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Using SSME to accelerate business
IBM Haifa Labs News Center
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In a seminar held recently at the IBM Haifa Labs in Israel, industry and university scientists gathered to discuss current efforts in the field of operations research (OR), as applied to Services Science, Management, and Engineering (SSME). The Business Optimization and Operations Research workshop was the second such seminar held in IBM Haifa in as many years.
Operations research applies advanced scientific and analytical methods to improve decision-making and build more productive systems, while the closely-related discipline of business optimization is devoted to helping large companies maximize their business performance and achieve new levels of performance. The IBM Haifa BO/OR workshop was dedicated to several emerging areas of OR with an emphasis on academic research as applied to such areas as service engineering, queuing, model-based systems, and supply chain management.
The workshop was part of the IBM worldwide Service Science, Management, and Engineering (SSME) initiative. SSME is a new multi-disciplinary research and academic effort that integrates aspects of established fields including computer science, operations research, management sciences, and social and cognitive sciences. Dozens of colleges and universities inside and outside the United States are developing services course offerings with IBM's help. From an industrial perspective, SSME scientists are researching new challenges connected with modern business resulting from the ever-increasing emphasis on services in today's economy.
Business optimization and operations research in IBM Haifa
The Haifa Labs are becoming increasingly involved in the SSME effort. The Business Optimization team is just one of several teams from IBM Haifa that are heavily involved in service solutions and academic research.
The workshop participants came from leading Israeli universities, such as the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Tel Aviv University, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and the University of Haifa. Also in attendance were representatives of the Israeli armed forces, ELBIT, and the Israel Electric Corporation.
Professor Aharon Ben-Tal, a faculty member and former dean of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion gave the keynote address. One of the leading academics in the OR field today, Ben-Tal presented a broad overview of robust optimization, a methodology designed to take uncertainty into account when solving optimization problems.
Several workshop talks addressed issues at the heart of the SSME initiative. Among those lectures, Professor Avishai Mandelbaum of the Technion delivered the presentation "Service Engineering: Data-Based Science & Teaching in Support of Service Management" and Segev Wasserkrug of the IBM Haifa labs gave the talk "Calculating the Business Importance of Entities in a Service-Oriented Enterprise".
Other talks at the workshop addressed the spectrum between pure research and applied science. According to Dr. Dagan Gilat, Senior Manager of Business Transformation and Optimization in the IBM Haifa Research Lab and one of the workshop organizers, the variety of presentations at the event accurately reflected the current focus of the OR field.
"Operations research is growing globally, both in scale and across geographies," Gilat noted. "We're getting more ambitious, but we need to deal with things on a more global scale."
In his opinion, IBM Haifa is particularly well-suited to host this conference.
"As an enterprise closely connected with the university community, we are able to integrate both academic research and applied science," Gilat said. "But as part of IBM, we have access to worldwide customers and experts, which provides us with data for operations research and insight on a global scale."
One of the positive results of the IBM Haifa seminars is collaboration between the various research institutes in Israel. Researchers from different universities and companies met at the 2006 workshop and went on to collaborate on projects funded by the European Union. As a result of the IBM Haifa BO/OR workshops, some top students have hooked up with firms working in the field.
Following the 2006 workshop, Zohar Feldman joined IBM after finishing his M.Sc. in operations research and systems analysis at the Technion. This year, he helped organize the IBM Haifa BO/OR workshop. According to Feldman, the collaboration and interaction is one of the main benefits of the workshop.
"Both industrial and academic participants have a chance to meet staff and students from a number of leading universities in Israel and learn about various research projects taking place," Feldman said. "Everyone benefits."
To see abstracts and presentations of the talks given at the event, go to the Business Optimization and Operations Research workshop web site.
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