IPB Mathematics Professor: 80 Percent of World Data is Unstructured

Like the industrial revolution that has reached the era of industrial revolution 4.0, operations research and management science (OR/MS) are also changing according to the times. After successfully implemented in the field of military during World War II, OR/MS then widely applied in the civil field.

In 1965-1975, OR/MS applied in the form of Management Information Systems, 1975-1990 applied in the field of Decision Support Systems, 1990-2000 applied in the field of Business Intelligence and in 2000 until now entering the Age of Analytic stage.

"With the strong support of the computational technology revolution, OR/MS has become a mathematically rooted field of science, and the OR/MS has grown to include many specific models and their use spans many areas such as engineering, economics, agriculture, health, political science, social, sports and even art. While at the present day are in the field of e-business, cloud computing and internet-based supply chain management and online commerce, "Prof.Dr. Toni Bakhtiar, S.Si, M.Si, Professor of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Bogor Agricultural University (FMIPA IPB) when presenting his oration material in a pre-oratory press conference at IPB Baranang Siang Campus (22/3) .

An example of the use of OR/MS is the distribution of Raskin in Indonesia, namely the distribution of rice from Bulog warehouse as depot to the villages as a distribution point.

Apparently after modeling with OR/MS programming perspective, vehicle routing problem (VRP) problem, the result is very interesting. This system is applied to the distribution of Raskin in Ponorogo. Three models were identified: VRP with multiple depots and split delivery, VRP with multiple depots and multiple trips, and VRP with multiple depots, multiple trips and split delivery.

"Another example of successful implementation of the OR/MS model in distribution problems is UPS America, they can save 100 million miles and save 300 million US dollars, which has not calculated the fuel savings and the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions," he said.

Meanwhile, in the field of health modeling, it can be used for control of the spread of infectious diseases. The role of OR/MS is indispensable in the process of controlling the spread of disease and evaluation of the effectiveness of control policies taken.

From the results of modeling, education to change the behavior of susceptible and infected individuals to reduce direct contact with patients is effective in controlling the spread of cholera rather than education to change the behavior of infected individuals to the environment.

Now the OR/MS modeling enters the sixth period of analytic age. The era marked by the launch of Natural Language Toolkit in Python (2001), the birth of facebook (2004) and twitter (2006) and the development of NoSQL database (2007).

Data 2015, there are 204 million emails, 1.8 million like, 278 thousand tweets, 200 thousand photos, 2.4 million search and 100 million videos in one minute. Of the 262 million Indonesians, there are 132.7 million internet users, 106 million active in social media and 371.4 million mobile subscriptions.

"The role of OR/MS in decision making is challenging in the era of big data. The data available is in a very large volumes of new, complex, format, type and structure. Unstructured data such as text (facebook comments), blogs, documents, video, etc. meet 80 percent of digital space, the rest is traditional structured data (excel data, word etc), "he said.

According to him, OR/MS should be able to face a big challenges in this big data era where everything is demanded real time. Changing unstructured data into appropriate decisions should be OR/MS with new optimization techniques.

"Today's OR/MS should be able to turn data into the best decisions through enhancing competitive advantage, opening new business opportunities, and creating useful information.These data can be utilized in many areas such as marketing, healthcare, supply chain management and public services" he said. (TK)