TIMS President, 1988-1989
Marshall Fisher was the 33rd President of TIMS. In 1975, he joined the faculty of the Wharton School, where is the UPS Professor of Operations and Information Management and co-director of the Fishman-Davidson Center for Service and Operations Management. Prior to his appointment at Wharton, he was a systems engineer in the Boston Manufacturing and Distribution Sales office of IBM (1965-66) and on the faculty of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
Dr. Fisher’s early research focused on combinatorial optimization. In 1977, he received the Lanchester Prize for his Management Science paper “Location of Bank Accounts to Optimize Float: An Analytic Study of Exact and Approximate Algorithms," (co-authored with G. Cornuejols, and G.L. Nemhauser). His 1981 paper in Management Science “The Lagrangian Relaxation Method for Solving Integer Programming Problems," in 2004 was voted by the membership of INFORMS as one of the ten most influential papers published in Management Science during its 50 year history.
More recently, his research has focused on supply chain management, including private truck fleet scheduling, supply chain management for hard to predict products and a new methodology for retail marketing. In 1983, he and his co-researchers received the Edelman Prize for development of a large-scale logistics planning model for a major industrial gas firm. In 1984, he and his co-author R. Jaikumar received The National Council of Physical Distribution Management E. Grosvenor Plowman award for the paper "Computers in Transportation: From Integration to Intelligence".
He co-founded and served as Chairman of two companies based on his research: The first: Distribution Analysis, Research and Technology, Inc provided private truck fleet optimization software and merged with Manugistics Inc. in 1990. The second, 4R Systems, Inc. provides supply chain planning software to retailers of short lifecycle products.
Dr. Fisher served as a TIMS Council Member during 1985-87 and then as TIMS President. For ORSA, he chaired the 1979 Lanchester Prize Selection Committee, the Publications Committee (1981-1982) He served as Chairman of the Selection Committee for the new Editor of Operations Research (1981-1982) and for Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (2001). He was a member of the Organizing Committee for the Annual Practice Conference (2003-2005), the Search Committee for the 2007 Morse Lecturer, and the Search Committee for the 2006 INFORMS Practice Prize. He has also given numerous plenary and keynote addresses at INFORMS conferences.
He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of three societies: INFORMS, the Production and Operations Management Society, and the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society. He was the 2006 Philip McCord Morse Lecturer.
SB (Electrical engineering), 1965, MIT; SM, 1969, MIT; PhD (Operations Research) 1971, MIT.