Volume 54, Issue 3 Contributors

T. P. Imthias Ahamed (“Adaptive Importance Sampling Technique for Markov Chains using Stochastic Approximation”) is a Lecturer at T. K. M. College of Engineering. His primary research interests are in the applications of machine learning techniques to power systems control. In particular, he has implemented reinforcement learning schemes for power systems control on a simulation test bed.

Achal Bassamboo (”Design and Control of a Large Call Center: Asymptotic Analysis of an LP-Based Method”) is Donald P. Jacobs Scholar in managerial economics and decision sciences at Kellogg School of Management. This paper is part of his dissertation completed under supervision of his co-authors. His research interests are stochastic systems, revenue management and rare event simulation.

Hatem Ben Amor (“Dual-Optimal Inequalities for Stabilized Column Generation”) received his Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from the École Polytechnique de Montréal in 2002. Since then, he is a researcher at GERAD Operations Research Center. He has also been a postdoctoral at FOR@C consortium (Laval University, Québec) in 2003. His main research interests include large scale optimization for linear and integer programming, non-differentiable optimization, vehicle routing problems, cutting stock problems, and operations scheduling in forestry.

Vivek S. Borkar (“Adaptive Importance Sampling Technique for Markov Chains using Stochastic Approximation”) is a professor at the School of Technology and Computer Science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. His research interests are both the theory of controlled Markov processes and stochastic approximation algorithms and their applications, notably to reinforcement learning and communications.

Edmund Burke (“A New Bottom-Left-Fill Heuristic Algorithm for the Two-Dimensional Irregular Packing Problem”) is Head of the School of Computer Science and IT at the University of Nottingham, UK. He also leads the Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning Research Group and is Director of the Inter-disciplinary Optimisation Laboratory at Nottingham. Professor Burke is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Scheduling (Springer) and serves on the editorial board of a number of scientific journals. His research interests lie in the inter-disciplinary interface between Operations Research and Artificial Intelligence and they cover a broad range of real world applications.

Zhi-Long Chen (“Order Assignment and Scheduling in a Supply Chain”) research interests include supply chain scheduling, production and logistics operations, and pricing. This paper is a part of a larger research project funded by the National Science Foundation. The project involves solving a number of integrated production-distribution scheduling models and quantifying potential benefits of production-distribution integration.

T. C. E. Cheng (“A Multi-product, Multi-criterion Supply-Demand Network Equilibrium Model”) Department of Logistics, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. This paper was stimulated by the idea that equilibrium models may be applied to handle large-scale optimization problems pertinent to distribution management in supply-demand networks.

Mabel C. Chou (“On the Asymptotic Optimality of a Simple On-line Algorithm for the Stochastic Single Machine Weighted Completion Time Problem and its Extensions”) is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Business, National University of Singapore. Her research interests include scheduling, flexibility design and coordination issues in the supply chain.

Jean-François Cordeau (“A Branch-And-Cut Algorithm for the Dial-a-Ride Problem”) is an associate professor in the Production and Operations Management Department at HEC Montréal. He is also an Associate of the Canada Research Chair in Distribution Management. His main research interests focus on the design of exact and approximate algorithms for hard combinatorial optimization problems encountered in the areas of vehicle routing and network design.

Valério de Carvalho (“Dual-Optimal Inequalities for Stabilized Column Generation”) received his Ph.D. degree in Engineering Production and Operations Research from the University of Minho in 1991. He is Full Professor in the Department of Production and Systems Engineering of the University of Minho. He is also a member of the Algoritmi Research Center. His main research interests include large scale integer programming, and cutting and packing problems.

Gregory DeCroix (“Optimal Policy for a Multi-echelon Inventory System with Remanufacturing”) is an Associate Professor at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. His research interests are in the area of supply chain management, with a particular emphasis on decentralized decision making and on the impact of environmental issues on supply chain decisions.

Jacques Desrosiers (“Dual-Optimal Inequalities for Stabilized Column Generation”) received his Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from the Université de Montréal in 1979. Since 1989 he is Full Professor in the Department of Management Sciences at HEC Montréal. He is also a member of the GERAD Operations Research Center. His main research interests include large scale optimization for vehicle routing and crew scheduling in air, rail, and urban transportation.

A. Dale Flowers (“The Multiple-Family ELSP with Safety Stocks”) is a faculty member of Operations Management at Case Western Reserve University. His research interests include manufacturing planning and control systems and the quality disciplines. He focuses on finding innovative solutions to real world problems, and creative implementations via decision support systems. He observed the multiple family economic lot scheduling problem with safety stocks in a variety of industrial situations, and was motivated to develop a practical solution to the problem. His awards include IIE Transactions Development and Application Award, a Franz Edelman Finalist Award, and a nomination for the Lanchester Prize for STORM software.

J. Michael Harrison (“Design and Control of a Large Call Center: Asymptotic Analysis of an LP-Based Method”) is Adams Distinguished Professor of Management in the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. With Achal Bassamboo and Assaf Zeevi, he has been working for several years on staffing and routing problems in telephone call centers, and this paper is one product of that continuing effort. His most recent teaching and research initiatives are in the area of revenue management.

Martin Haugh (“Evaluating Portfolio Policies: A Duality Approach”) is an Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University. He received his PhD in Operations Research from MIT in 2001 and his research interests include financial engineering, computational finance and risk management.

Robert Hellier (“A New Bottom-Left-Fill Heuristic Algorithm for the Two-Dimensional Irregular Packing Problem”) is a member of the Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning Research Group at the University of Nottingham, UK. This work was conducted as part of his PhD research into state-of-the-art irregular cutting and packing algorithms with respect to industrial applications. He is currently studying on a part-time basis for his PhD whilst working as a senior software developer for a UK based manufacturing company.

Sandeep Juneja (“Adaptive Importance Sampling Technique for Markov Chains using Stochastic Approximation”) is an Associate Professor at the School of Technology and Computer Science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. His interests are primarily in applied probability and a significant amount of his research has focused on rare event simulation. This paper was motivated by a talk that Prof. Reuben Rubinstein gave at RESIM 2002 conference where he discussed the application of the adaptive cross entropy method to efficiently simulate queuing networks.

Serge M. Karalli (“The Multiple-Family ELSP with Safety Stocks”) is a professor of Operations Management at California State University, Sacramento. His research interests include manufacturing planning and inventory control. His research stream includes the multiple family economic lot scheduling problem with safety stocks in a variety of industrial situations.

Graham Kendall (“A New Bottom-Left-Fill Heuristic Algorithm for the Two-Dimensional Irregular Packing Problem”) is a member of the Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning Research Group at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is a member of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Peer Review College and is an associate editor of three international journals. He also chairs the steering committee of the Multidisciplinary International Conference on Scheduling: Theory and Applications (MISTA) and has chaired several other international conferences. His other research interests include: adaptive learning (with an emphasis on game intelligence), heuristic development, optimisation, scheduling and artificial intelligence.

Seong-Hee Kim (“On the Asymptotic Validity of Fully Sequential Procedures for Steady-State Simulation”) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include ranking and selection, possibly with stochastic constraints; quality control for complicated processes including autocorrelated, multivariate and cyclic data; and simulation output analysis.

Leonid Kogan (“Evaluating Portfolio Policies: A Duality Approach”) is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Sloan School of Management, MIT. He received his Ph.D. in financial economics from MIT in 1999 and was an Assistant Professor at the Wharton School of Management, University of Pennsylvania, between 1999 and 2001. He joined the MIT faculty in 2001. Professor Kogan's research interests include asset pricing, derivatives and investment. He is a member of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, and NBER.

Wei-Min Lan (“Multiproduct Systems with Both Setup Times and Costs: Fluid Bounds and Schedules”) received his Ph.D. at the Industrial and Operations Engineering Department at the University of Michigan. There is significant overlap between this paper and his Ph.D. dissertation. Following graduation, Dr. Lan returned to his native Taiwan to work for IBM.

Martin A. Lariviere (“A Note on Probability Distributions with Increasing Generalized Failure Rates”) is an Associate Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. His research has focused on applications of economic tools to the study of supply chain management problems. This note follows from work on selling to a retailer facing a newsvendor problem.

Torbjörn Larsson (“Global Optimality Conditions for Discrete and Nonconvex Optimization-With Applications to Lagrangean Heuristics and Column Generation”) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Mathematics, Linköping University, Linöping, Sweden. The research leading to this paper was largely inspired by questions arising during many years of teaching on price-directive decomposition methods.

Hui Liu (“On the Asymptotic Optimality of a Simple On-line Algorithm for the Stochastic Single Machine Weighted Completion Time Problem and its Extensions”) received her B.S. degree in Chemistry from Tshinghua University, Beijing, China, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences from Northwestern University. She joined Verizon Laboratories in 2001, where she is currently a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff. Her research interests are in the design and operation of Telecommunication networks, with an emphasis on implementing newly emerged optical and IP technologies.

Barry L. Nelson (“On the Asymptotic Validity of Fully Sequential Procedures for Steady-State Simulation”) is the James N. and Margie M. Krebs Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences at Northwestern University, and is also Director of the master of Engineering Management Program there. He is interested in the design and analysis of stochastic simulation experiments, particularly issues of statistical efficiency, multivariate output analysis, multivariate input modeling and metamodeling.

Tava Olsen (“Multiproduct Systems with Both Setup Times and Costs: Fluid Bounds and Schedules”) is an associate professor at the John M. Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis. She has had a long-term research interest in the area of polling models, or systems with setups, and this work continues that body of research. Other research interests of hers include supply-chain management, pricing and inventory control, and stochastic games.

Michael Patriksson (“Global Optimality Conditions for Discrete and Nonconvex Optimization-With Applications to Lagrangean Heuristics and Column Generation”) is a Professor at the Department of Mathematics, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. Based in part on this paper, he received the 250,000 SEK Frisinger Stipend for 2004, awarded by the Hakan Frisinger Foundation for Transport Research.

Guruprasad Pundoor (“Order Assignment and Scheduling in a Supply Chain”) has research interests that include scheduling, network optimization, and pricing. This paper is a part of his Ph.D. dissertation that deals with a number of integrated production-distribution scheduling models in supply chains.

Maurice Queyranne (“On the Asymptotic Optimality of a Simple On-line Algorithm for the Stochastic Single Machine Weighted Completion Time Problem and its Extensions”) is a Professor of Management Science at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. His research interests include Operations Research methodologies, in particular combinatorial optimization, and their applications in Operations Management, in particular to production, logistics and supply chain management. The paper in this issue relates to his work on polyhedral approaches to machine scheduling problems for designing and analyzing exact and approximate scheduling methods.

David Simchi-Levi (“On the Asymptotic Optimality of a Simple On-line Algorithm for the Stochastic Single Machine Weighted Completion Time Problem and its Extensions”) is a Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT. The work described in this paper is part of a larger research project he conducted with colleagues and current and former Ph.D. students. The project deals with large scale production scheduling problems. Related papers appeared recently in Mathematical Programming, Naval Research Logistics and Operations Research.

Jiang Wang (“Evaluating Portfolio Policies: A Duality Approach”) is the Nanyang Technological University Professor of Finance at the Sloan School of Management, MIT. He received his Ph.D. degree in finance from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. His current research focuses on asset pricing, asset management and risk management. Wang is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and is also affiliated with the China Center for Financial Research. He is the recipient of the Leo Melamed Prize in 1997 and the Batterymarch Fellowship in 1995.

Glenn Whitwell (“A New Bottom-Left-Fill Heuristic Algorithm for the Two-Dimensional Irregular Packing Problem”) is a member of the Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning Research Group at the University of Nottingham. This work was conducted as part of his PhD dissertation, which was to investigate and develop new orthogonal and irregular cutting and packing algorithms. He is also the Managing Director of Aptia Solutions Limited, a UK based software development company that specialises in state-of-the-art automated packing and production solutions for various manufacturing industries. Other than automated packing, his research interests include: operations research, heuristic development, applied artificial intelligence and machine learning within game playing.

Yunan Wu (“A Multi-product, Multicriterion Supply-Demand Network Equilibrium Model”) is a professor in the Department of Logistics at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The paper is part of a large body of a research project on “Vector Optimization-based Supply-Demand Network Equilibrium Models.”

Assaf Zeevi (”Design and Control of a Large Call Center: Asymptotic Analysis of an LP-Based Method”) is the Nathan Gantcher Associate Professor of Business in the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University. His main research focuses on stochastic models of service systems, with other recent research addressing problems in financial economics, simulation, statistics and applied probability.