June 1996 € Volume 23 € Number 3

In-Country R&D

With hardly any natural resources and facing increasing competition, the island nation of Singapore needs to develop its own OR capability to be able to solve its unique problems.

By Sim Cheng Hwee and Khoong Chan Meng

Singapore is a young, small nation founded in the early 19th century by the British. It gained prominence as a trading post and attracted immigrants from China and India who came to make their fortune. Independence and industrialization finally arrived in the mid-1960s as multinational corporations were given incentives to invest and transfer their technology to Singapore. The people pulled together under the strong and able leadership of the government and worked hard to achieve what is now one of the highest standards of living in Asia.

Operations research played a quiet role in helping to tackle the many challenges along the way, a role which is becoming more important even as resource constraints become ever tighter and competition grows keener.

OR Practice in Singapore
Operations research as a profession in Singapore started 21 years ago with the formation of the OR Society of Singapore. Today there are about a hundred academics and practitioners in the Society, about half of whom are in the civil service with another third at one of the two local universities. The rest are employed in industry.

The largest single group of practitioners work for the Ministry of Defence where they are engaged in manpower, finance, logistics and military planning as well as requirement analysis, doctrine development, and operational test and evaluation. About a third of them are graduates of sponsored overseas graduate OR courses, primarily at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.
The other large group of in-house OR staff can be found at the Port of Singapore Authority doing mainly simulation and scheduling work aimed at improving business processes and optimizing the design of new facilities.

Of those in academia, about 20 trained in OR and related fields provide ad hoc consultancy services to industry on a small scale.

At the National University of Singapore (NUS), such expertise is located in various departments, including the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, the Department of Decision Sciences, and the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science. NUS also houses the Institute of Systems Science, which has a handful of experts providing training courses in IT and AI. Nanyang Technological University is home to the GINTIC Institute of Manufacturing Technology, providers of industrial and systems engineering consultancy.

Information Technology Institute (ITI), the R&D arm of the National Computer Board, has a handful of computer scientists with some experience in OR applications in operations management and DSS development. ITI has been an active partner with PSA and other organizations in incorporating OR techniques into systems.

In industry, there are very few companies offering OR work. IT and management consultancies in Singapore do not have OR specialists stationed here. The first OR-related company, Knowledge Engineering Pte Ltd, was started about five years ago, and provides scheduling work using constraint programming and expert systems. It achieved international recognition with work on airport gate allocation. Another company, Clarity Systems Pte Ltd, was spun off from ITI about three years ago and is engaged in the same kind of work. Two French companies, iLog and Syseca, both with track records in OR applications in Europe, have also established operations in Singapore.
A new joint venture company named APOR Consultancy Pte Ltd is now being established. It would be the first in Singapore to provide a broad spectrum of OR services, including manpower, logistics, finance and technology planning to industrial/systems engineering and decision analysis.

Education
OR education in Singapore is available at both undergraduate and graduate levels. The National University of Singapore, for example, offers a Master of Science degree in Industrial Engineering with specialization in OR. In addition, graduate degrees by research in OR at Master's and Ph.D. levels are available at both the local universities. At the undergraduate level, OR courses are available to majors in Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics and Business Administration. Many OR/MS practitioners in Singapore obtained graduate OR training overseas, mainly in the United States and United Kingdom.

Professional Society Activities
The OR Society of Singapore organizes regular talks and seminars aimed at raising current awareness of issues, techniques and tools. It co-hosted with the National University of Singapore the First INFORMS International Conference in June last year. ORSS is a founding member society of the Asia-Pacific OR Societies (APORS) and has been active in the publication of the APORS Journal.

OR Success Stories
The following success stories provide a sample of the breadth of OR work in Singapore:

Ammunition storage is a problem in land-scarce Singapore since it is a small island nation. The problem is further complicated by many safety regulations as well as severe restrictions on the development of land near where ammunition is stored. OR analysts in the Defence Ministry developed a model that solved the storage allocation problem for all the ammunition in the three services, yielding savings in floor area over a manual solution derived previously over a period of five years. This translated into millions of dollars in land and construction cost savings.
The Port of Singapore Authority operates one of the largest container ports in the world. To shorten the turnaround time for ships calling at the port and maximize utilization of port equipment, PSA developed a system in the late 1980s that automatically works out the best sequences for loading and discharging container ships. The system has resulted in more efficient operations and streamlined workflow, and saved more than S$10 million in operational costs.
PSA has since continued to build a comprehensive information infrastructure for terminal and marine operations, encompassing the ship planning system and other decision support systems for berth planning, yard planning, and equipment deployment and control.
The Telecommunications Authority of Singapore has developed an intelligent system for managing cellular frequency allocation in the mobile telephone network. Due to the limited number of frequencies available for allocation to call cells, optimization of frequency reuse is needed to handle the large volume of call traffic in the country. The system combines traffic forecasting methods with a dynamic frequency assignment algorithm to support real-time network monitoring, analysis and planning. The system has increased network capacity and reduced network congestion, leading to new standards of service quality while generating several millions of dollars in additional revenue per year.
Singapore Technologies Logistics, like many other Singapore companies, is making major investments in the developing countries in Asia to overcome resource constraints and lay the foundation for future growth. OR was used as a strategic tool to help it establish a distribution network in China. The distribution network design considered transportation, warehousing and inventory costs, and delivery lead time to develop a solution that is both responsive and cost effective (saving more than 8 percent over a previous proposal).

Characteristics of OR in Singapore
Although there has been significant success in the use of operations research in Singapore, OR remains largely unknown to most people. Its successes are often attributed to information technology, of which it is perceived to be a part.

Historically, demand for OR has not been high since Singapore was a nation of immigrants who were not long-term in their thinking. The "towkay" (authoritative know-it-all boss) trader mentality and focus on survival left little room for contemplative work. The later influx of multinational corporations also did little to spur demand as most of the soft engineering and invisible know-how that provide competitive advantage remained in the overseas corporate HQs.

Science and technology is appreciated in Singapore for its power, but only in the hard engineering sense and as something to be exploited by users. The need to develop an in-country R&D capability in order to deeply understand and improve operations was only realized in recent years, and even then promotion efforts were focused on hard engineering. Outside the civil service, few local corporations have grown large and sophisticated enough to appreciate the need for OR.

Outlook & Challenges Ahead
As a nation with hardly any natural resources and facing increasing competition, Singapore will have little choice but to harness the power of OR to tackle its problems. With a population projected to grow to 4 million by the year 2030 in a land area of just 600 square kilometers, and with economic growth expected to be sustained at a rate of about 6 percent for many years to come, there will be tremendous opportunities to apply OR to solve the transportation, logistics and other interconnected problems that are bound to escalate in size and complexity. Already, major initiatives are underway to review the land transport system, and it is hoped that OR will rise to the challenge of offering cost-effective and innovative solutions. The vision of a world-class land transport system, to be attained over the next 10 to 15 years, requires the integration of government, industry and public concerns on mobility, safety and other socio-economic factors.

At the seaport, a mammoth project is underway to expand container handling capacity from the current ceiling of 16 million 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs) to 36 million TEUs over the next 25 years. Here, again, lies ample opportunities for OR to help shape the future operations and strategy of this global gateway.

Singapore needs to develop its own OR capability to be able to solve the problems unique to itself and to continuously maintain and extend the solutions. As a small country with a stable government, OR professionals here will have a unique opportunity to solve large national-level problems that cannot be tackled elsewhere. And as Singaporeans become more educated and increasingly assertive in issues of national interest, OR will gain acceptance as a means to develop consensus and improve public accountability.

Growth in Singapore has been fueled mainly by capital influx, but land and manpower resource constraints will result in decreasing returns on investments. The need to improve Singapore's total factor productivity (TFP) is recognized as an urgent priority. Companies will also realize that just following benchmark practices and buying solutions that competitors can easily obtain will not be good enough to gain and maintain the critical edge.

The challenge is for OR professionals to convince decision makers of their ability to provide technological means to promote productivity complementing ongoing ideological efforts such as the quality movement. In time, OR will be seen as the R&D of management needed to help propel Singapore into truly developed nation status.

Sim Cheng Hwee is president of the OR Society of Singapore and a managing consultant with Integrated Decision Systems (IDS) Consultancy Pte Ltd. Khoong Chan Meng is the manager of the Centre for Strategic Process Innovation and National Computer Board Programme manager, Information Technology Institute. The co-authors acknowledge the contributions of Dr. Poh Kim Leng, honorary secretary of the OR Society of Singapore and a lecturer in the ISE Department at the National University of Singapore, for his input into the OR education and membership profile sections of this article.

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