Dick Conway honored for his key computer simulation work

Conway

By Linda Myers

Dick Conway, a founder of Cornell's computer science department and chaired professor emeritus at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, has been honored by Management Science for his early, seminal research in computer simulation. The pre-eminent journal in its field, Management Science is published by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

The journal's editor-in-chief, Wallace Hopp, the Breed University Professor at Northwestern University, described Conway's findings as "visionary" and said that they "established the research agenda for the simulation field for decades."

Computer simulation seeks to model such problems as inefficiency in a manufacturing facility's supply chain, study what's not working well and come up with a systematic way to improve the operation, said Hopp. "In the '60s, Dick identified what problems simulation had to solve. He laid them out neatly. People in the field followed his road map for decades."

An article in the July 2004 issue of Management Science by Barry Nelson, a professor at Northwestern University, noted that a 1959 paper co-authored by Conway (with Cornell researchers William Maxwell and B.M. Johnson) and a second paper authored by Conway alone in 1963 "described a number of simulation problems that continue to occupy researchers to this day." The article, which was written as part of a series marking the journal's 50th anniversary this year, traced the impact of the two papers on the work of other researchers, notably the authors of eight award-winning papers published in Management Science.

"Those were exciting times," said Maxwell, now an emeritus professor, of his early work with Conway. He also mentioned a textbook the two co-authored with L. Miller, Theory of Scheduling (1967), their development of the XCELL Factory Modeling System with Steve Worona and Johnson School Professor John McClain, Conway's PL/C compiler work in the 1970s and Programming for Poets, a Conway publication written for four different programming languages (1978), as indicative of Conway's breadth of interests.

Hopp also called Conway's later work on scheduling "extremely influential. I looked up to Dick as a real role model. He did good science, rigorously modeled, with relevant real-world solutions."

And Robert Constable, Cornell dean for Computing and Information Science and a former colleague of Conway's, said, "Dick's [scheduling] software was successful because of his keen insight into how things really work."

Conway, BME '54, Ph.D. '58, Cornell, began his academic career as a faculty member in operations research and industrial engineering at Cornell. He helped found the computer science department in 1965 and was acting chair in 1978-79 and 1983-84. In 1966-68, he was director of Cornell Computer Services, a precursor to Cornell Information Technologies (CIT). Conway left the College of Engineering to join the faculty of the Johnson School in 1984, becoming the first Emerson Electric Company Professor of Manufacturing Management, in 1989. He was instrumental in launching the Semester in Manufacturing, a course that was the model for other immersion courses at the Johnson School. He became emeritus in 1999 but continued to teach in the school's executive MBA program. The founder of C-WAY Systems, a company spun off his research on scheduling, Conway counted among his clients Hewlett Packard and General Electric. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering 1992 for his contributions.