Management Science News 2.0

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Welcome to the 2.0 version of Management Science News; this news site is supposed to deliver, complement, and gradually replace our old newsletter. We expect that there will be some initial problems (whether technological or organisational in nature) as we are upgrading from something that only replicates a paper-based concept of newsletter to the latest available technology.

We intend this news site to become a social networking platform with up-to-date technologies such as multimedia and interactivity, just to single out the two most significant ones. You can choose the news items you are interested in a variety of different ways: read them on the site as they appear, select by category, select by keywords, etc; or simply search for a word. If you do not fancy reading news on a website you can create your own pdf version with a keystroke or you can subscribe to an RSS feed to have our news of your choice delivered to your newsreader. You can also comment on each news item if you wish.

Of course, we will continue to deliver the newsletter as you are used to it, as long as you want. But my personal belief is that you will all like the 2.0 version much better. If there are additional features that you would like us to have on the new news site, please let us know.

Viktor Dörfler

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Caroline Sisi came back from her maternity leave, for now as a part timer – welcome back.

Susan Howick was promoted to a Reader. Congratulations!

Jaszmina Szendrey has joined the CBPO as research fellow in December and is placed in the Department. Her main research interest is decision making; particularly she is developing support tools for various types of sourcing decisions.

Paul Nutt, an extremely distinguished Professor of Management Science from the Fisher College of Business, Iowa State University, was visiting the department and gave a seminar. Paul has written many excellent papers on decision analysis, he is not only a leading researcher in areas of interest to us, but has also played a major role in OR/MS in the US and hence has insights into how the subject is developing.

Professor Tamás Terlaki has spent two weeks visiting the Department; and has been appointed a Visiting Professor. Tamás is Research Chair in Optimization at the Department of Computing and Software, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. During his stay Tamás gave two seminar talks (see under seminars)

Domagoj Hruška, lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Zagreb, Croatia, spent three months at the Department as visiting researcher. During his stay Domagoj gave a guest lecture to the first year Business Technology students.

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Val Belton has been awarded the Georg Cantor lifetime achievement award by the International Society for MCDM. The award, which is “bestowed upon a scholar who, over a distinguished career, has personified the spirit of independent inquiry and whose many innovative ideas and achievements are decidedly reflected in the theory, methodology and current practice of MCDM” was presented at the Society’s conference held in Auckland in January 2008. Val’s acceptance speech at the conference dinner was very short as, unfortunately, she had completely lost her voice that day, but luckily it recovered sufficiently to be able to present a wide-ranging plenary talk the following day on “The Importance of Integration for MCDA”. Val stepped down from the Executive Committee of the Society at the conference after 20 years service, including a period as President from 2000-2004.

Val Belton took up post as President Elect of EURO (the European Federation of Operational Research Societies) in January – having previously served as a Vice President from 1996 to 2000, Chair of the Organising Committee for the 1994 Conference which was held in Glasgow and organised ESI-III (the 3^rd European Summer Institute, held in Canterbury in 1986).

The University Management Committee of the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons has awarded Professor Tim Bedford Honorary Doctorate in recognition of work in risk analysis. FPM is the oldest University of Technology in Belgium, having been founded in 1837. One of their specialist research areas is in the analysis of Natural and Technological Risks. The degree will be awarded at a ceremony to mark the official opening of the academic year in September.

Jill MacBryde and Hasib Kosgi from Management Science were invited to join the senior management team from Campbell & Kennedy at the Dunbartonshire Business Excellence Awards at Cameron House Hotel on 14^th March. Campbell and Kennedy were nominated for the award of Best Performing Business in Dunbartonshire. Jill and Hasib have been working with the company under the auspices of the KTP programme for the past 8 months, helping the company to identify new ways to grow their business and improve their business processes.

At the annual Group Decision and Negotiation conference in Coimbra, Portugal the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) of the USA has conferred on Colin Eden, a former colleague and head of the department, the GDN section annual award. The award is made annually to an outstanding scholar in the field. The citation reads that the award is: “to honor his outstanding contributions to the theory and practice of Group Decision and Negotiation, by integrating OR methods and behavioural research, his theoretical works published numerous articles and books have shaped the entire field”

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NEL’s Management Consultancy Group and the Department are in the 3^rd year of an agreement to provide two three-year scholarships on annual basis to undergraduate students. These scholarships have been designed to not only to relieve students from financial pressure (and therefore enable them to concentrate on their studies) but also give them work experience and a vital honours year project. The company’s objectives are twofold, firstly to raise the profile of the company with undergraduates (with the aim of recruiting high calibre candidates), and secondly to support the developing talent base in Glasgow. The department likewise is keen to provide students with the means of integrating theory with practice and continue its tradition of working closely with industry. The successful students this year are Claire Ormiston & Mohammod Sheikh.

Not Ross Priory is one of two events that take place annually focused on fostering a research community in particular developing and supporting doctoral students. It took place in the department (the second event is at Ross Priory, hence the name) and comprised a series of activities. The main part of the day comprised presentations by research students enabling all to understand and learn about the different research avenues being undertaken (and the different methodologies) as well as providing feedback and suggestions to presenters. Alongside this was a session on ethics entailing a presentation on the University’s position as well as group work where each student reflected on the ethical issues stemming from their work. The two other sessions/activities were a) an update from Viktor on the on-line site supporting the research methodology programme and b) a discussion regarding the design of the summer two day event.

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Alkali Babakalli presented a paper at the 34^th ESReDA seminar and 2^nd joint ESReDA/ESRA seminar “On supporting technologies for advanced maintenance information management” in San Sebastian, Spain (May 13-14, 2008).

Viktor Dörfler and Jaszmina Szendrey presented a paper titled “From Knowledge Management to Cognition Management: A Multi-Potential View of Cognition” at the 3^rd International Conference on Organizational Learning Knowledge and Capabilities, 28-30 April 2008, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Colin Eden and Fran Ackermann were at the 2008 Group Decision and Negotiation Conference in Coimbra, Portugal where they were organizers and chairs for a session entitled “Exploring the Contribution of Soft Operational Research to Group Decision and Negotiation (I and II)” and co-chairs with Gwendolyn Kolfschoten and Gert-Jan de Vreede on a session entitled “Facilitation of Group Decisions and Negotiations I and II”. They also presented a paper (with David Andersen and George Richardson of SUNY) on “Using Group Explorer to Add Value to Group Model Building Sessions”.

Laura Davidson presented a paper co-authored with Jill MacBryde, Steve Paton, and Kepa Mendibil on “Operations Management for High Value manufacturing” at the 15^th International Euroma Conference, University of Groningen, The Netherlands, 15-18 June 2008.

Lesley Walls and Matthew Revie attended the RAMS conference in Las Vegas, 28- 31 of January. They presented a paper co-authored by myself, Lesley Walls, Tim Bedford, Matthew Revie and Richard Denning of the Ministry of Defence (MOD) on applying Bayes Linear Methods to support reliability procurement decisions.

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Tim Bedford, John Quigley Matthew Revie and Lesley Walls have carried out a project for NASA on the risks of long term exploration ventures. Their study looks at historical explorations and finds the common risks at mission, program and strategic levels, in order to assess overall lessons about the limitations of risk assessment for such exploration ventures. Tim, Matthew and Lesley gave a final presentation to the Constellation Project Team at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, on 24 March.

Susan Howick was invited to give a seminar at the Centre for Operational Research and Applied Statistics at Salford University in December 07. The title of the talk was: Methods for Linking System Dynamics & Causal Mapping.

Fran Ackermann gave an invited talk at Warwick University with title “SODA2: the JOURNEY approach to strategy development”.

Tim Bedford was an invited speaker at the one day meeting Statistics in Risk Assessment: Applications, Advances and Challenges organized by Durham University and DEFRA’s Central Science Laboratory, held on March 19. He spoke about the “Use and abuse of expert judgement in risk studies”. The talk involved a large amount of audience participation as the listeners found that they were being required to fill in expert judgement assessment forms and quantify uncertainties.

Fran Ackermann gave an invited talk at Leicester University titled “Cognitive and Cause Mapping”.

Jason Whalley was invited speaker at the workshop “Public and private regulation in the European telecommunications industry”, European University Institute, Florence, Italy. The workshop was organised by the Robert Schuman Centre for advanced studies and the Florence School of Regulation. The talk was titled “Combining policy initiatives to encourage the uptake of broadband”.

John Quigley gave an invited talk to the Business and Industrial Statistics Section of the Royal Statistical Society entitled “Modelling the Performance of UK Maritime Coastguard Search and Rescue Coordination Centres”.

Mik Wisniewski was one of the invited speakers at a recent research seminar aimed at analysts in Scottish Police services organised by the Scottish Institute for Police Research. His presentation was titled “Hard and soft approaches to performance measurement in police services”.

Jill MacBryde was invited to present a paper on the EPSRC Manufacturing Futures Network (which she leads) at the Manufacturing Professors Forum in London in July.

Bob van der Meer gave two invited talks at Lancaster University last December. The first talk was an invited lecture on “Outsourcing” to students on their MSc Supply Chain Management course and the second talk (with my PhD student Marisa Smith) was a staff research seminar on “Innovation in UK Contact Centres”.

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Thursday 29^th May “Investigating the Success of Decision Making Processes”. Speaker: Professor Paul Nutt, Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University

Thursday 27^th March “The pliant concept and its application in decision making and optimization”. Speaker: Professor József Dombi, University of Szeged, Department of Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence.

Friday 14^th March “Modelling Default Dependence in Portfolio Credit Risk”. Speaker: Professor Alexander J. McNeil, Department of Actuarial Mathematics and Statistics, School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Herriot-Watt University.

Friday 29^th February “State-of-the-art in the dual simplex method”. Speaker: Professor István Maros, Imperial College London, U.K. and University of Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary.

Friday 22^nd February “Managing software testing risk via a Bayesian graphical approach”. Speaker: David Woof Director, Statistics and Mathematics Consultancy Unit and Senior Lecturer in Statistics, University of Durham Department of Mathematical Sciences, Science Laboratories.

Friday 15^th February “Operational Research in HM Customs and Excise”. Speaker: Trish White, HM Revenue and Customs.

Thursday 14^th February “Conic Linear Optimization: Applications and Interior Point Methods”. Speaker: Professor Tamás Terlaky, Research Chair in Optimization, Department of Computing and Software, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada.

Thursday 7^th February “Linear Optimization: Twenty years of Interior Point Methods – What is next?”. Speaker: Professor Tamás Terlaky, Research Chair in Optimization, Department of Computing and Software, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada.

Thursday 31^st January “Simulation modelling of NHS hospital performance”. Speaker: Professor Mike Pidd, Management Science Department, Lancaster University

Jill MacBryde, along with colleagues from the Strathclyde Institute for Operations Management (SIOM), has been hosting a series of Round Tables on the High Value Manufacturing.

The department also holds a ‘Friday Lunchtime Seminar’ every week at 1pm, usually in room 886 of the Graham Hills Building. For more information on all upcoming and passed seminars please see seminar page.

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The Policy Council of the UK Chapter of the System Dynamics Society, of which Susan Howick is President, organised a 2-day joint event with the SD+OR Society study group at London South Bank University. The theme of the event was the use of System Dynamics with other modelling methods. The event attracted approximately 70 participants.  Invited speakers included Prof Colin Eden from Strathclyde Business School, Dr John Morecroft from London Business School, Prof Stewart Robinson form Warwick Business School and Prof Jim Lyneis from Worcester Polytechnic Institute & MIT. Two awards were presented at the event; a student prize for the best piece of student work in system dynamics in the previous year and the Steer Davies Gleave System Dynamics Prize for the best piece of work that applies System Dynamics to a problem of wide public interest in the UK. The event also included the first UK PhD colloquium for System Dynamics.

University of Strathclyde hosted a one day workshop on Service Science with academic and industrial participants from the UK. The workshop featured an invited talk by Professor Ray Fisk, Texas State University – San Marcos and a panel of academic and practitioner members, including Professor Alison Morrison the vice dean research for the Strathclyde Business School. The aim of the workshop was to look at the IBM proposal for Service Science with a critical review. The workshop concluded with proposing a number of research agendas in the area of service as a system. The workshop was sponsored by the university’s research enhancement group and it was a collaborative work between the Department of Management Science and Strathclyde Institute of Operations Management (SIOM). From right to left on the photo (2008July_4.jpg), three members of the organising team: Umit Bititci (SIOM), Farhad Shafti (Management Science) and Robert Van Der Meer (Management Science), with Ray Fisk, Alex Guild (RBS, panel member), Aileen Wallace (NAB Group), Chris Cromack (IBM, panel Member) and Heiner Evanschitzky (Marketing, panel member)

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EPSRC has awarded a CASE Studentship (PhD award) to John Quigley and Tim Bedford for a project that will be carried out in association with Simul8. This project will look at ways of modelling the uncertainty in simulation model outputs so that information gained from runs with different parameter settings can be used to reduce the overall amount of simulation required. Prof Stephen Chick from INSEAD, and internationally known expert on Bayesian methods for simulation, will be an advisor on the project.

The University has agreed to fund a new Risk Consortium from its EPSRC Collaborative Training Account, which aims to bring together a number of companies and agencies with which the department has carried out research and consultancy projects over the last few years. The consortium will be run by Tim Bedford, John Quigley Matthew Revie and Lesley Walls. It will run a series of workshops for consortium members to provide support to new employees and those moving jobs into the risk area, and will carry out research and consultancy work around specific problems of interest to one or more members of the group. For more details about the consortium contact Tim or Lesley.

The Department has been awarded an ESRC Collaborative Doctoral Studentship in partnership with the Scottish Government to undertake a Comparative Study of Scottish Police Boards. The PhD will be supervised by Mik Wisniewski at Strathclyde and Professor Nick Fyfe, Director of the Scottish Institute for Police Research at Dundee University.

Jill MacBryde (Management Science), Steve Paton (Management) and Kepa Mendibil (DMEM) have been awarded £60k from Scottish Manufacturing Advisory Service to conduct a study into high value manufacturing in Scotland. Laura Davidson has been appointed as the research assistant to work with the team on this project.

The RSE – NNSFC Joint Project scheme is designed to facilitate international collaboration between researchers based in Scotland and China. Professor Lesley Walls and Professor Tim Bedford were invited to speak at a workshop meeting of this project which was held at the RSE on 17^th & 18^th March. Professor Bedford gave a talk on “Partial specification of risk models”, and Prof Walls spoke on “Supporting Reliability Informed Design in Aerospace Product Development”. A delegation of Chinese academics then visited the University of Strathclyde on 19^th March, some visiting the Department of Management Science for presentations on department research and teaching initiatives (see photo).

Umit Bititci, Jill MacBryde and Jiju Anthony from the Strathclyde Institute for Operations Management have been successful in securing a 6 million Euro on FP7 integrated project (involving multiple European partners) that attempts to define future production models for European SMEs.

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