Volume 54, Issue 2 Contributors

Ali E. Abbas (“Maximum Entropy Utility”) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include information theory, decision analysis, utility theory, data mining, and applications of operations research tools in computational biology. This paper is the first in a series of papers exploring the analogy between probability and utility, and arose from the author's interest to facilitate the assignment of utility values for use in decision analysis.

Ravi Ahuja (“A New Linear Programming Approach to Radiation Therapy Treatment Planning Problems”) is a Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida. He conducts research in the theory and application of network optimization and publishes widely in prestigious journals. He is an Associate Editor of the journals Transportation Science and Networks.

Shoshana Anily (“An Optimal Lot Sizing and Off-Line Inspection Policy in the Case of Non-Rigid Demand”) is a Professor of decisions and operations research at the Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration, Tel Aviv University, Israel. Her research interests include routing problems, inventory control, production and scheduling. This paper is part of a series of studies on the impact of yield uncertainty on the optimal production and inspection policy.

Fernando Bernstein (“Inventory Policies in a Decentralized Assembly System”) is an Associate Professor in the Operations Management area of the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. This work is part of a series of publications analyzing the behavior and efficient management of decentralized assembly systems, employing a variety of game-theoretical models.

Daniel Bienstock (“Combined Newtork Design and Multi-Period Pricing: Modeling, Solution Techniques and Computation'') is the Director of the Computational Optimization Research Center at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University. His research interests concern high-performance mathematical programming, ranging from fundamental theory to practical implementation.

Robert A Briers (“Optimal Selection of a Connected Reserve Network”) is a Lecturer in Animal Biology in the School of Life Sciences, Napier University, UK. His research interests focus on a combination of field and theoretical approaches to a range of topics in population biology and species conservation, with a particular interest in spatial issues. This is his first foray into operations research literature. The current paper, which develops an integer programming model to select a fully connected network of sites for conservation, is part of ongoing research into the incorporation of spatial objectives in conservation reserve design using mathematical programming approaches.

Mark Broadie (“Exact Simulation of Stochastic Volatility and other Affine Jump Diffusion Processes”) is a Professor in the Decision, Risk and Operations division of the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. His research interests include financial engineering and computational finance, with an emphasis on the pricing of derivative securities, risk management, and portfolio optimization.

Milind Dawande (“Effective Hueristics for Multi-Product Partial Shipment Models”) is an Associate Professor of Operations Management at the School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas. Prior to joining academia, he was a Research Staff Member at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. His research interests are in combinatorial optimization.

Gregory A. DeCroix (“Inventory Policies in a Decentralized Assembly System”) is an Associate Professor in the Operations Management area of the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. This work is part of a series of publications analyzing the behavior and efficient management of decentralized assembly systems, employing a variety of game-theoretical models.

James F. Dempsey (“A New Linear Programming Approach to Radiation Therapy Treatment Planning Problems”) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Florida. His research interests are in the computation, measurement, and optimization of ionizing radiation dose for the treatment of cancer patients.

Edward Fox (“Optimal Inventory Policy with Two Suppliers”) is the W.R. and Judy Howell Director of the JC Penney Center for Retail Excellence and Assistant Professor of Marketing at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business. His research focuses on consumer shopping behavior, retail management, and customer relationship management. This paper was motivated by the authors’ interest in why consumers shop at different stores to buy similar products.

Michael J. Fry (“Firefighter Staffing Including Temporary Absences and Wastage”) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Quantitative Analysis and Operations Management at the University of Cincinnati. His main research interests are in supply chain modeling, specifically models that include the use of contracts and the effect of market power in the supply chain. This paper relates his interest in stochastic inventory models to comparable formulations in the area of workforce planning.

Jeremie Gallien (“Dynamic Mechanism Design for Online Commerce”) is the J. Spencer Standish Career Development Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He obtained his Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT. His research interests include revenue optimization (i.e. auctions, dynamic pricing and revenue management) and the control of supply-chain processes.

Srinagesh Gavirneni (“Effective Hueristics for Multi-Product Partial Shipment Models”) 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.

Gianpaolo Ghiani (“The Black and White Traveling Salesman Problem”) is an Associate Professor of Operations Research at the University of Lecce. His main interests lie in the field of combinatorial optimization, particularly in vehicle routing, location, and layout problems. With Gilbert Laporte and Roberto Musmanno he recently coauthored the book “Introduction to Logistics Systems Planning and Control”, published by Wiley.

Abraham Grosfeld-Nir (“An Optimal Lot Sizing and Off-Line Inspection Policy in the Case of Non-Rigid Demand”) earned his Ph.D. at Northwestern University and is currently teaching at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo, and at Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. His research concentrates on probabilistic models with real-life applications, such as optimal control of manufacturing systems with imperfect yield, uncertain processing time, and partial information about the state of the system.

Joseph Geunes (“Requirements Planning with Pricing and Order Selection Flexibility”) is an Associate Professor at the University of Florida. His research focuses on optimization-based models for practical production and inventory planning and control problems under various dimensions of planning flexibility. This article is part of a stream of work incorporating elements of demand planning flexibility within production planning.

Ozgur Kaya (“Exact Simulation of Stochastic Volatility and other Affine Jump Diffusion Processes”) is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University. His main research interests are applications of Monte Carlo simulation and other computational methods to financial engineering problems. This paper is part of his dissertation work done under the supervision of his coauthor, Mark Broadie.

Arvind Kumar (“A New Linear Programming Approach to Radiation Therapy Treatment Planning Problems”) received his doctorate in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Florida with focus on radiation therapy treatment planning problems. He is currently a Director of Research and Development at Innovative Scheduling, Inc, a company which develops high-end optimization-based tools for the transportation industry.

Gilbert Laporte (“The Black and White Traveling Salesman Problem”) is a Professor of Operations Research at HEC Montréal. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Distribution Management. He is the author or coauthor of more than 250 scientific articles in combinatorial optimization, mainly in the areas of vehicle routing, location, timetabling and production planning.

Mike Magazine (“Firefighter Staffing Including Temporary Absences and Wastage”) is Interim Dean of the College of Business and Ohio Eminent Scholar at the University of Cincinnati. He has published over fifty articles in the areas of scheduling, supply chains and other applications of manufacturing systems. This paper grew out of his initial work with Dennis Sweeney (Professor Emeritus of Quantitative Analysis, University of Cincinnati) and the Cincinnati Fire Department.

Richard Metters (“Optimal Inventory Policy with Two Suppliers”) is an Associate Professor in the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. His primary interests are at the cross-section of inventory and service operations. This particular paper grew from an interest in retail inventory policy.

Hayri Önal (“Optimal Selection of a Connected Reserve Network”) is a Professor of Operations Research in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include optimization methods and applications to environmental economics/resource management problems. His most recent research focuses particularly on mathematical programming approaches to biodiversity conservation and incorporation of spatial criteria in conservation reserve site selection. The present paper is part of this effort and develops an integer programming model to determine a minimal connected network of reserve sites which provide habitat services to a set of targeted species.

Uday S. Rao (“Firefighter Staffing Including Temporary Absences and Wastage”) is an Associate Professor of Operations Management at the College of Business, University of Cincinnati. His research publications have focused on building quantitative models and insights for diverse problem domains including resource capacity & workforce planning, supply chain configuration, inventory optimization, production scheduling, remanufacturing, and telecom hub location.

Olga Raskina (“Combined Newtork Design and Multi-Period Pricing: Modeling, Solution Techniques and Computation”) is an Operations Research and Optimization specialist at Emptoris, Inc. Her work and research interests lie in the areas of Supply Chain, Mathematical Programming, Pricing and Combinatorial Bidding. This work constituted part of her doctoral dissertation under the direction of Daniel Bienstock.

Edwin Romeijn (“Requirements Planning with Pricing and Order Selection Flexibility”) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida. His research interests are in optimization theory and applications to problems in supply chain management and medicine.

Iraj Saniee (“Combined Newtork Design and Multi-Period Pricing: Modeling, Solution Techniques and Computation”) heads the Mathematics of Networks and Systems Research Department at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies. Dr. Saniee's work in the past two decades has spanned a wide spectrum ranging from data traffic modeling to development of optimization tools for network design.

Frédéric Semet (“The Black and White Traveling Salesman Problem”) is an Associate Professor of Operations Research at the Université de Valenciennes in France. He has published extensively in several areas of operations research related to transportation planning, location, and health care applications.

John Semple (“Optimal Inventory Policy for Two Suppliers”) is a Corrigan Fellow and Associate Professor of Information Technology and Operations Management in the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University. His interests are in optimization theory and its applications. The current paper was motivated by work he has undertaken with Ed Fox and Rich Metters to model customer behavior in the grocery business.

Kevin Taaffe (“Requirements Planning with Pricing and Order Selection Flexibility”) is an Assistant Professor at Clemson University in the Department of Industrial Engineering His research examines how producers can select which demand sources or customers to satisfy, when faced with issues such as constrained production systems and uncertain order requests. One of the major outcomes from the variants of demand selection modeling thus far has been the combined pricing and selection decision model, the focus of this paper. In addition to his interests in optimizing production and inventory management systems, he is also engaged in transportation and logistics systems research.

Sridhar Tayur (“Effective Hueristics for Multi-Product Partial Shipment Models”) is the Ford Distinguished Research Professor in the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also the founder and CEO of SmartOps, a software company that provides web-architected tools (and associated consulting/educational services) for supply chain tactical planning. His research and teaching interests include internet-enabled supply chain management, managing product variety, logistics, and plant management.

Qiong Wang (`”Combined Network Design and Multi-Period Pricing: Modeling, Solution Techniques and Computation'”) is a Member of Technical Staff with Mathematical Science Center, Bell Laboratories. His research interest is in the area of network pricing, capacity planning, and revenue management. This work is motivated by a lab project to help a network carrier optimize its long-term business planning.

Ward Whitt (“Sensitivity of Performance in the Erlang-A Queueing Model to Changes in the Model Parameters”) is a Professor at Columbia University in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. He received his A.B. in mathematics from Dartmouth College in 1964 and his Ph.D. in operations research from Cornell University in 1969. This paper is part of an ongoing research project on stochastic models for the design and management of telephone call centers and their generalizations to customer contact centers.

David D. Yao (“Tracking a Financial Benchmark Using a Few Assets”) is a Professor of IEOR at Columbia University. His scientific collaboration with Shuzhong Zhang and Xun Yu Zhou started in 1999 when he was on sabbatical leave at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Their joint paper, "Stochastic LQ Control via Semidefinite Programming" (SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, vol. 40, 2001, 801-823), which won the 2003 SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize, provided much of the theoretical and computational foundation to the financial tracking model reported here.

Shuzhong Zhang (“Tracking a Financial Benchmark Using a Few Assets”) is a Professor at Department of Systems Engineering & Engineering Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include theory, methods, and applications of optimization in management and financial engineering. He serves on the editorial board of SIAM Journal on Optimization, Optimization and Engineering, Pacific Journal of Optimization, and Operations Research.

Xun Yu Zhou (“Tracking a Financial Benchmark Using a Few Assets”) is a Professor at the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests are in stochastic control, financial engineering and discrete-event manufacturing systems.