The University of Leeds is identified worldwide with computerised scheduling of public transport and crew, and Tony Wren is its acknowledged progenitor. Earlier this year, Universities UK published a list of the top 100 world-changing discoveries, innovations and research projects to come out of the UK universities in the last 50 years: two of these were in Computer Science. One was the development of the world's first computer [Manchester], and the other was software developed by Tony Wren.
Tony Wren was the author of a method and its software implementation which produced, in Leeds, the world's very first computerised train schedule in 1963. The software was first used by British Rail to allocate locomotives to freight trains on the North London Line, the very efficient algorithms saving three locomotives. It has since been applied to many thousand rail and bus scheduling problems, enabling enormous cost savings. This development has spawned a global industry, whose current participants would look to Tony as the founder.
Following the very early contribution, Tony went on to produce many further pioneering systems; these included scheduling London Transport's operations in 1984 - the largest UK application at the time, and more recently beating off commercial competition to build schedules for the country's largest bus operator (First Group). The academic worth of his and his group's research has been recognised by the award of some 18 research council grants since 1975 and, together with commercial and other sources, allowed the funding of over 125 person-years of research.
It is important to understand the depth of Tony's contribution. These problems are not just large incarnations of simple computational issues: they are inherently complex (NP-hard). Earlier systems were literally "pen and paper", and Tony's contribution was to succeed with mathematical programming approaches, and to persuade the customer of their value and validity when they had little prospect of understanding the theory. This was reinforced by annual workshops and CPD events which ran for 20 years, and played a vital part in raising awareness of IT in the then fragmented UK bus industry. Tony was also instrumental in instituting a triennial international conference (the tenth of which took place in Leeds in July 2006) drawing together academic researchers, consultants and practitioners. He was thus a pioneer of what we now call Knowledge Transfer. The public impact of Tony's work is clear: almost every bus, train, boat or plane we catch has been scheduled by computer, as have its attendant staff. In many cases, the software was developed by Tony's own team.
Tony himself, only semi-facetiously, records one of his greatest triumphs as an appearance on Channel 4's "The Big Breakfast", following a series of interviews on local and national radio. This confirms the very wide impact of a lifetime's work.