Need to Do Planning under Uncertainty and the Possibility of Using Parallel Processors for this Procedure

摘要

From the viewpoint of the general welfare and national security, the greater our ability to understand and come to grips with complexity the better, for our world is faced with dangerous dynamic forces at work: growing population, growing aspirations, decreasing resources base, growing gap between rich and poor countries, global climactic changes, starvation, and unanticipated political events that destabilize whole economics. A strong case can be made that a good part of the world's woes could have been avoided if decision makers had assembled the facts and heeded them about how these dangerous forces can reinforce one another spreading shortage, poverity, and starvation in their wake. There is a possibility that powerful analytical and computational tools such as large-scale mathematical programming could play in providing essential information to planners that will help them avoid the kinds of poor decisions made in the past. In particular, parallel processors may make it possible to come to better grips with the fundamental problems of planning, scheduling, design, and control of complex systems such as the economy, and ecological system, an industrial enterprise, an energy system, water-resource systems, military models for planning-and-control, decisions about investment, innovation, employment, and health-delivery systems. (Author)