Perspectives in Operations Research

Saul Gass has been a leading contributor to the field of Operations Research for more than 50 years. He has been affiliated with the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland for more than 30 years. On February 25, 2006, "Operations Research in the 21st Century: A Symposium in Honor of Professor Saul Gass' 80th Birthday," was held on our campus. Opening remarks by Deans Howard Prank and Rudy Lamone were followed by talks by Alfred Blumstein, Karla Hoffman, Richard Larson, Christoph Witzgall, Thomas Magnanti, Rakesh Vohra, and Bruce Golden. The celebration continued into the evening with dinner in the Executive Din ing Room of Van Munching Hall, followed by numerous toasts to Saul. It was a special day for all of us who were in attendance, but it was especially memorable for Saul and his family. This Festschrift companion to the Symposium includes articles from each of the Symposium distinguished speakers plus 16 other articles from friends, colleagues, and several of Saul's former students. The book is divided into three sections. The first section comprises eight articles focusing on the field of Operations Research from a historical or professional perspective. The second section contains nine articles whose theme is optimization and heuristic search, while the third section includes six articles in the general area of modeling and decision making. Collectively, these articles pay tribute to Saul Gass' major interests in the field of Operations Research.

History & Perspectives.- Reflections on Saul Gass' Influence.- Four Score Years of Saul I. Gass: Portrait of an OR Professional.- In the Beginning: Saul Gass and Other Pioneers.- Learning from the Master: Saul Gass, Linear Programming, and the OR Profession.- Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards: Reflections on Definitions of Operations Research by Morse and Kimball.- Ben Franklin: America's First Operations Researcher.- Good Management, the Missing XYZ Variables of OR Texts.- The Operations Research Profession: Westward, Look, the Land is Bright.- Optimization & Heuristic Search.- Choosing a Combinatorial Auction Design: An Illustrated Example.- Label-Correcting Shortest Path Algorithms Revisited.- The Ubiquitous Farkas Lemma.- Parametric Cardinality Probing in Set Partitioning.- A Counting Problem in Linear Programming.- Toward Exposing the Applicability of Gass & Saaty's Parametric Programming Procedure.- The Noisy Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problem: A Computational Analysis.- The Close Enough Traveling Salesman Problem: A Discussion of Several Heuristics.- Twinless Strongly Connected Components.- Modeling & Making Decisions.- EOQ Rides Again!.- The Federal Express Local Sort Facility Employee Scheduling Problem.- Sensitivity Analysis in Monte Carlo Simulation of Stochastic Activity Networks.- The EM Algorithm, Its Randomized Implementation and Global Optimization: Some Challenges and Opportunities for Operations Research.- Recovering Circles and Spheres from Point Data.- Why the New York Yankees Signed Johnny Damon.