ISOLDE before there was ISOLDE I

By Nigel Waters

How did ISOLDE come about, what was the Genesis? How did a bunch of Geographers who were interested in optimizing location problems get together with a bunch of operations researchers who were also interested in location problems and optimization?

This short paper will seek to answer these two questions and describe and explain the origins of ISOLDE before the first ISOLDE Conference, ISOLDE I, took place in Banff in 1978.

In 1975, I joined the Department of Geography at the University of Calgary (UofC) as an Assistant Professor. I was still working on my PhD dissertation at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario (now Western University) on fire station locations, where I was most fortunate to have Michael Goodchild as my supervisor. Mike was already a rising star in using computer-based algorithms to solve locational/geographical problems.  

I wanted to continue working on fire station location problems in Calgary and so in 1976, I went to see the Fire Chief, Derek Jackson, and he told me that he had just talked to Jonathan Halpern, from UofC’s Business School. Jackson said that he would support a research project but he wanted the two of us to work together. So, I went to see Jonathan and the two of us began working together with a team that included personnel from the Fire Department and from the City of Calgary. We had a grant from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities to support the research. The research was completed three years later. I still have a copy of the bound, final report, The Analysis of Response Operations of a Municipal Fire Department to which we all contributed. Sometime during our conversations, Jonathan said that he would like to establish a residential-type conference that would last one week and would include cutting-edge research on location problems. Jonathan obviously wanted to invite leading researchers from the OR academic community and I wanted to invite leading researchers from academic geographers working on location problems.  I suggested that the best person to do the latter would be my PhD supervisor, Mike Goodchild.

There were about 42 papers presented at ISOLDE I 1978. Depending on how you define a “geographer” about 13 papers were presented by the 21 geographers who authored or co-authored a paper. So, geographers contributed to about a third of the papers. The rest were by what we might describe as leaders in the operations research area and hence the choice of journals such as the European Journal of Operational Research to present special issues of ISOLDE Conference papers.

I have always believed that had I not talked to Fire Chief Derek Jackson and subsequently begun collaborating with Jonathan Halpern on the research project that produced the final report, Analysis of Response Operations of a Municipal Fire Department, the format of ISOLDE as a collaboration between geographers and OR researchers (and subsequently a great many cognate fields) would not have happened. The result instead would have been just another OR conference focused on location analysis.

I did not present at ISOLDE I, but I did get to meet my new University of Calgary colleague, Chan Wirasinghe, from UofC’s Civil Engineering Department. Chan had given the penultimate ISOLDE I presentation. Many previous presenters had announced how fast their algorithms had solved p-median and related problems. Details of how many seconds it took to solve how large a problem were common. Chan, tongue-in-cheek, announced that it had taken him 20 minutes --- to solve a problem on a hand calculator.

Subsequently, Chan and I contributed presentations to the ISOLDE II and ISOLDE III Conferences in Skodsborg for ISOLDE II and Boston and Martha’s Vineyard, for ISOLDE III. For some odd reason the ISOLDE II program pdf lists only my name and the rather odd title of “Hybrid Location Models”. The research that I presented was subsequently published in one of the special issues of the European Journal of Operational Research devoted to the ISOLDE Conference: Wirasinghe, S.C. and Waters, N.M., 1983, An approximate procedure for determining the number, capacities and locations of solid waste transfer-stations in an urban region. European Journal of Operational Research, 12(1), pp.105-111. If we were to count the number of “Geographers” presenting at ISOLDE II, it was probably less than ISOLDE I perhaps more like a quarter. But geographers were prominent enough that the OR delegates, at an evening social, had fun testing our geographical knowledge with a “pop quiz” with arcane knowledge such as “What is the most easterly point in the United States”. The answer is the Aleutian Islands and NOT any part of the state of Maine….

ISOLDE III was primarily organized by two geographers, especially the local events: Jeff Osleeb and Sam Ratick who also presented a paper. I, again, presented a paper that represented my joint work with Chan: “Location of Bus Garages”. This paper was subsequently published in the Journal of Advanced Transportation (NM Waters,  SC Wirasinghe, A Babalola, KED Marion – Location of Bus Garages, Journal of Advanced Transportation, 1986, vol. 20 (#2), 133-150).

Many geographers, myself included, subsequently turned to GIS Conferences and published in GIS Journals. Also, they had to satisfy other demands on their time. Chan became a highly successful Dean of the University of Calgary’s School of Engineering. In 1999, I became the Founding Director of the University of Calgary’s Masters in Geographic Information Systems (MGIS) Program, arguably the first degree program with this designation and which in its first five years took in students from 21 different countries.

However, in 2008, I again presented at an ISOLDE Conference. ISOLDE XI, the 11^th ISOLDE, of course, was held exactly 30 years after the first and it was organized by Richard Church and his colleagues in the Geography Department, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which also included Mike Goodchild who had moved there from the University of Western Ontario. I haven’t done a name count but there were, as might be expected many more geographers at this ISOLDE than there had been at some earlier ISOLDE Conferences. I was delighted to see that a number of the papers by participants from Santa Barbara used the “London Dataset” that I had collected for my PhD thesis on fire station location (the work that had originally precipitated my meeting with Derek Jackson and subsequently Jonathan Halpern). The London (Ontario) Dataset with 150 nodes was far more challenging than the more famous Teitz and Bart dataset (with 25 destination nodes) that had been used to test algorithms in earlier decades (Teitz, M.B. and Bart, P., 1968. Heuristic methods for estimating the generalized vertex median of a weighted graph. Operations research, 16(5), pp.955-961.).

The research that I presented at ISOLDE XI, was a collaboration with one of my MGIS students: Transportation for Seniors; Planning a Senior Shuttle Service with GIS. I met Monica Gentili at ISOLDE XI, she had been working with Pitu Mirchandani who, of course, had presented at ISOLDE I in 1978. Monica and I subsequently collaborated on research projects when I was the Director of the GIS Center of Excellence at George Mason University (2007-2014) and published an extension of the work at ISOLDE XI with another of my PhD students, Dennis Nicholas (Gentili, M., Waters, N., Tubbsum, M.I. and Nicholas, D.E., 2019. Volunteered Geographic Service: Planning a Senior Shuttle Service Using GIS and OR. In Analytics, Operations, and Strategic Decision Making in the Public Sector (pp. 1-19). IGI Global Scientific Publishing.)

I look forward to ISOLDE XVII in 2026 and wonder how many geographers will be there?