People

William Barton Rogers Professor in Energy,
Director, MIT Data Science Lab

Biography

David Simchi-Levi is the William Barton Rogers Professor in Energy, and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering Systems at MIT. He also serves as the head of the MIT Data Science Lab. He is considered one of the premier thought leaders in supply chain management and business analytics.

His Ph.D. students have accepted faculty positions in leading academic institutes including U. of California Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon U., Columbia U., Cornell U., Duke U., Georgia Tech, Harvard U., U. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, U. of Michigan, Purdue U. and Virginia Tech.

Professor Simchi-Levi is the current Editor-in-Chief of Management Science, one of the two flagship journals of INFORMS. He served as the Editor-in-Chief for Operations Research (2006-2012), the other flagship journal of INFORMS and for Naval Research Logistics (2003-2005).

In 2023, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 2020, he was awarded the prestigious INFORMS Impact Prize for playing a leading role in developing and disseminating a new highly impactful paradigm for the identification and mitigation of risks in global supply chains.

He is an INFORMS Fellow and MSOM Distinguished Fellow and the recipient of the 2020 INFORMS Koopman Award given to an outstanding publication in military operations research; Ford Motor Company 2015 Engineering Excellence Award; 2014 INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice; 2014 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Practice Award; and 2009 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Prize.

He was the founder of LogicTools which provided software solutions and professional services for supply chain optimization. LogicTools became part of IBM in 2009. In 2012 he co-founded OPS Rules, an operations analytics consulting company. The company became part of Accenture in 2016. In 2014, he co-founded Opalytics, a cloud analytics platform company focusing on operations and supply chain decisions. The company became part of the Accenture Applied Intelligence in 2018.

Education

• B.S. 1978, Technion Israel Institute of Technology
• M.Sc. 1984, Tel-Aviv University
• Ph.D. 1987, Tel-Aviv University

Research Interests

• Statistical learning and decision making
• Transportation and logistics systems
• Supply chain management
• Revenue and yield management
• Optimization based decision support systems
• Operations research
• Flexibility and Risk Management

Teaching Interests

• Statistical learning in operations
• Optimization based models for logistics and production systems
• Supply chain management
• Production management
• Flexibility and Risk Management
• Systems simulation
• Executive education

Selected Publications

Books

1. Simchi-Levi, D., P. Kaminsky and E. Simchi-Levi, Designing and Managing the Supply Chain: Concepts, Strategies and Case Studies, McGraw-Hill, 2021 (4^th Edition). The book received the Book-of-the-year award and the Outstanding IIE Publication award given in 2000 by the Institute of Industrial Engineering.
2. Simchi-Levi, D., X. Chen and J. Bramel, The Logic of Logistics: Theory, Algorithms and Applications for Logistics Management, Springer, 2013 (3rd Edition).
3. Simchi-Levi, D., P. Kaminsky and E. Simchi-Levi,  Managing the Supply Chain: The Definitive Guide for the Supply Chain Professional, McGraw-Hill, 2004.
4. Simchi-Levi, D, Operations Rules: Delivering Customer Value through Flexible Operations, MIT Press, 2010.

Papers in Refereed Journals

1. Chen, Y. F., Z. Drezner, J. K. Ryan and D. Simchi-Levi (2000), “Quantifying the Bullwhip Effect in a Simple Supply Chain: The Impact of Forecasting, Lead Times and Information.” Management Science, 46, 436–443.
2. Chen, X. and D. Simchi-Levi, (2004), “Coordinating Inventory Control and Pricing Strategies with Random Demand and Fixed Ordering Cost: The Finite Horizon Case.” Operations Research, 52 pp. 887-896.
3.  Chick, S. E., H. Mamani and D. Simchi-Levi (2008), “Supply Chain Coordination and Influenza Vaccination.” Operations Research, 56 pp. 1493-1506.
4. Simchi-Levi D. and Y. Xu (2021), “Bypassing the Monster: A Faster and Simpler Optimal Algorithm for Contextual Bandits under Realizability.” To appear in Mathematics of Operations Research.