On Wednesday 26 March the ORSSA SIG on the history of OR in South Africa had the honour to hear from another Honorary Life Member of the Society namely Hans Ittmann. After almost forty years at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Hans retired at the end of 2011 as Executive Director of the CSIR Built Environment but still acts as an associate researcher with the Institute for Transport and Logistics Studies (Africa), at the University of Johannesburg. Hans joined ORSSA in 1973 after which he was a regular presenter at ORSSA conferences for almost 50 years. He served in various capacities locally and internationally, including as ORSSA President in 1987 and again from 2001 to 2003. He is recognised as a Fellow of the International Federation of Operations Research Societies.

After graduating with a BMil (BSc) from the Military Academy, Saldanha in 1970, Hans’ aeronautics lecturer, Thys de Vries (ORSSA President in 1986), encouraged him in 1972 to start studying operations research (OR) at UNISA under Jos Grobbelaar (founding member of ORSSA). In 1973 Jos referred Hans to the CSIR where Hans joined the National Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences (NRIMS) and shared an office with Theo Stewart (ORSSA President in 1978). Weekly multidisciplinary work discussions proved invaluable to learn, gain know-how and to grow. Ten years later in 1983 the multidisciplinary and participative nature of OR was confirmed at the first and only seminar presented by the OR group at the CSIR under the theme of interactive decision analysis and modelling.

When Hans joined the CSIR, the South African Defence Force (SADF) funded many projects such as Project Sening to train senior officers. Initially a manual war game was conducted on an annual basis, but with the advent of computers the game was gradually computerised to run on a dedicated minicomputer and eventually the SADF established their own War Gaming Centre. Other projects included a simulation model developed in Fortran to compare different types of strike aircraft under operational conditions, a simulation model for long-term planning in the South African Air Force, forecasting terrorist attacks based on a priori probabilities, cryptology, and the optimisation of clothing production and distribution in prisons.

Non-military projects included a large project for the South African Maize Board which ran from 1962 to 1988. A transportation problem was formulated as a goal programming problem to calculate equitable costs for each of two or more mills at the same location. Another example involved the development of DSS in collaboration with the Leather Industries Research Institute to optimise shoe component layout using a heuristics approach. Yet another example was done in collaboration with the Sea Fisheries Institute to protect fish resources against overexploitation while optimising the utilisation of available resources. Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition method was one of the approaches applied to address this very large linear programming (LP) model. A production planning system was developed for the South African Breweries, work was done as part of the commission of the new Groote Schuur hospital, an LP model was developed to allocate children to schools, and an interactive system was developed for geologists to determine where key blocks will form due to fault lines in geological structures. For more information, please visit https://www.youtube.com/@orssa/featured.

From 1982 to 1986 major changes occurred at the CSIR, mainly due to reduced government funding. The NRIMS was dissolved and the OR group no longer had a natural home. However, the OR group survived by being pragmatic and practice orientated and essentially became a “consulting group” which endeavoured to tackle complex and difficult projects such as the above. Simultaneously, they did specialist shorter-term projects to maintain financial viability.

Thanks Hans, for helping OR practitioners to learn, gain know-how and to grow by sharing your achievements and challenges accumulated over many years. Though ORSSA cannot be everything to everyone, mentors like you guide us to remain a dynamic and innovative community dedicated to the promotion of better decision making in practice, through participative multidisciplinary teams, and with a generous amount of pragmatism.