Operations Research

Airline Schedule Planning

Much of the CEE research in operations research involves the development of optimization methods for large-scale transportation and logistics problems. The approaches often require the development of new models and algorithms, and their implementations in real operating environments. Research foci include integrated schedule planning, robust scheduling and real-time re-planning.

Supply Chain

Today’s supply chain executives must balance multiple trade-offs between, cost, service, risk and pressure for sustainability. This is where engineering and management have the potential to make a big impact. What is needed is a rigorous scientific understanding of physical properties of systems in general and supply chain in particular. Examples include trade-offs between responsiveness and efficiency, or flexibility and cost. Such understanding leads to the development of engineering design principles and management approaches that improve supply chain performance.

Rigorous analysis of supply chain characteristics have led to the development of engineering principles and management approaches such as Postponement, Risk Sharing, Risk Pooling and Push-Pull strategies. These and many other new concepts and principles have been developed using methods such as optimization, stochastic processes and queuing theory , simulation, game theory and economics.

At the same time, the role of public policy is more important than ever before. This is clearly the case with regard to the development of infrastructure or the level of taxation and its impact of strategies. It is even more important in its influence on corporate sustainability strategy. For example, polluters, e.g., manufacturers and distributors, effect the environments but do not necessarily face the direct consequences of their actions. This is exactly the role of public policy: to impose a cost structure on the polluters that will force them to take into account the impact of their activities on the environment.

Representative Research Areas

The National Air Transportation System as a Reconfigurable Engineered System
Optimization-Based Data Mining
Decision-Oriented Analysis of Hurricane Response

Researchers

Cynthia Barnhart, Professor (Airline Scheduling)
Patrick Jaillet, Professor (Stochastic, Online)
Amedeo Odoni, Professor (Airline Scheduling)
Carolina Osorio, Assistant Professor (Urban Transportation)
Yossi Sheffi, Professor (Logistics)
David Simchi-Levi, Professor (Supply Chain)

Related Research Labs and Centers

Simchi-Levi Supply Chain Lab
Center for Transportation and Logistics
Forum for Supply Chain Innovation
Global Airline Industry Program
Operations Research Center