Here is an appropriate place to treat some of the early 70s operational research projects, and also some of the critical analysis of science in Ireland as done via the weekly Irish Times column. There is a sequence in the latter, for example, dedicated to the Agricultural Institute and it will be appropriate in due course to overview this here, and to hotlink it to the appropriate sector of the Irish Times hypertext.

Gordon Foster's MSc in Statistics and Operational Research

The project work constituted the practical part of the master's degree programme; there was also a lecture programme and examinations. The work was innovative in three ways. First, each project involved more than one student, usually two or three. Secondly, the terms of reference were negotiated with an outside client or sponsor, who was interested in a real solution to a real problem. And thirdly, the supervisor (ie this author) was working as consultant to the client for a fee and was responsible for the delivery of the results, irrespective of the performance of the student groups.

This procedure was possible largely because the author had opted to develop his OR consultancy as a fringe-university activity, on the grounds of his belief in the need to develop the university post-graduate system as a useful resource.

The above three paragraphs are taken from the introduction to a chapter in a book edited by Julian Mac Airt, 'Operations Research in Ireland' (Mercier Press, 1988) which is available in full.

IFORS: the 1972 Simulation Debate and Fashion in OR

We had attended the 1969 IFORS Conference which took place in Venice, and some of us contributed papers. On the whole the Irish group was lively and innovative; our work on applying computer modelling to fleet planning had earlier aroused the interest of the aircraft manufacturers, who previously had considered the computer only relevant to aircraft design. We therefore had high standing in the IFORS world, and we had no trouble in pulling the 1972 triennial conference to Dublin.

I found myself on the Programme Committee, and under Alec Lee's guidance we put some effort into structuring the conference somewhat innovatively, in a manner which since has become more or less the norm, though the transmission of conference experience is problematic, since most people who are involved in their organisation usually say, afterwards, 'please God, never again!'. The philosophy of the conference was outlined by Micheál Ross the Editor of the Proceedings in his introduction.

There was a plenary opening, addressed very creditably by Erskine Childers, then Tanaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) and Minister for Health, by Arne Jensen (Technical University of Denmark) on behalf of IFORS, and by JP Hyland on behalf of the OR Society of Ireland, the host. Then there were plenary highlight papers by invited speakers; these included one from Charles Hitch, President of the University of California at Berkeley, who addressed the problem of how to get OR activity in the US interested in environmental problems rather than it current obsession with the modelling military scenarios with the 3rd world war in mind. There was also one from Nikita Moiseev, of the USSR Academy of Sciences, who showed a deep understanding of the problems at the interface between classical Russian mathematics and its application to industrial problems in a planned economy.

There was a clear sense of responsibility on the part of IFORS to help resolve the then acute issues relating to the 'cold war'.

There was then a series of papers on the state of the art, each being a substantive review of a topic followed by inputs from a pair of critical discussants. The topics were:

• Planning under Uncertainty
• The Role of Models in Corporate Decision-making
• Information Systems for Decision and Control
• General Systems Research
• Simulation and Validation
• Stochastic Processes
• Behavioural Science Models.

There was a channel for national contributions, where each national member-society had the right to give a paper. This was structured into several domains: communications, education and research, transport, energy, health, other miscellaneous applications, and OR techniques. The Irish contribution was from J Cantwell, B Lenehan and J O'Farrell on the improvement of the performance of the ambulance service in a sparsely populated area in the west of Ireland.

There were workshop sessions where groups were set up enabling identified problem-owners from the Irish scene to interact with groups of conference participants who were perhaps in a position to provide solutions; there is alas little record in the Proceedings of who the Irish participants were, so it is difficult to evaluate this. The intent however was worthy. The domains covered were educational systems, urban planning, guiding technological development, agriculture, health and welfare systems, crime prevention and control, environmental pollution. There is on record however that in the agricultural workshop there was 'an incisive introductory paper by Dr Pearse Ryan, Deputy Director of an Foras Taluntais' on the question of planning agricultural research. Also the crime session involved EJ Doherty, Stepen Fanning and James Enright of the Irish police force.

Finally there was a discussion forum which was a sort of overflow area for people to talk about work in progress; this in current conference practice has evolved into the 'poster session' and has become the norm, but in 1972 it was innovative. I got to co-ordinate it and write the report.

Simulation and Validation

He placed considerable emphasis on statistical analysis, ie abstraction of a signal from a noisy background, and the matching of the simulation experiment to the 'real-world' experiment as regards noisiness. In my response I homed in critically on this aspect.

I welcomed Dr. Naylor's paper; it put the philosophy of simulation before us in a comprehensive yet concise manner. In my response I defended three assertions:

(1) The ratio of simulation to analysis in a model can have any value between zero and one; it is not a binary variable.

(2) An experimental structure, which is a model of a real system, ought to be designed so as to produce a big signal, well above the noise level, if insights are to be gained.

(3) There is a need for some objective common measure in multiple-response situations; subjective measures, such as utility, are of doubtful value.

Dr Naylor gave the impression that he regarded simulation and analysis as two quite separate camps. I suggested that it was possible to build hybrid models, containing elements described analytically, interacting in response to signals one or more of which are simulated. I used my Aer Lingus 'analytical simulation of a real-time computer system' as an example.

As regards the need to design the experiment so as to produce a big signal, I leaned on the philosophy of experimentation which I had imbibed when working as a physicist. One constructed an experimental model of the system which reduced to the minimum the extraneous noise and focused on those signals which were considered to be the key to the essential dynamics.

I gained the impression that the type of simulation philosophy expounded by Dr Naylor was at variance with this: he felt it necessary to make the noise-level of the model system comparable to that in the real system, so that he is in the happy position of being able to use all the tricks in the statistician's bag to pick the signal out. When I was working in physics, the lore used to be that if a man had to resort to sophisticated statistical techniques, his experiment was suspect.

Fortunately, in business systems nature has provided a filter with which the experimenter can pick out the relatively small number of significant variables from the mass of background. This filter is the judgement and experience of the manager: those who have not developed a feel for the significant variables from the experience of working the system are unlikely to have survived.

As regards multiple-response situations, I went on to call for an alternative approach in which the sole measure was the survival probability of the system as a viable organism. I alluded to current work on ageing in biology; this depended on information-theoretic concepts such as garbling of coded data, entropy levels, etc.

I suggested that an approach to the problem of viability of an economic organism can be made via a thermodynamic model, with temperature and entropy defined in information-theoretic terms.... A "hot" management could reduce entropy rapidly.

There was a body of theory developing in biology with sound roots in physics, thermodynamics and information theory, representing a radically different approach to that of utility theory, although both relate to measures of value. It substituted for a multiplicity of subjective sub-goals a single over-riding goal, survival.

I concluded by remarking that he theory-practice ratio in OR was out of proportion to that which obtains in other branches of applied science. Because theoreticians were solving problems posed by each other and neglecting the experimenters' world, important areas such as that outlined by Dr Naylor are neglected.

The RJ contribution summarised above is given in full in the hypertext.

The Discussion Forum as an Indicator of Fashionability

I was surprised and disappointed at the poor support for the "development areas" group: most of this was clearly an effort to build bridges into disciplines where the relevance of OR was hitherto unrecognised. There was scope for more interaction with the civil and electrical engineers, and other such disciplines with long and distinguished numerate traditions; many OR techniques in fact have independent and parallel histories without the OR label. The poor attendance at some 'manpower planning model' presentations perhaps was an indicator of the trend away from 'optimising' and towards 'satisficing' and paying attention to the importance of the human element.

On the whole the comments I made then have stood the test of time. OR as an active branch of academic applied maths, with emphasis on theoretical refinement, has survived in 'ivory tower' mode, to the extent that people doing what I always regarded as 'real OR', ie addressing and structuring real-world problems and coming up with (perhaps fuzzy) quantitative 'what-if' analyses as an aid to their solution, taking into account the human dimension, have gone off and done this without the OR label.

I have made the Forum Report available in the hypertext.

The Irish Fishing Industry

Energy Policy

The memorandum outlined the dangers involved in nuclear power production, leaning mostly on the Brown's Ferry experience in the USA. It noted the aspirations of the physicists to produce fusion energy, but set this aside as being long-term (the date post-2000 was suggested!). It then went on to develop a strategy for conserving fossil fuels, while various forms of solar energy were developed to the extent of becoming economic. A key concept in the conservation plan was the development of the gas grid to feed a multiplicity of small local combined heat and power systems, rather than to convert the Kinsale gas to electricity in a large generator, in a location where the waste heat would have to be thrown away. Proposals for a nodalised system of public transport were also outlined.

A copy of this memorandum, dated May 1975, is available in the hypertext.

The October 1973 Moscow Peace Conference

I did however have some correspondence after the conference with like-minded people with whom I had exchanged addresses. This networking at conference is usually the way things happen, rather than actual documents coming out.

I had recently completed the preliminary analysis of the 1971 Census which gave for the first time a head-count of people having qualifications in science and engineering. This was subsequently published: An Approach to National Manpower Planning in Science and Technology, Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, Vol XXIII Part II, p21. The completed paper was delivered on January 9 1975 by RJ, co-authored with Genevieve Franklin.

It was evident that there was a reserve of qualified manpower available in Ireland, and that this tended to be exported to the already-rich core of the post-imperial world. I was then also building up the TCD MSc programme in Statistics and Operations Research, and we had experience of practical techno-economic development work with graduates from various scientific disciplines.

Some of the TCD projects on which we were working seemed to me to be models relevant to the development economics of the 'third world'. There would perhaps be scope for an internationally-funded development agency to locate in Ireland, and/or in one or more other European 'fringe' countries, for the purpose of training a cadre of graduates from third-world countries in techno-economic analysis relevant to their development programmes, with emphasis on a co-operative approach to adding value to to products of primary producers.

I attempted to develop a correspondence with various people I had met at the conference who were concerned to influence the fate of any 'peace dividend' which might emerge as a result of the 'detente' process in the direction of suitably located postgraduate programmes addressing the development economics environment. Regrettably this did not succeed. This particular did not enable the necessary related networking to develop.

I was attempting to use the 'international movement', in the form it had assumed under Soviet domination, as a vehicle for bottom-up networking among people who were prepared to adopt a democratic, bottom-up approach to the transfer of technologies relevant to the development-economics of the third world. I was, perhaps, attempting to build on a development philosophy which I had earlier encountered peripherally at an Irish Management Institute conference in Killarney: that of ('small is beautiful') Schumacher, who had addressed the conference but had been totally sidelined, to the extent that I had found myself unable to report on him in the 'innovation' stream of my Irish Times column, in which I evaluated the event critically. I did however spend some time with him at the conference, and we exchanged ideas.

I wrote at some length about the Moscow conference in the 'third world' stream of my Irish Times column at the time.

Anaerobic Digestion

This generated an extensive correspondence, and several outline proposals. There was also a visit to the Rowett Research Institute near Aberdeen, where there existed a pilot plant on quite a large scale, enabling the productivity to be quantified. Several firms of engineers were in touch, and we had some talk with the Lough Egish co-op in Co Monaghan, which among other things operated a cold store, and was geographically close to the border pig-rearing region.

The economics of intensive pig-farming in places like Cavan and Monaghan I gather is dependent on access to cross-border supplies of pig-feed, for which the price is favourable, being dominated by scale effects in the UK market. Disposal of the slurry however constitutes an ongoing problem; it has caused serious pollution in some of the Cavan lakes. In all-Ireland economic terms, it would make more sense to locate pigs near to the source of feeding barley, in the south-east. This is another example of an economic anomaly resulting from Partition.

What we had in mind was to power a cold-store using a gas engine running on the methane, and use the waste heat from the gas engine, as well as the waste heat put out by the cold-store heat pump, to warm the slurry in the digester, thus speeding the process, and making the investment in the slurry vessel and handling equipment more productive. Despite the favourable techno-economic analysis, we never got to try this out, due to the conflicting locations of existing pig slurry sources and cold stores. No firm or agency, alas, was prepared to invest.

The concept remains sound, and is on the agenda in the context of future trends towards sustainable agriculture with related sustainable industry. The key is the intelligent recovery of waste heat, which in this case is just right for warming the slurry gently to the preferred temperature for biological processes to take place, about 37 degrees C.

It will perhaps eventually become a reality when Irish farmers come around to re-invent the large-scale managed multi-enterprise commercial agribusiness estate, on the scale of a few 1000s of acres. Such an estate would support various added-value activities, cold storage being one, pig-rearing being another, based on feed grown locally. Such an estate could be organised 'from the bottom up' by a group of say 100 or more individual farmers agreeing to act as a managed working production co-operative, electing a committee, and employing a manager. For a time, Lough Egish Co-op in Monaghan, under the leadership of Brian Daly, was beginning to move in this direction. Unfortunately he died prematurely. I attended his funeral.

Techno-Economic Modelling

In it I outline at some length my 'temperature-entropy' approach to the analysis of the management of a firm in an environment, and I attempt to apply some of the concepts to the management of the innovation process, and the interaction between firms and the third-level education system. There was emphasis on the human, organisational and political aspects of the process.

I make available this Technology Ireland January 1978 paper Technology and the Economy as Interacting Systems in full in the supportive hypertext. It constitutes an outline of the essentials of the techno-economic modelling philosophy which had evolved over the previous 15 years or so, and interfaces it with the socio-political domains.

Biomass Systems Modelling

A team consisting basically of Robert Friel, Alasdair Mullarney and the present writer, supported by Trevor Gibbons and Aoileann Nic Gearailt, came up with serviceable 'conversational mode' analytical system enabling the evaluation of a range of 'what if' option. This ran on a dedicated mini-computer.

We picked up various bits of quantitative evidence from various quarters, including the US Department of Energy (whose conference in Boulder Colorado we attended), and integrated them into a credibly structured system, describing the harvesting of coppiced hardwood, on specified growth-cycles, using dedicated equipment with estimated cost-parameters, macerating it into chips or chunks, subject to air-drying under specified climatic conditions, and so on. The output was break-even price of land for specified DCF and oil price escalation assumptions.

We reported on this project at the 1980 Limerick conference of the Operations Research Society of Ireland, and the paper is available in the hypertext. Regrettably the system was not taken on board for ongoing utilisation by the State energy policy people, as they lost interest in the biomass sector as the price of oil again declined.

The modelling approach was actually quite an interesting development of the earlier work that had been done for Bunclody on flax, involving as it did the integration of the costing of moving of machinery in support of a process subject to weather factors predictable statistically.

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 1999