Compiled by Barry List

Several recent articles in the press examined the often unheralded contributions made by operations researchers and the OR field. A sampling:

"A significant increase in aviation security could be achieved while reducing the incidence of lost and misrouted checked bags, at a cost of less than 50 cents per ticket, according to a recent report.
"Titled 'Safe at Home? An Experiment in Airline Security,' the report in the March-April 2001 issue of Operations Research by Dr. Arnold Barnett and four co-authors highlights the results of a positive bag-match trial conducted under the auspices of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in May 1997. Barnett is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management. Under positive passenger-bag match, or PPBM, all bags loaded into the belly hold are matched to a passenger expected to be aboard. If the passenger checks a bag but does not board, the bag would be pulled off the airplane before departure. PPBM is designed to identify and remove any 'rogue' bags that could contain bombs."
—Air Safety Week, June 19, 2001

"But it was Pan Am Flight 103 that exploded on Dec. 21 1988 in the skies above Lockerbie, Scotland that made the aviation industry take notice of PPBM. All 259 passengers and crew and 11 people on the ground were killed when the plane blew up because of a bomb in an unaccompanied bag.
"In fact, introducing 100 percent PPBM on all domestic commercial flights would cost airlines about 50 cents per passenger, according to a recent studyŠwhich appeared in the March-April issues of Operations Research. The increased automation and higher labor costs would cost airlines between 25 cents and 52 centers per passenger, the study said."
—World Airport Week, Aug. 7, 2001

"New anti-terrorist measures to reduce unaccompanied baggage in aircraft luggage compartments would not cause intolerable delay or disruption, according to a study published in a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)…
" 'No one knows,' [Barnett] acknowledges, 'what security benefits, if nay would result from the policy shift, just as no one knows how many Tylenol-type poisonings have been averted by the protective shields that have appeared on grocery items for the past 19 years, costing billions of dollars and billions of person-hours of extra time opening packages. But given the modest additional costs of 100% bag match, many passengers might support that measure even if there is only a chance that it would be beneficial.' "
—Airports America, Summer 2001

"If it's time to improve a high-tech product, be it medicine or a new version of the Palm Pilot, one should think twice about where focus groups are sent. "According to new research, under some conditions designing products to please a disgruntled minority of customers rather than the average customer might actually lead to market dominance.
"A team of operational researchers using standard math modeling techniques claim to have shown that products designed to mollify an acutely miffed group can bring big payoffs in a broader market.
" 'We asked if it was possible to target people who are least happy and design a product catering to them,' said Christopher Tucci, an operational researcher at New York University. 'And we wanted to know if it is possible that a product appealing to one group would ever achieve market dominance.'
"They claim it can…
"The paper was presented at a conference in Maui, Hawaii hosted by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences or INFORMS."
—UPI, June 20, 2001

"Some managers try to ameliorate [a software design] problem by adding slack to tight deadlines: surely a little breathing room will encourage developers to do more careful work, they reason.
"That's exactly the wrong approach, says Rob Austin, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. What developers need are tighter deadlines, not looser ones, he argues in a new study, 'The Effects of Time Pressure on Quality in Software Development,' published in a recent issue of [a] journal of the Institute for Operation Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
—CIO Online, "Sound Off," June 20, 2001