I’ve been doing a bit of research on the heads of BP. It seems that BP’s Executive Director, Byron Elmer Grote, earned a doctorate from Cornell University, back in 1981.
Grote’s dissertation (entitled “Exact and Heuristic Solution Procedures to the Dynamic Facility Location-Allocation Problem”) has some ironic aspects in view of the current BP oil spill. It’s about optimizing where to put things!
Quoting from the dissertation abstract:
Consideration of the dynamic facility location-allocation problem is necessary if total distribution costs are to be minimized over a planning horizon. This requires an evaluation of the three-way trade off between fixed, variable, and relocation costs and the determination of the proper timing of site openings and closings.
…
Comparisons are made on the basis of execution time, the number of network paths evaluated, and, for the heuristic procedures, deviation from optimality.
“Deviation from optimality,” indeed.