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INDUSTRIAL & SYSTEMS
ENGINEERING
Driving Change Reimagining transportation systems
ALSO INSIDE
MODELING COVID FIRST LOOK: A NEW HOME FOR ISYE
CONTENTS FEATURES
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ISyE Ushering a New Era in a New Home A $33 million renovation will bring ISyE faculty, staff, and students under one roof in a 21st century space designed with collaboration in mind.
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Driving Change Yiling Zhang is modeling major changes to the way we buy goods online and travel by bus.
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COVID Contingency Planning How ISyE faculty are helping universities reopen safely.
DEPARTMENTS
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Faculty Undergraduate Program Graduate Program Alumni
ON THE COVER: ISyE Assistant Professor Yiling Zhang, who has been researching methods to improve last-mile delivery and electric transit.
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering 100 Union Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455
Department Head Saif Benjaafar
Director of Faculty and Academic Affairs Jean-Philippe Richard
Email: isye@umn.edu Phone: 612-624-1582
Director of Graduate Studies William L. Cooper
Department Administrator Hongna Bystrom
www.isye.umn.edu
Director of Undergraduate Studies Lisa Miller
Editor and Design Sam Schaust
Message from the Department Head
bers continues to be recognized by numerous awards and published in the very best journals in the field. Our graduate program has continued to climb in the US News and World Report ranking and is now among the top 25 programs in the nation.
Distinguished McKnight University Professor and ISyE Department Head
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he pandemic has given us a glimpse of perhaps not too distant a future where many products and services will be accessed on-demand anytime anywhere via online platforms, from tele-health and distance learning, to online shopping. I believe industrial engineers will play a crucial role in shaping this future and reimagining how products and services are designed, manufactured, and delivered. In the pages of this magazine, you will find inspiring stories about how our faculty, students, and alumni are not only helping us navigate the pandemic but also reimagining our world for this post-pandemic future. While I am optimistic about the future, there is no denying that this year has been a year of many challenges. The pandemic has forced us to adapt to new ways of communicating, learning, and collaborating. We have been particularly mindful of how this is impacting our students and we have doubled down on the amount of time we work with our students one-on-one and in small groups. As a result, we made the mental health and well being of everyone in ISyE a priority. The last few months have challenged us
in other ways. The killing of George Floyd and its aftermath has led to the realization that we need to do more, not only in increasing the diversity among our ranks, but also in ensuring that all members of the ISyE community feel welcome, respected, and supported. As a department, we have come together in committing to engage even more with the black community and other communities of color. Notwithstanding the challenges we faced, 2020 has also been a year of many successes for ISyE. Both the undergraduate and graduate programs continue to grow. Enrollments in our courses are at an alltime high. Our Senior Design projects and our MS in Analytics capstones continue to attract strong support and involvement from industry, with more than 20 funded projects expected this year. In partnership with the Departments of Computer Science and Statistics, we have launched a new undergraduate degree in Data Science, which we expect to attract many new students. We have recruited two new outstanding faculty members, including Professor Alex Estes, featured in this magazine. The research of our faculty mem-
We are grateful to the many of you who are contributing to the growth and success of ISyE, including the leadership of the college, our advisory board, our collaborators and supporters from industry, and our alumni. To all of you, and to the many other friends of the department, a big thank you! As usual, I will end with a request: please get and stay in touch. Are you inspired by something you read here? Do you have an idea for a project? Would you like to support student scholarships or faculty research? Please send me an email or give me a call.
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the challenges we faced, 2020 has also been a year of many successes for ISyE. —Saif Benjaafar
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Saif Benjafaar
We are thrilled that the Lind Hall renovation is underway (read the feature story in this magazine). Once the 33 million-dollar renovation is complete in 2022, ISyE will have a new permanent and cohesive home. The renovated building, in the historic core of the campus, will feature state-of-the-art facilities: office spaces, classrooms, study spaces, and graduate research labs. A hallmark of the building will be the many open interaction spaces that we hope will encourage spur of the moment discussion and collaboration.
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Faculty
Saif Benjafaar
Distinguished McKnight University Professor and ISyE Department Head PhD, Purdue, 1992 Operations management, supply chains, service systems, sharing economy, sustainability
Sherwin Doroudi Assistant Professor
PhD, Carnegie Mellon, 2016 Stochastic modeling, queuing systems, computer security
Krishnamurthy Iyer Associate Professor
PhD, Stanford, 2012 Game theory, applied probability, economics and computation, stochastic modeling
William Cooper
Director of Graduate Studies and Professor PhD, Georgia Tech, 1999 Stochastic modeling, pricing, revenue management, applied probability
Darin England
Teaching Assistant Professor
PhD, University of Minnesota, 2006 Optimization, simulation, machine learning
Kevin Leder
Associate Professor PhD, Brown, 2008 Stochastic modeling, cancer evolution, probability theory
Ying Cui
Assistant Professor PhD, National University of Singapore, 2016 Optimization, stochastic programming, operations research
Alex Estes
Assistant Professor
PhD, University of Maryland, 2018 Combinatorial optimization, air traffic management, machine learning
Zhaosong Lu Professor
PhD, Georgia Tech, 2005 Continuous optimization, statistics, data analtyics, machine learning, image proceessing
Faculty
Ankur Mani
Assistant Professor PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Tech, 2013 Peer and network interactions, pricing, matching and mechanism design
Shuzhong Zhang Professor
PhD, Erasmus University, 1991 Nonlinear optimization, game theory, signal processing, risk management
Karen Donohue Affiliated Faculty
Board of Overseers Professor Carlson School of Management, UMN
Lisa Miller
Distinguished Teaching Professor and Director of Undegraduate Studies PhD, Georgia Tech, 2002 Optimization, analytics, operations research
Yiling Zhang
Assistant Professor
PhD, University of Michigan, 2019 Stochastic, integer and nonlinear programming, energy systems, healthcare, transportation
Mingyi Hong Affiliated Faculty
Assistant Professor Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UMN
Jean-Philippe Richard Professor
PhD, Georgia Tech, 2002 Mathematical optimization, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure
Tony Haitao Cui Affiliated Faculty
Deputy Associate Dean for Global DBA, Professor Carlson School of Management, UMN
Alireza Khani Affiliated Faculty
Assistant Professor Department of Civil, Environmental, and GeoEngineering, UMN
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New Faculty Joining ISyE
Welcome to Alexander Estes Assistant Professor PhD, University of Maryland, 2018 Joined: Fall 2020 Why did you become a professor of industrial engineering? When I graduated high school I didn’t really have an idea of what I wanted to do. It’s really hard to get an idea of what any field is like. I chose math because it was something I did well at in high school. I figured I’d do well with it in college and it’d be pretty useful. After some research experiences as an undergrad, I knew I wanted something that was a little more tied to the real world and with industry connections. I came across operations research and became especially interested in combinatorial optimization. I did a combinatorics sequence in my undergrad and that had been one of my favorite sequences. It seemed like that could be a good way to go. That’s how I got the idea of doing industrial engineering or operations research. What are your research interests and how do you hope to leverage them at the University of Minnesota? In my work as a PhD student, I talked with people from the Federal Aviation Association and the airlines, so I have some perspective on the industry side. I know what people have published and what people like to see published from that community. At the same time, having my industry insight from working with Target is also valuable. The Fortune 500 companies and the healthcare connection in the Twin Cities offers a lot of opportunities for collaboration. In our field of industrial and systems engineering, those collaborations are important. You can do good work without having collaboration, but if you can get data or insight—or just talk to an industry person and understand what problems they’re facing—that’s really valuable for the field. Do you see opportunities to collaborate with ISyE faculty? I’m definitely excited to continue collaborating with Jean-Phillipe Richard. There are a lot of people in ISyE who I’d be excited to work with. The recent hires, Ying Cui and Yiling Zhang, are doing optimization stuff that’s very exciting to me. Then there is Kris Iyer, who was talking about infinite dimensional optimization, which I think sounds really cool. Bill Cooper has done a lot of work in airline revenue management. If I’m looking to keep doing some air traffic management work with revenue management in there, that would be great. There are a lot of great opportunities and talent within the ISyE department.
Advisory Board
Eric Ayenegui
Mondher Ben Hamida
Director, Operations Engineering Cintas Corporation Member since: 2019
WW BPR Product Operations Apple Member since: 2019
Christine England
Megan Trickey Brosnan Member since: 2019
Betsy Enstrom
Mitchell DeJong, PhD Chief Technology Officer Design Ready Controls Member since: 2015
Jeremiah Johnson
Global Demand and Supply Chain Planning Capabilities Lead General Mills Member since: 2015
Manager, Advanced Analytics Testing IDeaS Revenue Solutions Member since: 2015
Senior Manager, Global Enterprise Excellence Consultant Boston Scientific Member since: 2014
Brent Kellum
Brian Naslund
Nicole Nelson
Director, Strategic Pricing Daikin Applied Member since: 2017
Director, Engineering Collins Aerospace Member since: 2019
Vice President, Pricing and Merchandising Analytics Best Buy Member since: 2020
Kalyan Pasupathy, PhD
John Zaic
Jeffrey T. Zudock
Scientific Director Mayo Clinic Member since: 2019
Northern Plains IE Training and Development Manager UPS Member since: 2019
Global Improve Manager ExxonMobil Member since: 2018
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Department News
ISyE Ushering a New Era in a New Home A $33 million renovation will bring ISyE faculty, staff, and students under one roof in a 21st century space designed with collaboration in mind.
In January 2023, the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department (ISyE) will have a new home. Construction in Lind Hall is set to start this summer and, when complete, will bring together ISyE faculty, staff, and students under one roof. ISyE’s relocation from several buildings on the East Bank campus to Lind Hall is part of a multimillion-dollar renovation. Plans to revitalize the century-old Lind Hall will expand upon the 2012 renovation to the building’s first floor. The basement floor, second, third, and fourth floors of Lind Hall will be transformed into a modern and high-tech environment designed to encourage collaboration. The new Lind Hall will also house part of the Computer Science department, the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, and the College of Science and Engineering’s Student Services offices.
Rendering courtesy of Collaborative Design Group.
“This renovation is a major milestone for us,” says ISyE Department Head Saif Benjaafar. “It puts an exclamation point on the growth and transformation we have seen in recent years.” Features of the multi-floor renovation include offices for faculty, staff, and graduate students, multiple classrooms, including several designed for active learning, and conferences rooms and student study spaces. Most areas of the building will be punctuated by open interaction spaces with white boards and informal seating to encourage spur of the moment discussion. “In designing the space, we have tried to move away from a traditional office arrangement where faculty, staff, and students are siloed from each other. We wanted a space that mixes everyone with everyone and that favors shared and multi-purpose space,” says Benjaafar. Transparency and natural light will be a strong feature of the renovated building with many areas opened up to let natural light pour in from the expansive windows facing Church Street.
Johona Harris, who is senior interior designer of Collaborative Design Group, the company heading the renovation project, believes Lind Hall will become a dynamic space with a lasting quality. “Our design goals include [making spaces that are] timeless, clean-line, and modern,” says Harris, “yet have classic aesthetics with a subtle color palette.” The new Lind Hall aims to encourage flow between floors. The connection between the two-story Taylor Center and the second floor will be reopened. Four sets of stairs will also connect the first and second floor, including through the Taylor Center. A Starbucks will continue to be a feature of the first floor and a venue for faculty, students, and staff to bump into each other. From the beginning, making spontaneous interactions happen was central to the Lind Hall redesign, according to ISyE Department Administrator Hongna Bystrom. “The feedback that we hear all the time is that our faculty members are very accessible to students,” she says. “With the new space we believe we will do even better.”
Lind Hall Renovation Features Third Floor facing northwest • New teaching spaces, including a 65-seat classroom • Multiple conference rooms and meeting spaces • Seminar space for large lecture • Faculty offices
Third Floor Second Floor facing northwest • Public lounges and study spaces for students • Several conference rooms and informal huddle spaces for meetings • Pod offices designed to spur interaction between graduate students • Offices for faculty and staff • Natural light throughout
Third FloorFloor Basement facing northwest • Shared computer lab • Several meeting spaces for small groups • Office areas for student groups • Teaching Assistant offices and consultation rooms • Four high-tech classrooms where many ISyE classes will be taught
Top: A view of the student lounge, which will be across the hall from a glass-walled conference room. (Renderings courtesy of Collaborative Design Group) Bottom: Behind the front desk of the ISyE office area will be a series of conference rooms and informal huddle spaces for students, staff, and faculty.
Top: Open and interactive learning spaces will punctuate the building. Bottom: The corridors between classrooms on the third floor of Lind Hall are designed to feel more spacious and illuminated.
Ch an ge in g iv Dr T Yiling Zhang is modeling major changes to the way we buy goods online and travel by bus. By Sam Schaust
he pandemic dramatically transformed the relationship between American households and online delivery services. What once felt like a convenience turned into a necessity for many families and individuals who felt safer on their couch than in the aisles of a retail store. Early this summer, Americans spent more money online than they had over the 2019 holiday period, according to Adobe Analytics. Online spending in June 2020, for instance, reached $73 billion in the U.S.—a nearly 80 percent uptick year-over-year—as households opted to buy consumer electronics, apparel, and grocery items over the Internet. ISyE Assistant Professor Yiling Zhang believes the pandemic has accelerated the demand for e-commerce, particularly for businesses that once considered it secondary to their store-
front operations. Zhang has been researching last-mile delivery, which focuses on the logistics behind transporting goods over the “last mile”—from a store or a warehouse to a person’s residence. With funding from the University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies, Zhang is developing a model that businesses large and small can adopt to remain competitive with Amazon, Walmart, and other retailers with an established delivery system. To build a last-mile delivery service, Zhang says there are two main aspects to consider: design/planning, and operations. At the design and planning stage, it’s about numbers. “You’ll want to know how many professional and crowdsourced drivers to
hire, how many vehicles to purchase, and how many of each should be located at different locations,” she explained. If there’s an uptick in deliveries or a shortage of crowdsourced drivers, the need to hire professional drivers increases, otherwise delivery performance could suffer. At the operations level, it’s about logistics. Customer demand can fluctuate at random, which means order sizes and customer geography can change daily. “The main question I want to answer is how do you balance paying a moderate rate for delivery operations while achieving satisfactory delivery speeds to the customer,” says Zhang. Her ultimate goal is to provide a robust system that helps businesses allocate the right resources. “The general methodology and tools provided by this research can be easily adapted to different retail models,” says Zhang. “There could also be benefits for nonprofit or government organizations. For example, this type of platform could be a way to deliver critical social services, like periodic health check-ups for the elderly.” Zhang is teaming up with ISyE Professor Saif Benjaafar to incorporate a multidisciplinary approach. The models they are developing use techniques from stochastic optimization, network optimization, and economic analysis. Moreover, they plan to validate their models using data from two major retailers. “We want to test the effectiveness of our models on actual cases and we’re going to do that by leveraging data from real companies,” says Benjaafar. “But our goal is not just to use data to validate our algorithms. There might be an opportunity to implement these algorithms in the field and then do a pilot of some sort to test their effectiveness. At that point, we could measure how much they’ve actually improved performance.”
“Our models can be applied easily to different fields, including the delivery of social services to communities in need.” Yiling Zhang, ISyE Assistant Professor
Metro Transit lauched its first fleet of battery electric buses in 2019. (Photo courtesy of Metro Transit)
Going Electric Zhang’s fascination with transportation and operations efficiency goes beyond last-mile delivery. She received funding from the Center for Transportation Studies for a second project—this one on the electrification of transit systems. Cities around the world are increasingly investing in battery electric buses, also known as BEBs. Metro Transit, the primary transit provider in the Twin Cities, recently took steps to replace its diesel bus lines with BEBs, while simultaneously mapping out new bus routes. In addition to its 900 buses serving an average of 225,000 customers every weekday, Metro Transit introduced eight BEBs in early 2019 to service a new rapid transit route called Line C. A critical component of Zhang’s study is to map out an electronic charging station infrastructure that Metro Transit can use to expand BEBs to new routes. “Given the existing charging stations in the city and the current bus schedule, our goal is to maintain the current bus schedule as much as possible,” she says. Zhang is teaming up with two University of Minnesota faculty: Ying Song (Department of Geography, Environment, and Society) and Alireza Khani (Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geo- Engineering). According to Khani, Metro Transit’s Line C currently uses two charging facilities—one at each end of the route. However, expanding BEBs to new routes isn’t as easy as copying the Line C template for diesel buses.
“There is not a one-size-fit-all model for charging station locations,” says Khani, who is also an ISyE affiliated faculty member. “There are many factors such as bus facilities, power supply, and land availability that contribute to selecting an optimal network of charging stations.” Zhang and her collaborators are building their model with the world in mind. They believe their BEB network can be mapped to cities with comparable daily ridership. “Our research will develop methodologies that can be general and applicable to similar transit systems,” Khani says while naming Denver, Portland, and Dallas as immediate examples. Those methodologies could later be tweaked to accommodate for changes in population density, route length, climate, and other factors. Challenges aside, the researchers are driven by the many advantages that come with a switch to electric-powered transit. “There are financial benefits,” says Zhang. “Electrical buses require less maintenance, so there are reduced maintenance costs. The fuel costs are also lower.” For Song, quality of life is another reason to move in this direction. “While buses are serving areas with the most need,” she explains, “those areas are also receiving the most negative environmental impacts such as congestion and bad air quality. Replacing the diesel buses with battery electric buses would potentially mitigate the emissions around these disadvantaged communities.”
How ISyE faculty are helping universities reopen safely.
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midst a pandemic, how do you safely operate a campus? If you ask ISyE Assistant Professor Ankur Mani, he will tell you: “That’s a systems and operations question.” COVID-19 simulations across the globe have been lacking an industrial engineering perspective, according to Mani. “None of them have taken a network-based approach to the problem,” he says. “They take a homogeneous population-based approach that ignores the structured nature of human interactions in the built environments. You need to take a twosided network approach of people and places.”
could be created online with designated arrival and service times, thus avoiding physical waiting and reducing interactions,” says Mani. However, groups are the most difficult to control. “Part of the reason why,” says Mani, “is because it constrains the freedom you have on campus within classes or groups. The big risk in the system today is not because of community transmission inside the system, but transmission from outside.”
or individual testing positive for COVID19—would allow for safe operations on campus. This was a surprising and valuable finding because it provided a safe way of operating the University campus without the massive cost of testing being implemented in other schools. Their predictions about the number of community infections remain accurate more than halfway through the Fall 2020 semester when this article was published.
For example, approximately 80 percent of University of Minnesota students live off campus, and most faculty, staff, and visitors come from surrounding areas, as well.
“The number of new infections coming from the outside will hopefully be very small—two or three on average [per day]—but what we want to do is mitigate the community transmission,” says Mani. “This is what we are focusing on.”
Industrial and systems engineers are uniquely equipped to dissect large-scale problems—such as a public health emergency—and design new, more efficient operations. That’s why as higher education institutions sent everyone home or locked down in the spring, Mani started to wonder if there was another way to protect a campus community from COVID-19. He started by partnering with ISyE Associate Professor Krishnamurthy Iyer and Computer Science Professor Jaideep Srivastava. Together, they discovered how to keep a university running and relatively safe. Their solution: Close the busiest locations while monitoring sparsely visited ones.
So Mani assembled a multidisciplinary team to evaluate operational policies under a pandemic. Together with ISyE PhD student Jiali Huang, computer science graduate students Himanshu Kharkwal, Dakota Olson, and Abhiraj Mohan, and in consultation with ISyE Associate Professor Krishnamurthy Iyer and public health experts, Mani and Srivastava created a stochastic network simulation framework to evaluate campus operations. Their efforts culminated into a series of back-to-school protocols that would guide students, faculty, staff, and visitors back into campus. The team tested various aspects of the plan, including a face covering requirement.
“If we shut down only the top 10 percent of the places—high traffic areas—we would have a similar impact to what happened in a city, like New York City, where everything shut down,” says Mani.
“One thing universities should look for are low-cost, high-impact actions they can take,” says Mani. “We demonstrated that without masks there would be no classes. The marginal cost of putting on a mask is minimal—a big bang for the buck.”
This structural approach is even more important for smaller environments such as university campuses. Along with his colleagues, Mani determined a way to measure all types of campus interactions. “We can classify all interaction structures on campus as rivers, groups, and queues,” says Mani. In his example, rivers are the campus pathways and walkways; groups are formed within classrooms and university activities; and queues are the service lines at places like banks and cafes. “Rivers and queues admit easy solutions. All rivers could be made one-way while maintaining sufficient distance. All queues
In the end, the extensive testing and modeling done by Mani and his colleagues have provided universities with concrete guidance on how to reopen safely. A paper based on this research was recently submitted for publication.
“The marginal cost of putting on a mask is minimal — a big bang for the buck.”
The researchers went on to review university plans for enhanced cleaning practices, its testing capacity, ventilation rates in buildings, maximum class sizes for in-person learning, and a system for maintaining physical distance around campus and in classrooms. The team also modeled solutions for the risk of infection. Their findings suggested that protocols such as the University of Minnesota Mtest—a plan of action for testing, isolating, contact tracing, and quarantining in the event of an outbreak
Ankur Mani, ISyE Assistant Professor
Undergraduate Student Spotlight
Stranded in Europe During the Pandemic It was Claire Minea’s long-held dream to visit Italy. Nearly two years of planning culminated in the moment Minea finally stepped foot in Florence, Italy for a threeand-a-half month learning abroad experience starting January 8. “During the time I was there, I was having the time of my life,” Minea says. Mapping out her class schedule early on as an undergraduate allowed Minea to take mostly elective classes in Italy, including an Italian language course and a drawing course—the latter of which paired well with Italy’s breathtaking scenery. She also interned at a civil engineering company where everyone spoke Italian.
Over the course of her stay, Minea took full advantage of her learning abroad experience. She went horseback riding in the Italian countryside; soaked up the sun on the beach of Nice, France; sipped sangrias in Barcelona, Spain; and went paragliding overtop a small Swiss town. All of this—and a trip to London—were accomplished before her return to Minneapolis in March. Now entering her senior year, Minea looks back at her time abroad and encourages other students to plan ahead if they want a similar experience. “Try to pursue where you want to go and don’t let your curriculum dictate all of it,” says Minea. “It’s a once in a lifetime experience.”
“ It was always my dream to go to Italy and when I finally got there I felt so connected. It made it easier to be away from home. —Claire Minea, senior
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Photo courtesy of Claire Minea
It was during a short stay in Sicily that Minea received news that her learning abroad experience was being upended by COVID-19. So on March 6, she quickly returned to Florence, packed up her things, and left the country all in the same day. Although Italy was locked down, much of Europe remained open.
Minea says her and her classmates’ mentality was “we’re not leaving, we’re staying in Europe.” Together, they explored Europe for the next couple of weeks before returning to Minneapolis, where she completed her Italy-based courses online.
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Undergraduate Student Highlights Developing Tomorrow’s Tech at Microsoft ISyE junior Governess Simpson spent her summer building a business strategy with experts at Microsoft in anticipation of a new product launch that could affect the entire Windows ecosystem.
(Photo courtesy of Governess Simpson)
Prior to the pandemic, Governess Simpson was planning to temporarily relocate to Redmond, Washington for a summer internship at Microsoft’s headquarters. “Though I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be experiencing the internship in-person,” says Simpson, “I’m grateful Microsoft was able to make the transition to a virtual format as seamless as possible.” Simpson’s U of M experience opened the door to a career in technology, an industry that she had not considered before joining the Industrial and Systems Engineering program. As a Program Manager Intern at Microsoft, her interest in technology only grew. According to Simpson, the internship managed to merge the problem-solving and logic-based skills she learned in engineering courses with that of a people-man-
agement role. “It’s an extremely collaborative role; I spent over 75 percent of my day in meetings with my fellow employees discussing aspects of [a new] product, such as the targeted market, its design, and what implications the [product’s] features will bring to the entire Windows ecosystem,” says Simpson. “I’m learning how to run meetings with key stakeholders and develop a business strategy plan.” The development of this new product covered the entirety of Simpson’s three-month internship as she worked with the company’s marketing, sales, and engineering staff. “I was in charge of driving a vision for a product rather than the implementation of it,” says Simpson. “That experience was very rewarding—and fun, as well!”
Crafting Efficient Systems for Cargill Agricultural business Cargill hired ISyE senior Imad Diomande to evaluate trials at two of its plants and create a market data exchange system.
(Photo courtesy of Imad Diomande)
Cargill hired ISyE senior Imad Diomande over the summer as a supply chain intern within its strategic sourcing team. In his role, Diomande was tasked with several projects: He coordinated and evaluated tests of a new chemical in two Cargill plants, and designed a system to facilitate the exchange of market data between his team members. “Process design and system thinking are some of the core skills of the ISyE degree,” he says. “It has helped me design a process that would help [Cargill’s] team work more efficiently.” Diomande, who is also majoring in Agricultural and Food Business Management, plans to continue his education beyond his senior year as one of the ISyE department’s first students to enroll in the Inte-
grated Bachelor’s and Master’s Program. He sees the integrated degree program as a unique way to work a career in data science. “I hope to expand my horizon in analytics to be able to manipulate data in a way that would allow me to make better decisions,” Diomande says about the integrated degree program. “Being able to handle data and apply it to make decisions in a manufacturing or supply chain setting is critical to creating value.”
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The integrated degree program is an opportunity that is very hard to pass on.
—Imad Diomande, senior
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2019-2020 Dr. Alan L. Eliason Undergraduate Achievement in ISyE Award Recipients
Cassandra Anderson
Kayla Johnson
Erin Momany
Kenneth Chuhairy
Rachel Kukielka
Kayla Olson
Emma Ehling
Erin Larson
Elisabeth Smith
Lyndon Hills
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Senior Design Projects
Seniors Reinvent a Healthcare Supply Chain In Spring 2020, 10 companies sponsored 17 Senior Design projects. Project teams of four to five seniors worked to address important issues affecting these businesses. The teams conducted site visits, collected data, developed models, and performed analysis to provide their sponsors with fresh perspectives and insights intended to address important challenges. Simultaneously, students practiced hands-on approaches to solving problems in a real-world setting.
Boston Scientific improved visibility of their inventory once a product reached its customer.
One group was tasked with developing a new inventory management system for Boston Scientific Corporation, a medical device company with more than 22,000 UPNs (unique product numbers) that generate upwards of 6.5 million orders annually.
Typically, Boston Scientific’s inventory management system reacted to order placements: hospitals and health centers would request a product and then receive it from one of Boston Scientific’s warehouses. However, once products reached the customer, Boston Scientific did not know when (or if) a product was used. With real-time usage data, the team of seniors believed Boston Scientific could drastically improve its demand forecasting processes and inventory management. Moreover, the company would be able to save millions of dollars annually and eliminate waste from products with high inventory and little demand.
The project, managed by ISyE seniors Cassie Anderson, Brooklyn Berenz, Ji Woong Choi, Sam Loidolt, and Tyler Rouze, was complex in every regard. Their goal was to determine how
Meetings with Boston Scientific employees and hospital staff provided insights that the team of seniors used to outline a centralized database. They began by tracking implantable devices that
were sold in the U.S. The team determined that Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) cabinets were the best solution for Boston Scientific and their customers. Products could be stored in the RFID cabinets and removed as needed, meaning hospitals wouldn’t be burdened with extra inventory-tracking steps when providing care. At the same time, the RFID cabinets would capture nearly immediate point of use information, which could be shared with Boston Scientific. In the end, the team of seniors handed off their recommendation guide to Boston Scientific for implementation domestically and, potentially, worldwide. Other groups of ISyE seniors did the same for their sponsors. Despite the second half of their work all taking place remotely, each team successfully provided solutions to the problems posed by their sponsors across a range of industries.
ISyE seniors (right to left) Ji Woong Choi, Cassie Anderson, Brooklyn Berenz, Tyler Rouze, and Sam Loidolt toured Boston Scientific’s facility in Maple Grove, Minnesota. During their tour, the group learned about the company’s warehouse operations, as well as gained a better understanding of the functions of specific medical devices. (Photo courtesy of Rebecca Slater)
Sponsors of 2020 Projects All Flex — CAD Set-Up Group Capacity Model Andersen Windows and Doors — Inbound Material Flow Boston Scientific — Analytical Lab Process Improvement Boston Scientific — Customer-Facing Facility Redesign Boston Scientific — Packaging Lab Flow Improvement Boston Scientific — R&D Lab Redesign
Boston Scientific — Product Flow Monitoring System
Heraeus Medical Components — Optimal Line Flow for a Medical Device Assembly
Boston Scientific — Real-time Operations Metric Visibility
Heraeus Medical Components — New Equipment Process Development
Cintas — Quality Management System
Stratasys — Layout Analysis
Daikin Applied — Job Life Cycle Analysis
West Monroe Partners — Mechatronic Tabletop
Daikin Applied — Design Ready Controls Process Improvement
United Parcel Service — Cross Facility Sport Load Balance
ExxonMobil — Demonstrated Service Level Measurement
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Graduate Student Spotlight
New Opportunities in a New Country Abdalla Osman was born in Somalia, raised in Kenya, and for much of his life dreamed of moving to America. “Growing up in Kenya, there isn’t much future unless you come from a well-established family,” Osman says. Using what money he had, Osman relocated to Minneapolis in 2005. He took up a job in the neighborhood Kmart, but quickly discovered making $7 an hour wasn’t enough to support himself as well as his family back in Kenya. To make more money, he left for Chicago to be a cab driver. Although the pay was better, Osman couldn’t get over the feeling of being stuck in a career without future prospects. “I had no educational background and no other experience,” he says. Osman decided to enroll in some English as a second language classes and, eventually in 2014, move back to Minneapolis to be with his wife. Osman wasn’t yet sure what career he wanted for himself. “I didn’t have a plan,” he admits. Even to this day, Osman likens his life approach to train-hopping. “I was jumping from one train to another,” he said. “If it worked I’d stay on that train, but if it didn’t I’d jump to another.” A three-month internship at US Bank led Osman to take on a job in banking and finance after receiving his M.S. in Analytics. (Photo courtesy of Abdalla Osman)
His pursuit for a better life led him to Metropolitan State University, where he enrolled in classes that struck his interest. “I didn’t know what to do, so I took an economics course,” says Osman. “I liked it, except [to continue in] economics you have to know some math.” Osman had never taken a math course in his life. In order to enroll in his first precalculus class, “I realized I needed to take all of these courses,” Osman says. To prepare for his placement test, he poured dozens of hours into learning algebra and prerequisite material in a short span of time. Ultimately, it paid off. In May 2018, Osman received his bachelor’s in mathematics and economics with a minor in statistics. Yet Osman’s hunger to learn wasn’t satiated. After some searching, Osman enrolled in the M.S. in Analytics program offered by the Department of Industrial and Systems Engi-
neering at the University of Minnesota. “What I liked is it takes all of these backgrounds—economics, applied math, and statistics—and puts them together into production,” says Osman. As an analytics student, Osman’s career aspirations started to take shape. He enjoyed the classes he was taking, but didn’t know to which industry he could apply his growing skillset. Then one day Professor William Cooper shared with Osman information about an internship opportunity at US Bank. “I liked it right away,” says Osman about his internship experience there. “It combined several things I enjoy doing, including modeling, programming, dealing with data, and connecting it all with the economy.” What he learned at his internship and in the Analytics Track led to three job offers before
Osman had his degree in hand. In the end, he took an offer from Wells Fargo, where he officially started in June. At Wells Fargo, Osman works as a Quantitative Analytics Specialist. His role is relatively new within the banking system. In response to the Great Recession of 2008, the Federal Reserve now requires banks to stringently forecast commercial losses, according to Osman. He and his team use forecasting models to predict whether a company could default on a loan. Looking back at his journey from Somalia to Kenya, and now to his new life in America, Osman hopes his story would influence others. “The beauty is that with a rough background you can still accomplish your dreams,” says Osman. “The analytics program changed my life more than I could have imagined.”
Graduate Student Highlights
ISyE Grad Student Named Full Fellow of GEM ISyE graduate student Anthony Roberts was named a Full Fellow of a national engineering organization.
Anthony Roberts, a second-year master’s student within ISyE’s Analytics Track, was chosen as a Full Fellow of The National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science (GEM). GEM offers tuition coverage, a stipend, and professional development opportunities to under-represented students pursuing graduate degrees in engineering and science. Roberts’ fellowship will cover his entire two years at the University of Minnesota. As the first member in his family to earn a college degree, Roberts said he was “beyond elated” upon hearing the news of his selection.
Photo courtesy of Anthony Roberts
“GEM has offered me tremendous opportunities,” says Roberts. “Not only do I get to attend graduate school, but also gain professional experiences thanks to the network of employer
sponsors in GEM.” When Roberts isn’t occupied with his graduate coursework, he’s working for MITRE Corporation, a not-for-profit organization that manages federally funded research and development centers operated by the U.S. government. At MITRE, Roberts recently transitioned from the position of High-Performance Computing Engineer to Health Systems Engineer. “I love MITRE,” Roberts says. “It’s filled with smart people and their mission is very noble.” Outside of work and school, Roberts is active in professional organization, among them INFORMS, IISE, and the National Association of Black Engineers. Recently, he wrapped up a three-year term as alumni association board member for his alma mater, Northern Illinois University.
Advancing Facebook’s Data Infrastructure ISyE PhD student Jiali Huang made the most of her remote summer internship with Facebook, during which she managed to improve the company’s data storage system.
Photo courtesy of Jiali Huang
The pandemic provided an unexpected twist to ISyE PhD student Jiali Huang’s summer internship. Before the lockdown, she had been preparing to move to Seattle from June to August to work at Facebook as a Data Scientist Intern (Infrastructure Strategy). Instead of meeting her mentor, work partners, and managers in person—as she did at her summer internship with Lyft last year—Huang instead met them all virtually. Yet this disruption and distance didn’t stop her from taking on challenging projects for one of the world’s largest technology companies. “During my internship, I built discrete optimization models to explore the idea of Regional Block Placement for the Storage team, who manages the storage of Facebook’s data,” says Huang. Every other week, Huang would meet up with her mentor and two engineers in her partner team to provide each other progress updates as they worked toward their goal of improved data optimization. Being apart from her colleagues gave Huang an experience she hadn’t previously
received during her in-person internship with Lyft. “Working proactively on projects and communicating effectively is extremely important during a remote internship,” she says. “On the positive side, I was able to focus more on my project and the improvement of my technical and communication skills.” In the end, Huang says her project significantly increased Facebook’s data availability and balanced service times across the company’s data storage facilities. Doing so required extensive analysis with her team, including an examination of the availability and service time of data reading, while also factoring in operational needs, such as maintenance and unexpected failure events for Facebook’s many data warehouses. However, there were aspects of the in-person internship that Huang wishes had been possible. “I was not able to walk around the office, chatting with different people, and participating in various intern events,” says Huang, which together would have created a sense of company culture she missed.
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Alumni Spotlight Managing Scientists at Google
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The world of education is up for a major transformation... [but] the ISyE department is well positioned to keep up with these trends and will continue to grow and prosper. —Maher A. Lahmar, Head of Data Science, Google Customer Solutions
Photo courtesy of Maher A. Lahmar
It was the late-90s and Maher A. Lahmar had just completed his Master’s in Industrial Engineering at Bilkent University in Turkey. After a period of contemplation, he started to seriously consider pursuing a PhD. It was one of Lahmar’s friends from America who encouraged him to consider the University of Minnesota. Although the cold weather intimidated Lahmar, it was the cordiality he immediately received from ISyE faculty that convinced him to move to Minnesota instead of attending another institution. “When I came to the PhD program,” he says, “I had more of a manufacturing and production background.” But in the
United States, Lahmar recognized the services industry was booming, which meant demand was growing for engineers capable of developing systems and solving domain-agnostic problems. Looking back, he believes the knowledge he gained as a PhD student equipped him to solve many of today’s problems. “I worked on sequencing and scheduling problems,” Lahmar says. “The underlying mixed-integer and dynamic programming solution frameworks were generic enough to allow me to transfer those skills to problems I tackled [years later] at PROS and Target when solving pricing optimization problems” for the airlines
and retail industries. The same goes for Markov Decision Processes, which Lahmar explored as a PhD student and now uses as part of the Machine Learning models that assign advertiser accounts to the right service team in his current job at Google. Similarly, Lahmar says the elective graduate statistics courses he took at the University of Minnesota gave him the foundation to develop Regression and Bayesian time-series models that he uses now to measure business impact—a critical KPI in allocating resources within Google. “These techniques that used to be limited in scope outside academia are now
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Department Honors & Awards Kevin Leder Awarded Grant Funding for Cancer Therapy Proposal being adopted more widely as data science goes mainstream,” says Lahmar, the current Head of Data Science at Google Customer Solutions. “I consider myself fortunate enough to have had the chance to work at forward-looking companies that are eager to test and implement cutting-edge data solutions to business problems at scale.” After working for Target, Walmart, IBM and others, Lahmar now manages a multidisciplinary team of 15 data scientists at Google. His team is made up of particle physicists, astrophysicists, economists, statisticians, industrial engineers, materials scientists, among others. Looking back at his years at the University of Minnesota, Lahmar again believes it was the faculty—many of whom are still with the ISyE department—who gave him the direction he needed to succeed today. In one instance, Lahmar was being challenged by the high standards for writing in English held by scholarly publications in his field of study. “My advisor Saif Benjaafar highlighted the importance of communication skills,” Lahmar says. “To be successful, [Benjaafar told me] I need to have a growth mindset and strive to go beyond my current challenges and be the best in everything I do. This was one of the most genuine pieces of career advice that I continue to cherish till today.” Years after graduating from the ISyE department, Lahmar says he is “fascinated” by how his PhD experience deeply shaped his career. At Google, Lahmar has a keen ability to quickly spot process inefficiencies, frame business problems, and transform them to mathematical models. “These are some of the critical skills,” he says, “that I developed at the University of Minnesota and now apply daily in my current role.”
Leder’s research will be done collaboratively with faculty from the University of Minnesota and the University of Oslo.
The Norwegian Centennial Chair Program has awarded seed grant funding to ISyE Associate Professor Kevin Leder for his cancer therapy research proposal. In the first year of Leder’s project, he will receive $75,000, followed by a second allocation of funds in his second year based on progress. Funding comes from the NOCC program, a grant program established in 2006 with support from the Norwegian government.
Associate Professor Kevin Leder
Leder and collaborators intend to develop novel computational approaches to address the problem of heterogeneity in personalized cancer therapy. Leder’s project will include faculty from both the University of Minnesota and University of Oslo.
Saif Benjaafar Elected as INFORMS Fellow A virtual Fellows Ceremony will be held this fall to honor Benjaafar and those elected as this year’s INFORMS Fellows.
The Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) has elected Saif Benjaafar, Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Head of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, as a Fellow. “This honor is reserved for a few select members of INFORMS,” said Pinar Keskinocak, President of INFORMS. INFORMS Fellows are examples of outstanding lifetime achievement in operations research and the management sciences. They have demonstrated exceptional accomplishments and made significant contributions to the advancement of operations research and management sciences over a period of time.
Distinguished McKnight University Professor Saif Benjaafar
INFORMS is the world’s largest professional association dedicated to and promoting the best practices and advances in operations research, management science and analytics to improve operational processes, decision-making and outcomes.
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Recent Faculty Publications Benjaafar, S., J. Ding, K. Kong, and T. Taylor. “Labor Welfare in On-Demand Service Platforms,” forthcoming in Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, 2020. Yu, Y., S. Benjaafar, and H. Liu. “Price-Directed Cost Sharing and Demand Allocation among Service Providers with Multiple Demand Sources and Multiple Facilities,” forthcoming in Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, 2020. Liu, Y., W. L. Cooper, and Z. Wang. “Information Provision and Pricing in the Presence of Consumer Search Costs,” Production and Operations Management, 28(7), 1603-1620, 2019. Cui, Y., Z. He, and J. S. Pang. “Multi-Composite Nonconvex Optimization for Training Deep Neural Networks,’’ SIAM Journal on Optimization, 30(2), 1693–1723 2020. Cui, Y., T. H. Chang, and M. Y. Hong. “A Study of Piecewise Linear-Quadratic Programs,” Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, 186, 523–553 2020. Gardner, K., J. Abdul Jaleel, A. Wickeham, and S. Doroudi. “Scalable Load Balancing in the Presence of Heterogeneous Servers,” forthcoming in Performance Evaluation, 2020. Estes, A. S., and M. O. Ball. “Equity and Strength in Stochastic Integer Programming Models for the Dynamic Single Airport Ground-Holding Problem,” Transportation Science, 54 (4), 944-955, 2020. Ball, M.O., A. S. Estes, M. Hansen, and Y. Liu. “Quantity-Contingent Auctions and Allocation of Airport Slots,” forthcoming in Transportation Science, 2020. Ciocan, D. F., and K. Iyer. “Tractable Equilibria in Sponsored Search with Endogenous Budgets,” forthcoming in Operations Research, 2020. Gorokh, A., S. Banerjee, and K. Iyer. “From Monetary to Non-Monetary Mechanism Design via Artificial Currencies,” forthcoming in Mathematics of Operations Research, 2020.
Foo, J., K. Leder, and J. Schweinsberg. “Mutation Timing in a Spatial Model of Evolution,” Stochastic Processes and their Applications, 2020. Gunnarsson, E. B., S. De, K. Leder, and J. Foo. “Understanding the Role of Phenotypic Switching in Cancer Drug Resistance,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, 490, 110162, 2020. Lu., Z., and Z. Zhou. “Nonmonotone Enhanced Proximal DC Algorithms for a Class of Structured Nonsmooth DC Programming,” SIAM Journal on Optimization, 29 (4), 2725-2752, 2019. Lu, Z., Z. Zhou, and Z. Sun. “Enhanced Proximal DC Algorithms with Extrapolation for a Class of Structured Nonsmooth DC Minimization,” Mathematical Programming, 176 (1-2), 369-401, 2019. Huang, J., A. Mani, and Z. Wang. “The Value of Price Discrimination in Large Random Networks,” EC’19: Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, 243-244, 2019. Davarnia, D., J.-P. Richard, E. I. Icyuz-Ay, and B. Taslimi. “Network Models with Unsplittable Node Flows with Application to Unit Train Scheduling,” Operations Research, 67 (4), 1053-1068, 2019. Kim, J., M. Tawarmalani, and J.-P. Richard. “On Cutting Planes for Cardinality-Constrained Optimization Problems,” Mathematical Programming, 178 (1-2), 417-448, 2019. Zhang, J., S. Ma, and S. Zhang. “Primal-Dual Optimization Algorithms Over Riemannian Manifolds: An Iteration Complexity Analysis,” Mathematical Programming, 2019. Lu, C., Y. F. Liu, W. Q. Zhang, and S. Zhang. “Tightness of a New and Enhanced Semidefinite Relaxation for MIMO Detection,” SIAM Journal on Optimization, 29 (1), 719 – 742 2019. Zhang, Y., M. Lu, and S. Shen. “On the Values of Vehicle-to-Grid Selling in Electric Vehicle Sharing,” forthcoming in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 2020.
Recent Seminars Fall 2019 September 4 Andrew Lim National University of Singapore “Calibration of Robust Empirical Optimization Problems”
September 18 Sewoong Oh University of Washington “The Power of Two Samples in Generative Adversarial Networks”
Spring 2020 October 30 Yun Fong Lim Singapore Management University
February 12 Anil Aswani University of California, Berkeley
“Integrating Anticipative ReplenishmentAllocation with Reactive Fulfillment for Online Retailing Using Robust Optimization”
“Optimization Hierarchy for Fair Statistical Decision Problems”
November 6 Abhishek Roy Cargill “CORTX—Optimization as a Service”
September 25 Jeff Kharoufeh Clemson University “Staffing and Pricing in Co-Sourced Call Centers”
October 2 Erik Erickson Hennepin County “Using Data and Analytics to Improve Human Resources”
October 9 Maged Dessouky University of Southern California “Cost-Sharing Transportation Systems”
October 16 Lavanya Marla University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign “Data-Driven Greedy Policies and Information-Relaxation Bounds for Ambulance Allocation and Dynamic Redeployment”
October 25 James Orlin MIT “The Shortest Cycle Problem and the Second Shortest Path Problem”
November 13 Marc Meketon Oliver Wyman “Freight Railway Operations Research: A Look at the Most Important O.R. Applications in the Past 20 Years”
November 20 Kristopher Purens Descartes Labs “Geospatial Big Data Analytics for Business and Conservation”
December 4 Michael Chmutov C.H. Robinson “If You Could Send a Truck Anywhere, Where Would You Send It?”
December 11 Rhonda Righter University of California, Berkeley “Service Systems with Server Compatibilities and Redundancy”
Fall 2020 September 9 Hayriye Ayhan Georgia Institute of Technology “Optimizing the Interaction between Residents and Attending Physicians”
September 16 Matthias Poloczek Uber AI “Scalable Bayesian Optimization for High Dimensional Expensive Functions”
September 23 Radhika Kulkarni SAS Institute Inc. “Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Optimization: Opportunities for InterDisciplinary Innovation”
September 30 Chrysanthos E. Gounaris Carnegie Mellon University “Decision-making Across Scales: From Supply Chains to Materials Nanostructure”
October 21 John Khawam Stitch Fix “Making the Most of Inventory: Advance Inventory Availability at Stitch Fix”
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