Contributors

Abstract

Roberto Baldacci (“ An Exact Algorithm for the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows ”) is a researcher in operations research at the Department of Electronics, Computer Science, and Systems (DEIS) of the University of Bologna, Italy. His major research interests are in the areas of transportation planning, logistics and distribution, and the solution of vehicle routing and scheduling problems over street networks. His research activities are in the theory and applications of mathematical programming including the design of new heuristic and exact methods for solving routing and location problems. Enrico Bartolini (“ An Exact Algorithm for the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows ”) holds a postdoctoral position at the University of Bologna. His research activity concerns the study and development of heuristic and exact algorithms for solving combinatorial optimization problems with applications in logistics and distribution systems, in particular network design problems and some generalizations of the vehicle routing problem. Saif Benjaafar (“ Optimal Control of an Assembly System with Multiple Stages and Multiple Demand Classes ”) is professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Minnesota, where he is also founding and current director of the Industrial & Systems Engineering Program, director of the Center for Supply Chain Research, and a faculty scholar with the Center for Transportation Studies. He was a Distinguished Senior Visiting Scientist at Honeywell Laboratories and a visiting professor at universities in France, Belgium, Hong Kong, China, and Singapore. His research is in the areas of supply chain management, service and manufacturing operations, and production and inventory systems, with a current focus on sustainability and environmental modeling. He serves on the editorial board of several journals including Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Naval Research Logistics, and IIE Transactions. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE). Dimitris Bertsimas (“ Performance Analysis of Queueing Networks via Robust Optimization ”) is the Boeing Professor of Operations Research and codirector of the Operations Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This research is part of his work in the last decade on robust optimization for optimization and performance analysis of stochastic systems. Atul Bhandari (“ Revenue Management with Bargaining ”) is manager of the Algorithms Team at SmartOps. He supervises the design and development of enterprise inventory optimization algorithms, supervises modeling and analysis support for sales and implementation efforts, and leads educational sessions. He earned a Ph.D. in operations research from the Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business. Sushil Bikhchandani (“ An Ascending Vickrey Auction for Selling Bases of a Matroid ”) is professor of decisions, operations, and technology management at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is interested in the economics of incentives and its application to auctions, market institutions, and social learning. J. Paul Brooks (“ Support Vector Machines with the Ramp Loss and the Hard Margin Loss ”) is an assistant professor of operations research in the Department of Statistical Sciences and Operations Research and a fellow of the Center for Study of Biological Complexity, Virginia Commonwealth University. He is currently secretary/treasurer of the INFORMS Section on Data Mining. His research interests include the design of optimization-based algorithms for data mining and their application to biomedical data. He is also interested in applications of optimization to models of cellular metabolism and network design problems. Sungyong Choi (“ A Multiproduct Risk-Averse Newsvendor with Law-Invariant Coherent Measures of Risk ”) is an instructor in the Department of Management Science and Information Systems at Rutgers University. Dr. Choi's research interests are in the area of stochastic modeling and its application in supply chain management. Milind Dawande (“ Production Planning with Patterns: A Problem from Processed Food Manufacturing ” and “ Quantifying the Impact of Layout on Productivity: An Analysis from Robotic-Cell Manufacturing ”) is professor and area coordinator of operations management at the School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas. His research interests are in discrete optimization problems in manufacturing and operations. His papers have appeared in a number of research outlets, including Operations Research, Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and the INFORMS Journal on Computing. Mehmet Demirci (“ Production Planning with Patterns: A Problem from Processed Food Manufacturing ”) is a supply chain sales engineer at SmartOps. He holds a Ph.D. degree in industrial engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include inventory optimization, operations management, large-scale combinatorial optimization, and operations research applications in health care. Sven de Vries (“ An Ascending Vickrey Auction for Selling Bases of a Matroid ”) is a professor of operations research in the Department of Mathematics at the Universität Trier. His research interests include combinatorial optimization and auctions. Xiaowei Ding (“ A Top-Down Approach to Multiname Credit ”) is an associate at Morgan Stanley's Commodity Trading Group. Mohsen ElHafsi (“ Optimal Control of an Assembly System with Multiple Stages and Multiple Demand Classes ”) is a professor at the Anderson Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Riverside, where he also serves as associate dean and graduate advisor. He holds Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees from the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department at the University of Florida and was the Honor Graduate. He received the Qualified Engineer degree, with honors, from the Ecole Nationale d'Ingénieurs de Tunis, Tunisia. His area of research includes operations and supply chain management, manufacturing and service operations, and production and inventory systems. Amr Farahat (“ A Comparison of Bertrand and Cournot Profits in Oligopolies with Differentiated Products ”) is an assistant professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. He obtained his doctoral degree in operations research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current research focuses on differentiated product pricing, inventory management, and competition. He is interested in problems at the interface of operations management, economics, and marketing. Vivek F. Farias (“ The Irrevocable Multiarmed Bandit Problem ”) is the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Assistant Professor of Management at the Sloan School of Management and the Operations Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on revenue management, dynamic optimization, and the analysis of complex stochastic systems. The paper in this issue is part of the author's research in the context of dynamic optimization. David Gamarnik (“ Performance Analysis of Queueing Networks via Robust Optimization ”) is an associate professor of operations research at the Sloan School of Management of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests include applied probability and stochastic processes, theory of random combinatorial structures and algorithms, and various applications. He currently serves as an associate editor of Annals of Applied Probability, Operations Research, Mathematics of Operations Research, and queueing systems journals. Srinagesh Gavirneni (“ Production Planning with Patterns: A Problem from Processed Food Manufacturing ”) is an assistant professor of operations management in the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. His research interests are in the areas of supply chain management, inventory control, production scheduling, simulation, and optimization. His papers have appeared in Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Operations Research, European Journal of Operational Research, Operations Research Letters, IIE Transactions, and Interfaces. Previously he was an assistant professor in the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, the chief algorithm design engineer of SmartOps, a software architect at Maxager Technology Inc., and a research scientist with Schlumberger. His undergraduate degree from IIT-Madras is in mechanical engineering, and he received an M.Sc. from Iowa State University and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. Kay Giesecke (“ A Top-Down Approach to Multiname Credit ”) is assistant professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University. His research and teaching interests are in financial engineering. Lisa R. Goldberg (“ A Top-Down Approach to Multiname Credit ”) is executive director of analytic initiatives at MSCI Barra with responsibility for developing and prototyping financial risk and valuation models. Randolph W. Hall (“ Discounted Robust Stochastic Games and an Application to Queueing Control ”) is vice president of research, and professor of industrial and systems engineering, at the University of Southern California. After receiving a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, he has held research and faculty positions at General Motors, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California, including directing the METRANS and CREATE research centers. He is the author of Queueing Methods for Services and Manufacturing, editor for the Handbook of Transportation Science and Patient Flow: Reducing Delay in Healthcare Delivery, and is preparing a book on scheduling in health care. Erim Kardeş (“ Discounted Robust Stochastic Games and an Application to Queueing Control ”) received his Ph.D. in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Southern California in 2007. His research interests are in the areas of probability models with optimization applications, Markov decision processes, stochastic games, robust optimization, and their applications in optimization in queues, production/inventory control, and in security domains. He has recently been interested in health-care applications. Sunkyo Kim (“ Modeling Cross Correlation in Three-Moment Four-Parameter Decomposition Approximation of Queueing Networks ”) is an associate professor in the School of Business at Ajou University, Suwon, Republic of Korea. His research focuses on the decomposition approximation of queueing networks. He received a B.A. in business and an M.B.A. from Seoul National University, an M.S. in applied mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, an M.S. in industrial engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from Purdue University. Ayşe Kocabıyıkoğlu (“ An Elasticity Approach to the Newsvendor with Price Sensitive Demand ”) is an assistant professor in the Department of Management at Bilkent University. She received her Ph.D. in decision sciences from INSEAD in 2005. Her research interests include pricing and revenue management, dynamic decision making under uncertainty, and behavioral operations management. Chung-Yee Lee (“ Optimal Control of an Assembly System with Multiple Stages and Multiple Demand Classes ”) is Chair Professor of the Industrial Engineering and Logistics Management Department at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He served as department head at HKUST for seven years. He is also the founding and current director of the Logistics and Supply Chain Management Institute at HKUST. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers in the United States and also a Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Science. Before joining HKUST in 2001, he was Rockwell Chair Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Texas A&M University. His research areas are in logistics and supply chain management, scheduling, and inventory management. Ritesh Madan (“ The Irrevocable Multiarmed Bandit Problem ”) is staff engineer at the Qualcomm New Jersey Research Center (NJRC), Bridgewater, New Jersey. His current work is on emerging 4G cellular networks and includes contributions to standards and design of algorithms and architectures for products. His research interests include fast and distributed algorithms for resource allocation in cellular networks. Mili Mehrotra (“ Production Planning with Patterns: A Problem from Processed Food Manufacturing ”) is a doctoral student in operations management at the School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas. Her research interests are in supply chain management. In particular, her work focuses on applying discrete optimization techniques to problems in both manufacturing and service operations management. Her papers have been accepted for publication in Management Science, Operations Research, and Production and Operations Management. Aristide Mingozzi (“ An Exact Algorithm for the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows ”) is a professor of operations research in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Bologna, Italy. His main interests include mathematical programming, combinatorial optimization, graph theory, dynamic programming, and the development of exact and heuristic algorithms for the solution of real-life problems in distribution and scheduling. W. Ross Morrow (“ Fixed-Point Approaches to Computing Bertrand-Nash Equilibrium Prices Under Mixed-Logit Demand ”) is an assistant professor in mechanical engineering and economics at Iowa State University. He received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2008. During 2008–2009 he was a research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School. His research focuses on mathematical models and numerical methods for large-scale, complex energy and environmental policy models. Fernando Ordóñez (“ Discounted Robust Stochastic Games and an Application to Queueing Control ”) is an associate professor in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department at the University of Southern California, currently on leave at the Industrial Engineering Department of the University of Chile. His research focuses on convex and robust optimization, complexity of algorithms, sensitivity analysis, and applications of optimization to engineering and management science. He received his B.S. and mathematical engineering degrees from the University of Chile in 1996 and 1997, respectively, and his Ph.D. in operations research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002. Melda Ormeci Matoglu (“ Drift Control with Changeover Costs ”) earned her Ph.D. in industrial engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2006. Her thesis, “Inventory Control in a Build-to-Order Environment,” was awarded second place at the George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award. Her research interests span both fields of optimization and stochastic control, with applications mainly within the areas of supply chain management and logistics. Her work covers theoretical problems dealing with optimal stochastic control of Brownian motion along with practical applications of these problems with companies like BMW. Georgia Perakis (“ A Comparison of Bertrand and Cournot Profits in Oligopolies with Differentiated Products ”) is the William F. Pounds Professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She joined the faculty at Sloan in 1998. She received an M.S. degree and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Brown University. Her research interests include applications of optimization and equilibrium in revenue management, pricing, competitive supply chain management, and transportation. She has published widely in journals such as Operations Research, Management Science, Mathematics of Operations Research, and Mathematical Programming. Ioana Popescu (“ An Elasticity Approach to the Newsvendor with Price Sensitive Demand ”) is the Booz & Company Professor in Revenue Management and associate professor of decision sciences at INSEAD. Her main research and teaching interests are in the area of pricing and revenue management. Tharanga Rajapakshe (“ Quantifying the Impact of Layout on Productivity: An Analysis from Robotic-Cell Manufacturing ”) is a doctoral student in operations management at the School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas. Her research interests are in supply chain management, green supply chains, and logistics. She is a member of INFORMS, POMS, and DSI. Her papers have been accepted for publication in Operations Research and Production and Operations Management. Alexander Anatoliy Rikun (“ Performance Analysis of Queueing Networks via Robust Optimization ”) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Operations Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned his B.S. in applied mathematics from Columbia University in 2005. His research interests are in robust optimization, queueing theory, and supply chain management. The paper in this issue is part of his Ph.D. thesis under the supervision of Dimitris Bertsimas and David Gamarnik at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Robin O. Roundy (“ Multidimensional Approximation Algorithms for Capacity-Expansion Problems ”) graduated magna cum laude from Brigham Young University. He received the Orson Pratt Award, which is given annually to the outstanding mathematics graduate. He then studied operations research at Stanford University, where he received his doctorate in 1984. In that same year, he won the Nicholson Student Paper Competition, sponsored by the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA). In 1985, he received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. In 1988 he received the Fredrick W. Lanchester Prize from ORSA for the best paper of the year on operations research. He is the author of one of Management Science's 50 Most Influential Papers (2004). He is a two-time recipient of the S. Yau '72 Excellence in Teaching Award and has won other teaching awards as well. Andrzej Ruszczyński (“ A Multiproduct Risk-Averse Newsvendor with Law-Invariant Coherent Measures of Risk ”) is a professor in the Department of Management Science and Information Systems at Rutgers University. His interests are in the area of stochastic programming, where he initiated research on risk-averse optimization. He is an author of several books and numerous articles in the field of optimization. James Schummer (“ An Ascending Vickrey Auction for Selling Bases of a Matroid ”) is associate professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. His interests include dominant strategy mechanism design, voting, signaling, and auctions. Nicola Secomandi (“ Revenue Management with Bargaining ”) is an associate professor of operations management at the Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business. His research interests include real options in the energy and commodity industries, the interface between operations and finance, revenue and supply chain management, and logistics under uncertainty. Steven J. Skerlos (“ Fixed-Point Approaches to Computing Bertrand-Nash Equilibrium Prices Under Mixed-Logit Demand ”) is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he received a B.S. in electrical engineering (with highest honors) in 1994 and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering in 2000. His research interests are environmental technology policy, the design of “green” products and manufacturing systems, and the development of sustainable water systems. Chelliah Sriskandarajah (“ Quantifying the Impact of Layout on Productivity: An Analysis from Robotic-Cell Manufacturing ”) is a professor of operations management and holds the Ashbel Smith Chair at the School of Management of the University of Texas at Dallas. His research revolves around solving various production planning and scheduling problems with the aim of making the production process more economical and efficient. His research interests lie in the general area of production planning and scheduling, supply chain management, and performance evaluation of production systems. Sridhar Tayur (“ Production Planning with Patterns: A Problem from Processed Food Manufacturing ”) is the Ford Distinguished Research Professor of Manufacturing and Operations Management at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as the founder and CEO of SmartOps Corporation. The article in this issue is part of his research and practice agendas in creating scalable enterprise analytic software using appropriate operations research to be part of the IT infrastructure for ongoing use at Global 2000 companies to improve their supply chain capabilities and performance. Van-Anh Truong (“ Multidimensional Approximation Algorithms for Capacity-Expansion Problems ”) is a quantitative researcher at Google, Mountain View, California. She obtained her doctoral degree in operations research from Cornell University. She works in the area of stochastic capacity planning and inventory theory and has published in Operations Research and Mathematical Programming. John Vande Vate (“ Drift Control with Changeover Costs ”) is the founder and executive director of Georgia Institute of Technology's Executive Master's in International Logistics and Supply Chain Strategy (EMIL-SCS) program. He has spent the last few years focused on finding practical ways to extend the power of optimization techniques to address challenges of managing variability and risk in supply chain management and logistics. Rakesh V. Vohra (“ An Ascending Vickrey Auction for Selling Bases of a Matroid ”) is the John L. and Helen Kellogg Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences, at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. His interests include auction theory, pricing, and game theory. Yikun Yu (“ Optimal Product Acquisition, Pricing, and Inventory Management for Systems with Remanufacturing ”) received his B.S. in mathematical science from Tsinghua University, China, in 2006 and his M.Phil. in systems engineering and engineering management from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2008. He is serving as senior associate in the Department of Investment Banking, CITIC Securities Company Limited and has been involved in several IPO projects since he joined the company. Yao Zhao (“ A Multiproduct Risk-Averse Newsvendor with Law-Invariant Coherent Measures of Risk ”) is an associate professor in the Department of Supply Chain Management and Marketing Sciences at Rutgers University. This paper is part of a general research interest in risk management of multi-item and multistage inventory systems. Sean X. Zhou (“ Optimal Product Acquisition, Pricing, and Inventory Management for Systems with Remanufacturing ”) is an assistant professor in the Systems Engineering and Engineering Management Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his B.S. in electrical engineering from Zhejiang University, China in 2001 and his master's and Ph.D. in operations research from North Carolina State University in 2002 and 2006, respectively. His main research area is supply chain management and specifically inventory theory, production planning, pricing, and game theoretic applications. Weihua Zhou (“ Optimal Control of an Assembly System with Multiple Stages and Multiple Demand Classes ”) is associate professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Zhejiang University, China. He received his M.S. degree in applied mathematics from Zhejiang University, and his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Industrial Engineering and Logistic Management at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China. His research interests include supply chain and inventory management and port terminal optimization.