Activity Analysis

When Koopmans joined the Cowles Commission in 1944, he had worked for two years as a statistician for the Combined Shipping Adjustment Board, a cooperative British-American group studying merchant shipping problems during World War II. He had made preliminary formulations of several models which later became known as versions of the transportation problem (see Koopmans 1947b; Koopmans and Reiter 1951), a problem of routing carriers to achieve a stated objective at lowest cost or to achieve as much as possible with resource limitations. He continued studying these models at Chicago and was visited early in 1947 by George Dantzig (see Dant- zig 1963, 1982) who was a mathematical advisor to the Comptroller of the United States Air Force and had, along with Marshall K. Wood and Murray A. Geisler, formulated models of Air Force procurement and deployment activities. The formal structures of the Koopmans and Air Force models were similar.