Ravindra k. ahuja

Ravindra Ahuja is a Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and also the founding President & CEO of Innovative Scheduling, Inc., a company focused on developing business intelligence solutions for large-scale and complex problems arising in logistics and transportation. Professor Ahuja has contributed both to the theory and applications of Operations Research and his contributions have received highly competitive awards from INFORMS, including 1993 Lanchester Prize, 2003 Pierskalla Award, 2006 Daniel H. Wagner Award, 2007 Koopman Prize, and INFORMS Fellowship in 2008. He is a coauthor of the widely used text and reference book, “Network Flows: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications.” He is also a coauthor of the companion book, Developing Web-Enabled Decision Support Systems, which describes how to build web applications using VB .NET and ASP .NET. Professor Ahuja consults for several Fortune 500 companies.

Arnold I. Barnett

Arnold I. Barnett is a George Eastman Professor of Management Science and Professor of Statistics at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He has received the President’s Award and Expository Writing Award from INFORMS, and the President’s Citation from the Flight Safety Foundation for “truly outstanding contributions with respect to safety.”  At MIT, Professor Barnett has been honored by students 13 times for his outstanding teaching of Probability and Statistics.

DICK DEN HERTOG

Dick Den Hertog is Professor of Operations Research at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Amsterdam and a Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He combines theoretical research with practical applications within a broader societal context. He is a recipient of the Franz Edelman Award twice and of several teaching awards, former chairman of the Dutch Network on the Mathematics of Operations Research and co-founder of the Analytics for a Better World movement (analyticsbw.org).

JACK DUNN

Jack Dunn is a co-founding partner of Interpretable AI, a leader of interpretable methods in artificial intelligence. He has a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sandra D. Eksioglu

Sandra D. Ekşioğlu is an Assistant Professor at Mississippi State University (MSU), in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Her research is focused in the area of Operations Research (OR). She uses OR tools to model and solve large scale supply chain design and management, logistics management and transportation-related problems. Sandra’s research on biomass-to-biofuel supply chain has resulted on a number of innovative models and solution algorithms that improve the performance of this supply chain. She received the NSF Career Award in support of this research. Sandra has taught the Information Systems for Industrial Engineers class at MSU for several semesters. This class teaches students how to build Spreadsheet-Based Decision Support Systems. Sandra used the feedback and comments from students to make valuable additions and modifications to this new edition of the book.

Richard C. Larson

Dr. Richard Larson received his Ph.D. from MIT where he is Mitsui Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and in the Engineering Systems Division (ESD). He is founding director of the Center for Engineering System Fundamentals (CESF).  Much of his career has focused on operations research as applied to services industries, primarily in the fields of urban service systems, queueing, logistics, technology-enabled education and workforce planning. He has served as President of INFORMS, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. He has applied the ideas of this book to many urban service systems, especially in the City of New York.   Dr. Larson has twice served as Co-Director of the MIT Operations Research Center. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an INFORMS Founding Fellow, and a recipient of the INFORMS President's Award, Lanchester Prize and its Kimball Medal.

Michael N. Metaxas

Michael Metaxas studied Mechanical Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. After he finished his studies at the Institute of Mechanical Systems of his dear Professor Mahir Sayir in 1985, he returned to Greece and worked at the family ceramics factory, the management of which he undertook completely in 1996. At the same time he worked scientifically on the strength of materials, thermodynamics and fluid mechanics, publishing relevant articles in mechanical engineering journals. He also worked on computer programming for industrial applications and on the solution of related mathematical problems. Since 2006 Mathematics has taken up the largest part of his time while writing the Fundamental Mathematics together with his teacher from his high-school years, who inspired his love and enthusiasm for Mathematics and the passion to serve it with humility and selflessness.

Abhijit A. Pol

Abhijit Pol coauthored this book as a researcher in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is now a Senior Software Engineer in the Strategic Data Solutions at Yahoo, Inc. His research focus is in the area of databases, with special interests in approximate query processing, physical database design, and data streams. Abhijit has taught the course Developing Web-Enabled Decision Support Systems (DSS) several times in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida. He has presented several tutorials at workshops and conferences on the need and importance of teaching DSS material, and he has also taught at two instructor-training workshops on DSS development. Abhijit has presented research papers at several prestigious database conferences and performed research at the Microsoft Research Lab.

Michelle M.H. Seref

Michelle Şeref has a Ph.D. in Operations Management from the University of Florida and a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the same university. Michelle wrote her Master’s thesis on decision support system development and design while simultaneously working on the first edition of this book and the creation of educational materials for a course in DSS. Michelle’s Ph.D. dissertation focused on supply chain management decisions under various marketing strategies, including advance sales inventory management and new product development pricing and timing decisions. Using her advanced education and research experience in optimizing operations decisions, Michelle is now pursuing a second Ph.D. in rhetoric and communication to study the relationship between social behavior and language. Michelle’s new dissertation focus is on causes and remedies of miscommunication in intercultural and interdisciplinary communication. She plans to complete her new Ph.D. at Virginia Tech and continue her career in academia.

Jan A. Van Mieghem

Dr. Jan Van Mieghem is the Harold L. Stuart Distinguished Professor of Managerial Economics and Professor of Operations Management at the Kellogg School of Management of Northwestern University. He serves as the Academic Director of the Executive MBA Program. Previously he served as Senior Associate Dean of the Kellogg School and as chairman of the Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences department. He teaches courses in operations management and operations strategy in MBA, Ph.D. and executive programs and advises firms on those topics.

His research focuses on manufacturing, service and supply chain operations. His articles have appeared in leading journals, including Annals of Applied Probability, Journal of Economic Theory, Management Science, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management and Operations Research. He is past editor of the operations and supply chain area of Operations Research and has served on the editorial board of several journals.

Professor Van Mieghem is the co-author of the MBA textbook Managing Business Process Flows: Principles of Operations Management. He received his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University in 1995. Born in Belgium, he currently lives in Evanston, Illinois, with his wife and four children.

Robert Weismantel

Robert Weismantel is the head of the Institute for Operations Research, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

gad allon

Dr. Gad Allon is the Jeffrey A. Keswin Professor and Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions, and the director of the Management and Technology Program at the university of Pennsylvania.

He received his PhD in Management Science from Columbia Business School in New York and holds a Bachelor and Master degree from the Israeli Institute of Technology.

His research interests include operations management in general, and service operations and operations strategy in particular. Professor Allon has been studying models of information sharing among firms and customers both in service and retail settings, as well as competition models in the service industry. His articles have appeared in leading journals, including Management Science, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management and Operations Research. Professor Allon won the 2011 "Wickham Skinner Early-Career Research Award" of the Production and Operations Management Society. He is the Operations Management Department Editor of Management Science and serves on the editorial board of several journals.

Gad is an award-winning educator, teaching courses on scaling operations and operations strategy and was recently named among the "World's Top 40 B-School professors under the age of 40." He has also been an innovative leader in many educational technology initiatives. He is the co-founder of ForClass, a platform that enables professors to drive higher student engagement and accountability in their classrooms. Professor Allon regularly consults firms both on service strategy and operations strategy.

Dimitris Bertsimas

Dimitris Bertsimas is a Boeing Professor of Operations Research and the co-director of the Operations Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, recipient of numerous research awards and co-founder of six Analytics companies.

Robert M. Freund

Robert Freund is the Theresa Seley Professor in Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He conducts research in large-scale optimization – both applied and theoretical – as well as in related mathematical systems. Freund teaches MBA courses in business analytics and quantitative methods, as well as advanced courses in optimization theory. Freund is the co-author, along with Dimitris Bertsimas, of the MBA textbook Data, Models, and Decisions: the Fundamentals of Management Science.

Manolis G. Maragakis

Manolis Maragakis studied Mathematics at the University of Athens. He taught Elementary Mathematics at the Lyceum Korais during the periods 1968-1969, 1972-1978 and Elements of Advanced and Applied Mathematics at the TEI of Crete during the period 1979-2011. He has written seven books on Elementary Mathematics and three books on Advanced and Applied Mathematics. At the same time he trained diligent, persistent and intellectually mobilized young people - a training which can be built only over time and which asks for continuous osmosis, spiritual space and time - in order to successfully confront demanding competitions and to acquire essential knowledge for an easier and more decent University presence and an exciting future career.

KARTHIK NATARAJAN

Karthik Natarajan is Professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. He has won both teaching and research awards and has spent a significant part of the last twenty years working on topics discussed in the book.

Allison K. O'Hair

Allison O'Hair is a Lecturer in Operations, Information and Technology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She has a Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT, and is a former Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Amedeo R. Odoni

Dr. Amedeo Odoni is a T. Wilson Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT where he received S.B., S.M. and Ph.D. degrees.  His research and teaching have concentrated on applied probability, stochastic processes and the applications of operations research to transportation systems, especially to air transport, airports, and air traffic management.  He was one of the two original Co-Directors of the National Center of Excellence in Aviation Operations Research, established by the FAA in 1996, and is now a Co-director of the Global Airline Industry Program at MIT.  He has served as Co-Director of the Operations Research Center at MIT, as Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Science, and as a consultant in numerous projects at many airports and civil aviation organizations throughout the world.  He has received an Honorary Doctorate from the Athens University of Economics and Business, the Robert F. Herman Award for Lifetime Achievement in Transportation Science, the FAA Administrator's National Award for Excellence in Aviation Education and is a Fellow of INFORMS.

William R. Pulleyblank

William Pulleyblank is a Professor of Operations Research at the United States Military Academy, West Point. Previously he was Vice President of Business Optimization in IBM and before that led the BlueGene supercomputing project in IBM Research. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has served on a broad range of business and government advisory boards.

John N. Tsitsiklis

John Tsitsiklis is a Clarence J. Lebel Professor of Electrical Engineering, with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He is affiliated with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and the Operations Research Center.

Scott Webster

Scott Webster is the Bob Herberger Arizona Heritage Chair in Supply Chain Management at the W.P. Carey School of Business of Arizona State University. He has a B.S. in Mathematics and Statistics and a Ph.D. in Operations Management and Decision Sciences. He has worked in industry in the areas of consulting and corporate finance. He teaches undergraduate, MBA, and doctoral classes in supply chain management and he has been the recipient of numerous Whitman research and teaching awards, including the Oberwager Award for dedication to students. His research focuses on improving competitiveness through logistics, and his work has appeared in such journals as Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and Operations Research, among others. He has served on the editorial boards of Decision Sciences, Journal of Operations Management, Manufacturing & Services Operations Management, and Production and Operations Management, and was named outstanding associate editor of Decision Sciences in 2006.

Wayne L. Winston

Wayne Winston is a professor at the Kelly School of Business at Indiana University, Bloomington, in the Department of Operation & Decision Technologies. He has a Masters degree from MIT in mathematics and a Ph.D. from Yale University in operations research. Professor Winston has written several widely used textbooks on spreadsheet modeling and operations research, including Introduction to Mathematical Programming, Introduction to Probability Models, and Practical Management Science. His primary research areas are spreadsheet models, applied probability, dynamic programming, quality control, and math and sports. He teaches various spreadsheet modeling courses in the MBA program at Indiana University and has been the recipient of the Lilly Award for Teaching Excellence four times. Professor Winston is also involved in several consulting projects with companies including Eli Lilly, Bristol Myers Squibb, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, the Dallas Mavericks, and the Department of Defense and US Army. He is also a two-time Jeopardy! champion.