17 minute read
Faculty
from UMN Industrial and Systems Engineering magazine
by College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota
Ankur Mani Assistant Professor
PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Tech, 2013
Peer and network interactions, pricing, matching and mechanism design
Lisa Miller Distinguished Teaching Professor and Director of Undegraduate Studies
PhD, Georgia Tech, 2002
Optimization, analytics, operations research
Jean-Philippe Richard Professor
PhD, Georgia Tech, 2002
Mathematical optimization, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure
Shuzhong Zhang Professor
PhD, Erasmus University, 1991
Nonlinear optimization, game theory, signal processing, risk management
Yiling Zhang Assistant Professor
PhD, University of Michigan, 2019
Stochastic, integer and nonlinear programming, energy systems, healthcare, transportation
Tony Haitao Cui Affiliated Faculty
Deputy Associate Dean for Global DBA, Professor
Carlson School of Management, UMN
Karen Donohue Affiliated Faculty
Board of Overseers Professor
Carlson School of Management, UMN
Mingyi Hong Affiliated Faculty
Assistant Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UMN
Alireza Khani Affiliated Faculty
Assistant Professor
Department of Civil, Environmental, and GeoEngineering, UMN
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
Director, Operations Engineering
Cintas Corporation Member since: 2019
Mondher Ben Hamida
WW BPR Product Operations
Apple Member since: 2019
Megan Trickey Brosnan
Member since: 2019 Mitchell DeJong, PhD
Chief Technology Officer
Design Ready Controls Member since: 2015
Christine England
Global Demand and Supply Chain Planning Capabilities Lead
General Mills Member since: 2015
Betsy Enstrom
Manager, Advanced Analytics Testing
IDeaS Revenue Solutions Member since: 2015
Jeremiah Johnson
Senior Manager, Global Enterprise Excellence Consultant
Boston Scientific Member since: 2014
Brent Kellum
Director, Strategic Pricing
Daikin Applied Member since: 2017
Brian Naslund
Director, Engineering
Collins Aerospace Member since: 2019
Nicole Nelson
Vice President, Pricing and Merchandising Analytics
Best Buy Member since: 2020
Kalyan Pasupathy, PhD
Scientific Director
Mayo Clinic Member since: 2019
John Zaic
Northern Plains IE Training and Development Manager
UPS Member since: 2019
Jeffrey T. Zudock
Global Improve Manager
ExxonMobil Member since: 2018
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. “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 northwestThird Floor
• New teaching spaces, including a 65-seat classroom
• Multiple conference rooms and meeting spaces
• Seminar space for large lecture
• Faculty offices
Third Floor facing northwestSecond Floor
• Public lounges and study spaces for students
• Pod offices designed to spur interaction between graduate students
• Offices for faculty and staff
• Natural light throughout
Third Floor facing northwestBasement Floor
• 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.
Driving Change
Yiling Zhang is modeling major changes to the way we buy goods online and travel by bus.
he pandemic dramatically transformed the T 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 storefront 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.”
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.
Amidst 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.”
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.
“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.
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 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.”
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Ankur Mani, ISyE Assistant Professor
