James R. Jackson

Production and Operations Management, Nov/Dec 2008

James R. Jackson (born May 16, 1924 in Los Angeles) served in the Air Force in meteorology during WWII and subsequently attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he earned an AB in 1946, an MA in 1950, and a Ph.D. (in mathematics) in 1952. He remained at UCLA in the Graduate School of Management for his entire career, with parttime appointments in engineering, mathematics, and biostatistics, and he retired in 1985.

He published several papers in mathematics journals based on his dissertation in pure mathematics, "Homotopy Groups of Abstract Function Spaces," but his interests turned to machine-shop scheduling and simulation by virtue of his association, starting in the spring of 1952, with the business school's Logistics Research Project, one of the early university research projects sponsored by the Office of Naval Research.

In late 1954, Jackson had an idea that was to be remarkably fruitful: to model a machine shop as an arbitrary open network of classical-type interacting queues: exogenous Poisson inputs, exponential service, and Markovian routing. He derived the unexpected result that the steady-state joint distribution of the number of jobs at the various machine groups had an unexpectedly simple product form in which each individual factor corresponded to the queue length of an isolated exponential queue with a Poisson arrival rate satisfying the equilibrium conditions for total system flows. This was surprising because it can be shown that, in general, the arrival processes at the machine groups are, in fact, not Poisson.

His work led to two seminal papers, "Networks of Waiting Lines" (Operations Research, August 1957) and the follow up "Jobshop-Like Queueing Systems" (Management Science, October 1963). Although this work stemmed from his contact with jobshops in and around the Los Angeles aircraft industry, it proved to be much more widely applicable in the design and analysis of computer, logistics, manufacturing, telecommunication, and other kinds of systems. Notably, this work provided a critically important foundation for Leonard Kleinrock's seminal work on packet-switching theory and data networks, which in turn provided much of the theoretical basis for the Internet.

The 2002 50th anniversary issue of Operations Research honored Jackson's 1957 paper, and in December 2004, Management Science republished his 1963 paper (with commentary) as one of the 10 most influential works in that journal's first 50 years. He also made important contributions to areas such as assembly line balancing, lot scheduling (e.g, among his well-known results is Jackson's Rule for minimizing maximum tardiness), and dynamic queuing disciplines.

In the late 1950s, he developed a computerized game to help management students understand the interactions of various major areas of a competitive business. Known initially as the "UCLA Executive Games," it was adopted at hundreds of schools, was the subject of a book coauthored with Richard Henshaw that went through five editions, and is still used instructionally four decades later.

A man of considerable administrative gifts, Jackson was the founding director of the Western Management Science Institute, an organized research unit of UCLA created under a large Ford Foundation grant from 1959 until 1963. He was also President-Elect of The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS), which later merged with the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) into what is now the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). However, due to illness, he was unable to serve his year as President.

In the 1970s and 1980s, he focused on educational program development at the master's level in UCLA's management school, pioneering innovations that draw more on group psychology than operations research. He was a key developer of the school's MBA program around 1970, serving as its director from 1974 through 1978, although his influence on the program remained visible for many years thereafter.

Beyond his brilliant professional career, Jackson has been for many years a serious model railroader. A scale steam train big enough to ride ran at his former home in Beverly Hills and now runs at his retirement residence in Tehachapi. The California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento houses his extensive collection of railroad prints and negatives. He is also an avid reader in such areas as evolution, neurology, scientific biography, and social history.