Optimization optimization everywhere: an IT and OM bonanza

I am back in India. I still have a bunch of general observations from my trip, but I think I should focus on some management observations for a change!

Today, I will write about how one of the world's leading airlines became that way - by optimizing EVERYTHING. This airline (which I will not name) has spent a lot of time and effort and money to create, buy and customize software to mathematically optimize every aspect of its business.

When we were studying to be engineers, we would hear about the legendary Narendra Karmarkar and the Karmarkar's algorithm, which could solve very large linear programming problems that were till then practically unsolvable. Karmarkar used to work at the famous AT&T Bell Labs. They would charge airlines a lot of money for letting them run their flight scheduling problems on Karmarkar's algorithm.

But it's not just flights and planes that need scheduling, but also crews, food services, fuel services, maintenance operations and so on. The more of these things you can optimize, the better off you are.

At the airline I mentioned, crew scheduling is now so sophisticated that the crew members can even give their personal preferences and these are taken into account! "We want our crew members to be always smiling, and perhaps our optimization can help in that", a Vice President of IT at the airline told me.

Then there is revenue management optimization, where you price the ticket differently depending on whether it is a one-way or a round-trip, the number of days in the trip, whether the trip includes a weekend, when the ticket is bought, the amount that is refunded if the ticket is canceled, and so on. You want to make as much money as possible from each passenger but not annoy him or her! By doing a better job of optimizing this pricing, you can make or lose a lot of money.

This sort of opportunity is going to be very much needed in India. While industry was booming, everyone focused on growth at any cost. Now that the limits to growth have been demonstrated, we are going to see a lot more focus on squeezing the most out of current operations.

The IT and OM students can surely capitalize on this!


[Photo by Boeing - www.boeing.co.in]

Drugs on the streets of Frankfurt

Some months ago as I ate at a roadside cafe in Frankfurt, two young men came and sat at the next table. They were probably British, tall and strong and fit. They wore stylish black T shirts and high quality jeans. Their cheerful demeanor contrasted with the dark messages on their T shirts - pictures of skeletons and words of death and despair.

Across the road, I saw a young blond girl - looking like Steffi Graf in her prime - come and sit down on the pavement with her back against a wall. She was dressed in sky blue denim and the evening sun lit her with a nice light. She brought out a brown paper bag and I could vaguely make out that she was doing something with her arm. When I looked a few minutes later, her body had slumped forward. Soon she was flat on the dirty pavement.

I could not help but note the irony - while some of us play at being "grown up" with dark images and dark words and dark music, others who are innocent and young lose the bright spark of their youth to the darkness of drugs. There was no great insight here - just oodles of irony.

Frankfurt has its dark side. There are a few streets where the pavement is littered with used needles and addicts walk around aimlessly. The whole place stinks of urine. Some of the drug users are still young and relatively healthy. Others are older, their eyes sunken and their skin blotchy.

Sometimes there are groups of addicts who are quite aggressive in asking for money. Walking past them is for me one of the scariest things in the world, because you can see in their empty eyes that they could stab you with a knife or a needle and not even realize what they had done. I don't think I have felt fear like that in any other situation.

I normally prefer that individual freedoms are not circumscribed by government regulations and I usually believe in giving the individual the right to experiment, but with drugs the answer is not that obvious. Many drugs are too highly addictive to expect a human being to be able to try them and yet resist them.

From the relaxed regulations of the Netherlands which focus on treating the individual, to the harsh, death penalty approach of countries like Indonesia and Singapore (which runs the risk of executing unwitting carriers of drugs), this is one battle waged across the world without any clear formula of success.

Hooray for Chandrayaan!

When we were studying at IIT, ISRO's space launches would typically end up in the Bay of Bengal instead. We used to discuss what went wrong (one of them failed due to a floating point error in the software, if I remember right) but overall I used to see the failures as a symbol of how India's government-sponsored projects just never succeed. Even today, one is bewildered at the glacially slow progress and huge cost overruns in the Light Combat Aircraft, Arjun Main Battle Tank and Light Combat Helicopter projects, for example.

But in missile and space technology, India seems to have come a long way. And Chandrayaan's discovery of water on the moon, however fortuitous, is a great story! I was lucky enough to see it while in Germany, on US television. It was also interesting to note that while the sensor Chandrayaan used had been given by NASA, CNN directed the majority of the coverage to Chandrayaan and the Indian connection rather than to that piece of equipment. It was another step forward in the building of the country's brand image.

"What one man can do, another can do" - which, by the way, appears to come from ancient Latin: "ILLUD AB HOMINE FACTUM AB ALTERO FIERI POTEST"!

Taxi drivers from around the world

In response to one of my recent posts about Swedes, Nikhil Sukhlecha (Fall 2009) wrote: "Reading the article i realised that every country has its own ettiquetes which have positives as well as negatives but a country develops its image by capitalizing on its positive side and negating the negative side to least." (sic) I liked this insightful comment and it led to this post on taxi drivers.

When you get into a cab in the US or in most European countries, you are likely to have a driver who has immigrated from another nation. This leads to a lot of interesting hours, interesting discussions, and interesting insights. Let me start with a few anecdotes from this visit and then go back to some previous interesting cab rides.


When I landed in Stockholm this week, the driver's name tag read "Nasser" and he looked Egyptian but I did not talk to him as I was very tired. Still, I thought of the famous people with that name.

The next day, I had a taxi driver whose name was "Halwaaei Esmail Esse". I asked him where he was from and he said Iran. I said I had guessed he was not Arabic because Arabs tend to write "Ismail". He said, yes, "Arabs write it with an 'I' as they pronounce it 'ISHHmaayil'." Thus we got talking about how close the Iranian language is to Hindi because of the connection via Urdu, and how even the beautiful Taj Mahal has Persian influence. Then I asked him what "Halwaaei" meant. He said, "Halwaa is a sweet thing that we eat". I laughed and said, "We have halwaa too - I grew up having halwaa on every Sunday morning! And for us a halwaaei is a sweetmaker." This was news to him and we talked some more. We talked about the meaningless Iraq-Iran war in which a million people (yes, million) people were killed and about the US-Iraq wars and about the theological hardliners in Iran. "I think man should stop making weapons", he said, and he must have suffered more than many of us on account of these tools of death. I said, "I also think one must often meet people from other countries. Then one realizes we are all the same!"

In Frankfurt, I once sat in a cab driven by an Afghan immigrant. I came to know this young Afghan through a German friend who had grown up as a child in Afghanistan. The Afghan's name was Enayat, meaning mercy in his language. Enayat is also an Urdu word, of course! He talked about the two main languages of Afghanistan - Dari and Pashto. Dari is like Persian, but even Pashto has a lot of commonality with Hindi (with words like khwaish, kitaab, kitaabkhaanaa, khoshqhalaa (happy), kaafi, imteqhaan, intezaar etc.) He also added that Enayat was in fact also a part of a common Arabic name, "Enayatollah" - the mercy of God!!

Whether we like it or not, the world is a small place and changes seamlessly, from Iran to Afghanistan, to Pakistan, to India, to Sri Lanka and beyond, to Thailand and Indonesia and on and on!

Last evening I was driven to the Stockholm Arlanda airport by a driver with the last name "Bemmet". He was from Eritrea. He talked of the decades-old struggle for independence from Ethiopia which culminated in independence in the 90s, the beauty and safety of the Italian-built capital Asmara, and of how the Eritrean military dictatorship enjoys the support of its people at least for now. (We also talked about how power corrupts, and how absolute power corrupts absolutely!) He said that there are many Indians in his country involved in teaching and helping build the country. This is our silent diplomatic corps! I once had a Nigerian taxi driver who said the same thing about Indian teachers and educators in Nigeria.

Some months ago, I had a Kurdish Iranian driver in the German city of Freiburg. I told him about how I had been growing up in Iraqi Kurdistan in the early 80s, when Saddam still ruled Iraq and the Kurds were in open rebellion. We talked of Iraqi Kurdistan now being connected by flights to Frankfurt and how it was booming. It was like meeting someone from my own village!

I often get to sit in cabs driven by Pakistanis. We talk of how my mother was born in Lahore (sometimes they tell of how their parents were born in what is now India) and of how we are almost one people. The Pakistanis are usually very complimentary on how India has pulled itself up in the last decade or so, mainly on the strength of IT and BPO. But once in a while I meet a Pakistani - very infrequently - who doesn't really want to talk. Most are very friendly and very welcoming.

Once I sat in a New York City cab driven by a Sardarji who had left India after the 1984 Sikh riots. I could feel his pain and his bitterness, even a decade later. My mind went back in time to how there used to be a taxi stand run by some Sikhs just outside the South Delhi colony where we lived, which I would pass every evening on the way to the Mother Dairy milk booth. When sometimes I was late making my trip, I remember how I would feel secure once more when I would reach the taxi stand and see those strong cheerful Sikhs. Later in those dark days in 1984, when I saw from our windows thin columns of smoke rising from the horizon, I did not know that some of the fires below contained the bodies of those friendly Sikhs. I could not talk normally to my Sikh friends for some years afterwards.

It's not always that one finds commonality with the taxi driver. I was being driven by an Indian in New York City right after the World Trade Center bombings. No matter how much one may hate historical US foreign policy, the sheer human tragedy of those bombings hung over every street like a cloud of gloom and unspeakable despair. Mumbai must have felt like that after the terror attacks last year. But the taxi driver had other thoughts and said of his host country, "Serves them right, they had it coming!" I felt like asking him to go back to India if he felt so strongly about this... and to stop the cab and let me get off.

I can go on and on. It's a revelation to meet these people around the world, still in tenuous touch with their home countries, still drawn to the lands of their birth but unable to do more than visit once in a few years. Most are very nice and friendly to an Indian.

I try my best to make a connection and spread some goodwill because in this dangerous tinderbox world, we all need all the goodwill we can get.

Intelligent transport systems

I attended the Intelligent Transport Systems trade fair at Stockholm today and was amazed to see the new technologies being developed by dozens of innovative companies, big and small.

Most interesting for me was the technology that lets you analyze videos of traffic. The camera feed is processed using feature extraction and image recognition techniques to read license plate numbers and even find out the type and color of the car! It is also possible to find out the speed and direction of the car. Therefore you just have to install cameras at strategic points in the city and you will not need to set up police checkposts! If you are looking for a blue Wagon R, say, that was involved in a robbery at location A, you will be able to pretty much track in real time its progress through the city, even if the crooks change the number plates! Imagine the data being delivered to policemen on their mobile phones by SMS, in real time. The technology exists!

Now THAT is truly game changing! I love it.