Learning How to Plan Production, Inventories, and Work Force

T he HMMS research team of Holt, Modigliani, Muth, and Simon at Carnegie Tech's new Graduate School of Industrial Administration set out in the early 1950s to develop quantitative and computerized decision methods for business and industry. Bill Cooper had initiated, with Air Force support, the project-Planning and Control of Industrial Operations-and the Office of Naval Research extended support for the new team. The interests and backgrounds of the team members in "industrial operations" were quite varied. Charley Holt was interested in observing close up what business managers were doing with their inventories that contributed so much to the instability of the national economy. Franco Modigliani had worked on production smoothing and could be seduced by any interesting research problem. Jack Muth, with an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering, was studying for a Ph.D. in economics and was interested in combining both fields. Herb Simon was dedicated to determining how managers actually made decisions in organizations and in modeling their behavior.