INFORMS Open Forum

  • 1.  Seminal Article

    Posted 02-14-2024 16:49

    A colleague in another department asked for a (or the) seminal article in my field.  What would you say?  



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    Paul Brooks
    Professor and Chair
    Virginia Commonwealth University
    Richmond VA
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  • 2.  RE: Seminal Article

    Posted 02-15-2024 10:59
    Edited by Bruce Hartman 02-15-2024 11:05

    I'd begin by thinking hard about what your field really is. There are so many research directions in OR today.

    Mine started out as cooperative game theory of inventory systems; I found papers and books by Bezalel Peleg to be particularly useful, though more on the axiomatic side and less on the applied.  Over the years my field morphed into logistics and supply chain economics, particularly with a maritime bent. I considered papers by Theo Notteboom among the best in the maritime field. And now I am doing analytics and big data, which is too broad to cite any seminal article. Anyway it's more teaching and not very much research now.
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    Bruce Hartman
    Professor
    University of St. Francis
    Tucson, AZ United States
    bruce@ahartman.net
    website:http://drbrucehartman.net/brucewebsite/
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    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: Seminal Article

    Posted 02-16-2024 12:20

    Dantzig's papers on Linear Programming would be definite candidates.

    As an undergraduate, it was Gene Woolsey's "Fifth Column" articles in Interfaces that whetted my appetite for operations research



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    Keith Willoughby
    Professor
    University of Saskatchewan
    Saskatoon SK
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    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Seminal Article

    Posted 02-18-2024 01:56

    I agree with Keith and add that my favorite Gene Woolsey article is...

    Gene Woolsey, (1986) The Fifth Column: On System Acceptance. INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics 16(3):55-59. https://

    doi.org/10.1287/inte.16.3.55

    The Jan/Feb issue of the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics (IJAA) contains the Edelman Award finalist papers. Below is one of my favorite Edelman papers.

    Intel Realizes $25 Billion by Applying Advanced Analytics from Product Architecture Design Through Supply Chain Planning

    Published Online:10 Feb 2021   https://doi.org/10.1287/inte.2020.1067


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    John Milne
    Clarkson University
    Potsdam, NY
    jmilne@clarkson.edu
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    Original Message


  • 5.  RE: Seminal Article

    Posted 02-23-2024 08:16

    These are great suggestions!  I had also thought of "Paths, Trees, and Flowers" by Jack Edmonds.  It contains a polynomial-time algorithm for finding a matching (a problem that was later shown to have no polynomial-sized LP formulation).  There is also a discussion about what makes a problem hard to solve.



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    Paul Brooks
    Professor and Chair
    Virginia Commonwealth University
    Richmond VA
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    Original Message


  • 6.  RE: Seminal Article

    Posted 02-16-2024 13:11

    Hi Paul,

      For me, it's Little, J. D. C. (1961). "A Proof for the Queuing Formula: L = λW". Operations Research. 9 (3): 383–387. The relevance of this work can be found all around, especially in service systems and capacity planning.

    -Murray



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    Murray Côté
    Associate Professor
    Texas A&M University
    College Station TX
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    Original Message


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