birth rate” of university professors, the numbers of PhD students produced over a faculty lifetime; (b) We present an improved vaccine allocation policy that would have reduced the number of USA influenza cases by 5,000,000 in 2009, the year of H1N1 flu pandemic. We conclude with a discussion of needs to erase traditional academic silos when addressing the services industries, as most real problems are difficult and multi-faceted, requiring inter-disciplinary if not trans-disciplinary approaches, not unlike the multi-person teams put together in the 1940’s by our O.R. founders.