Management Science Area
Operations Research and Statistics

The Operations Research and Statistics (OR/STAT) group investigates scientific methods of decision making. The OR/STAT group faculty draws upon ideas from mathematics, economics, engineering, and management to contribute to a wide spectrum of application domains: Transportation, manufacturing, health care, finance, e-commerce, revenue management, to mention a few. Methodologically, the major areas of the field include optimization, stochastic systems, applied statistics and data mining. Members of the group have received major prizes from the professional societies, international organizations and the National Science Foundation, have written textbooks that are widely used in the teaching of the field throughout the world and they have significantly affected practice by their research and consulting activities. Examples of recent projects include: Air-traffic management in the US airspace, scheduling of the Panama canal, aviation safety, portfolio optimization and pricing.

Operations Research Faculty

Dimitris J. Bertsimas

Robert M. Freund is the Thersa Seley Professor of Management Science. Rob Freund does research on the theory of constrained optimization. Rob teaches courses on constrained optimization for doctoral students and courses on management science methods for MBA students.

James B. Orlin is the Edward Pennell Brooks Professor of Operations Research. Professor Orlin specializes in network and combinatorial optimization. With two colleagues, he has written a graduate-level text, Network Flows: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications (1993). This text was the winner of the 1993 Lanchester Prize for the best English language publication in Operations Research. He is also interested in applications of network optimization and combinatorial optimization to logistics and vehicle routing.

Georgia Perakis is the Sloan Career Development Associate Professor of Operations Research. Her research interests include revenue management, dynamic pricing, and competitive supply chain management. Furthermore, she studies transportation, in particular, the study of traffic in dynamic settings and as well as more generally the study of optimization and its applications in both dynamic and static settings. She has received a number of awards for her research, including the CAREER PECASE award through the National Science Foundation which is awarded by the office of the President of the United States on Science and Technology to 59 early career researchers across all fields. In Spring 2002, she was the recipient of the Graduate Teaching Award for the Sloan School of Management for excellence in teaching. In the Fall of 2002, she received the Sloan Career Development Chair. Perakis has been an Associate Editor for the journal Management Science (1998-2002), as well as for the special issue of Management Science in Auctions and is currently an Area Editor in the area of Supply Chain Management and Services for the journal Networks and Spatial Economics and the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Revenue Management and Pricing. Perakis was elected at the Informs Council in 2003 and is the current chair of the Pricing and Revenue Management Section of the Informs society.

Andreas Schulz is The Class of 1958 Associate Professor of Operations Research. He teaches courses on the theory and practice of optimization and decision making. His main area of research is mathematical programming; his current interests include algorithmic game theory, approximation algorithms, combinatorial auctions, combinatorial optimization, integer programming, local search, network flows, online algorithms, polyhedral combinatorics, project management, and scheduling. He is on the editorial board of the INFORMS Journal on Computing and the Journal of Scheduling as well as a past editor of Operations Research.