The following is a Q&A session was held with Mr.

AbhikBhattacharya

, an alumnus of USF-IMSE(Graduated in May 2009).

Could you tell us which company you currently work for, your position and briefly what your responsibilities are?

I recently joined Massachusetts General Hospital (part of thePartners Health System) in Boston, MA as an electronic inpatient record system (EMR) workflow analyst. My first/current project isgeared towards helping to ensure that the planned partners (whoinclude MGH, BWH & other hospitals) transition entirely to anEMR is at least time-neutral from the existing system(combination of paper & electronic) and identify workflow changes/issues arising from the change.

What were the motivating factors for you to join the health careindustry?

I always wanted to be in the service industry since I was akid, and health care came as a natural progression. Let's just say I like assisting people to help other folks...and making the form-ers’ lives easy…

What are the courses that you have found most applicable inyour career so far?

Quite a few: Analysis of Health Care Issues (it gave a really great overview of the US health care industry), Advanced TQM (I believe that course is very important for someone pursuing thiscareer path), Simulation (DES is incredibly useful along with awow factor for non-technical audiences), Industrial InformationSystems (for its great overview of a mixed bag of tools), SAS,...

What advise can you give to the current IMSE graduate stu-dents?

USF-IMSE is a great department, with some of the most wonderful people. There are some great things going on that really help you in your career. I've known & met people fromother schools and was amazed at how much more professional exposure & career development was available at USF-IMSE. So,you are at the right place, at the right time… However, I don't think I'm qualified to advise other people, since I'm still in thelearning phase of my career, but I'll share what has worked for me so far (it might very well be the worst attitude to have!) - Doyour own thing (be impervious to pressure). Make sure you enjoy what you do - so it never seems like work, and most importantly,never forget to have fun... Live your life your way!

This interview was carried out by Wilkistar Otieno (OR Times Editor) via email. INFORMS USF would like to thank Mr. Abhik Bhattacharya, for his contribution tothe OR Times.

Supercomputer: the solution to NP-hard problems?

Optimization problems exist everywhere in real appli-cations, including operating room scheduling in hospitals,vehicle routing in transportation, and protein folding pre-diction in computational biology. Many of them are NP-hard, i.e. the computational time increases exponentiallywith the size of problem. You may think, as the computa-tional power of computers developed so fast, we could beable to solve many problems that were impossible tosolve in a reasonable amount of time. However, the evo-lution of modern sciences and technologies also lead tothe demand of solution methods for large-scale systems,such as those in computational biology and in transporta-tion systems. As you may know, the “deep blue” (fromIBM) and more advanced computing machines havebeen applied in major airline companies. However, westill may have unpleasant experiences in our trips due tothe bad operation planning and scheduling. Clearly, thesupercomputer is not an all-cure solution and a powerfulalgorithm is more cost-effective than any supercomputer.Different from computer scientists, operations re-searchers study and develop many advanced algorithmsfor NP-hard optimization problems with solid mathemati-cal analysis. The most famous is the branch-and-cut al-gorithm, which combines the classical branch-and-boundscheme and cutting planes to reduce the solution spacein the solution procedure for mixed integer programs.In the past 15 year, the use of cutting planes theoreti-cally and computationally has been fruitful. Cuttingplanes have proven to be very effective in deriving theoptimal solutions within reasonable times. Many challeng-ing real problems have successfully been solved usingcommercial solvers based on branch-and-cut algorithms,such as CPLEX and Xpress. These solvers are becomingthe industrial standards—large oil companies, airlinecompanies and a majority of the Fortune 500 have im-plemented CPLEX in their decision support systems. Asa result, there exist many opportunities for operationsresearchers/industrial engineers with good skills onCPLEX.Currently, more and more attention has been put oncomplicated stochastic and fast real time/online optimiza-tion problems, such as those arising from airport controland service system scheduling. Some interesting ques-tions naturally follow: How can we develop fast algo-rithms for these applications? Can we extend the wonder-ful work on cutting planes to them? We, operations re-searchers, will provide the answers

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By Dr. Bo ZengIMSE Assistant Professor

A Newsletter from Student Chapter of INFORMS @ IMSE, USF

Faculty Column Alumni Q&A Session

V olu m e 4, Issue 2 F all 2009

I nsid e t his iss ue:

I NFO R MS@ USF Co m munity Ser vice…………………………………….2 O pti mal Discrete-in-Ti me In ventory Manage ment of a Single Deteriorating Product wit h Partial Backlogging ……………………………………………………………………….……….3 I NFO R MS and II E welco me social………………………………….3 I MS E at I NFO R MS Annual Meeting………………………………….4

During the summer of 2008, a group of INFORMS colleagues and I werethinking on different ways to give back to the community. We decided thatthe best alternative was to offer tutoring and mentoring services in settingswith limited assistance. We commented the initiative to Wilkistar O. who,due to her attitude towards service and involvement with several communityinitiatives, cheerfully embraced the idea and proposed the Youth Empow-ered to Achieve (YEA) program, which offers after-school services to low income studentsfrom underperforming elementary schools in the county.Since August 2008 to date, a group of INFORMS members including Chaitra G.,Vishnu N., Patricio R., Laila C., Wilkistar O., Diana P. and Anahita H. have been spending twohours every week in helping the K-5 graders accomplish their mathematics, reading and writ-ing homework. In the summer of 2009, INFORMS supported five of the students to participatein the STARS science summer camp—a one week camp organized by the Industrial Engi-neering department using an NSF grant. In this event, children were able to learn and re-create some of the most famous inventions of all-time.Also, in July 2009, the YEA program had a month of multicultural emphasis, where INFORMSmembers presented different aspects of their countries and cultures. We made presentationsabout the countries of Colombia (Laila C. & Diana. P.), India (Chaitra G. & Vishnu N.), Turkey(Fethullah C. & Ozan O.), Puerto Rico (Dayna M.), Kenya (Wilkistar O.) and the culture of Chero-kee Indians (Courtney F.).This academic year, INFORMS@USF plans to continue andenlarge the support to the YEA program by encouraging newmembers to participate. The YEA program is a unique opportu-nity to share and enjoy with the children and to assure that,even with a small contribution, young citizens are encouragedto enjoy learning, develop critical thinking and become moretolerant to the diversity in their community.

Written by: Diana Prieto. Graphic material: Wilkistar Otieno. IMSEPh D. students

Community Service

On late February of 2009, our IN-FORMS chapter received an invitationfrom Metropolitan Ministries (MM) to helpthem review their layout and operationsflow for their 25,000 sq. ft. holiday tent.Every year in November and December,MM hosts a tent for distributing food andtoys to those in need in Tampa (24,000people served in 2008). Due to the eco-nomic situation around the country, theyexpect a significant increase in solicitantsand perhaps a decrease in donations for the 2009 holiday season. Consequently, there is only one solution: to becomemore efficient.After our first meeting, the indications were clear: people crowding at some specific points, not enough storagespace, long distances walked by volunteers carrying diverse heavy items, and some activities that seemed not to addvalue to the process, but were needed for various reasons. We analyzed their current layout and detected a lot of oppor-tunities to improve their distribution and simplify their process. After using traditional layout-distribution heuristics anddiscussing our with them, we were able to improve their layout.In the new layout, new queue areas were included, more flexible storage space was added, distances between client-customer areas were reduced, a single flow for the customer was designed, less volunteer workers are needed to dealwith more clients, and safety for children and supplies were enhanced. You may want to stop by and see how good itlooks now, so please go to Hillsborough Avenue in downtown Tampa to volunteer or donate this year, helping MM giveothers a moment of hope and joy.

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By: Alfredo Santana-Reynoso, IMSE PhD. student

INFORMS@USF and Metropolitan Ministries of Tampa: IEs at your service!

Holiday tent under construction. Taken from www.metromin.org

INFORMS@USF and the YEA After School Program: There is always a way to give!

Research Corner

Optimal Discrete-in-Time Inventory Management of a SingleDeteriorating Product with Partial Backlogging

The implicit assumption in conventional inventory models is that the stored products maintainthe same utility forever, i.e., they can be stored for an infinite period of time without losing their value or characteristics. However, generally speaking, almost all products experience some sort of deterioration over time. Some products have very small deterioration rates, and thus the effect of such deterioration can be neglected. Some products may be subject to significant rates of dete-rioration. Fruits, vegetables, pharmaceuticals, alcohol, and radioactive materials are examplesthat can experience significant deterioration during storage. Therefore the effect of deteriorationmust be explicitly taken into account when developing inventory models for such products.In general, deterioration is defined as decay, damage, spoilage, evaporation, obsolesce or lossof utility of an item such that it cannot be used for its original purpose. The inventory models deal-ing with deterioration can be classified into two categories. The first category includes models withage-dependent ongoing deterioration (i.e., the items have fixed life-times). Such models are re-ferred to as perishable inventory models. The second category consists of models with age-independent ongoing dete-rioration (i.e., the products have random life-times). Such models are called deteriorating inventory models. Milk, fish andblood are examples of category one, while perfume, alcohol and gasoline are examples of category two.It has been pointed out that due to spoilage the $1.7 billion apple industry in the U.S. loses as much as $300 millionevery year and the top 40 retailers in the U.S. dump as much as 500 million pounds of food every year (Andrew Webb,2006). Therefore, an essential analysis of the effect of deterioration for inventory management of products that deterio-rate is required. The objectives of this research are two-fold: (i) to identify the optimal ordering policy structures for a sin-gle deteriorating product over a discrete, finite/infinite horizon under various conditions suchas different demand patterns, time-varyingdeterioration rates and waiting-time-dependent partial backlogging ratios, withminimum expected overall ordering, holding,deteriorating, backlogging and penalty costs;and (ii) to build mixed-integer programmingmodels and develop efficient computationalalgorithms to solve more general cases, withfixed ordering costs, non-homogeneous de-mands, and other characteristics.Through computational experiments andsensitivity analysis, a thorough and insightfulunderstanding of deteriorating inventory man-agement will be achieved.

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By Yang Tan, IMSE PhD. student

http://communication.howstuffworks.com/how-inventory-management-systems-work.htm