Over the past several years, a group of leading thinkers from around the world have come together to identify some grand challenges for engineering (under the auspices of the NAE). These challenges, broadly classified under the themes of Sustainability, Security, Human Health, and the Joy of Living, identify a few key areas with the potential to reinvent our way of life. The role of the proposed Task Force is to identify new operations research (OR) directions that will enable the NAE Grand Challenge-domains to leverage new OR knowledge into their research. In this sense, the proposed effort will identify OR challenges with an eye towards serving as a catalyst for the NAE Grand Challenges.
The Task Force will convene three meetings. The first one will be focused on distilling the NAE challenges into drivers for OR research. Given the multi-disciplinary nature of OR, it is expected that certain broad requirements for OR research will emerge during presentations, and deliberations of the task force. The second meeting will be focused on in-depth statements of OR challenges, which if met by the OR community, will allow the NAE challenges to make progress, and even engage the OR community in the quest for solutions to some of the more pressing problems facing the engineering world. Finally, at a third meeting feedback from a panel of referees will be incorporated into the preparation of a final report that is expected to be widely disseminated in the OR community and have broad impact in shaping future research directions.
A panel of thought-leaders convened by the NAE (and facilitated by NSF) unveiled its vision of the Engineering Grand Challenges in 2008. Over the past several years, this report has invited (and received) feedback from international leaders and professional organizations, including the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). As part of the feedback, INFORMS prepared a report on the role that the Operations Research (OR) community was likely to play within the context of the challenges. As predicted, the OR community has been active in many of the thematic areas of the NAE Grand Challenges via publications in topical research areas of our flagship journals, joint major conferences (e.g., the joint INFORMS-Medical Decision-Making Conference in Phoenix 2012), and several thematic conferences on the Smart Grid, Homeland and Cyber Security, and others. Because OR brings together a combination of methodologies from computing, mathematical, and economic sciences, OR tools provide an integrated platform for the engineering grand challenges of today. Among its successes, we mention the Internet, where OR tools (such as shadow prices, Lagragian decomposition etc.) and the Computer Science emphasis on building distributed systems, have created a stable, ubiquitous resource which has changed everything from commerce to educaton and entertainment. Our report, prepared under funding from NSF, suggests that such successes may be achieved in areas of the NAE challenges as summarized below. Energy and Sustainability. Integration of renewable resources by introducing new powerful tools (e.g. stochastic optimization) for modeling intermittent resources like wind and solar. Homeland and Cyber-Security. Implementation of Multi-agent con-cooperative and adversarial games to thwart threats from various sources. Human Health. Introduction new treatment planning methods for challenging diseases like cancer, as well as cost-control methods using OR models, while ensuring high quiality patient services. Joy of Living. Formalizing ways to improve research and education so that common tools can be developed for improved and cost-effective learning and discovery. In order to accomplish these goals, the report recommends that NSF undertake a new nationwide center to promote Multidisciplinary Operations Research and Engineering (MORE). Such a center would facilitate exchanges between domain researchers (e.g. those studying nano-technology for solar cells) and OR modelers (who would provide the expertise to model and optimize efficiency of solar cells, for example). Such collaborative research would catalyze improvements of many orders of magnitude over current hit-and-miss experiments, designed through trial-and-error.
