Super Exciting Operations Research Conferences This Summer

This promises to be a very exciting summer with multiple Operations Research conferences on the horizon. There are even others and I wish that my supernetwork team could present at all of them.

The first one at which we will have a paper is the MSOM 207 Conference at the UNC Kenan-Flager Business School, which should be a lovely venue. MSOM stands for Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. The conference will take place June 20-21 and the full program is now online.

At the MSOM conference,  we will be presenting our latest research on sustainability: A Competitive Multiperiod Supply Chain Network Model with Freight Carriers and Green Technology Investment Option. Dr. Sara Saberi of the Foisie School of Business at WPI will present this paper, which is co-authored with  Professor Jose M. Cruz of UConn's School of Business, Professor Joe Sarkis, the Head of Sara's Department and also one of the most highly cited researchers in 2016, and me. We had the pleasure of hosting Professor Sarkis at the Isenberg School of Management through the UMass Amherst INFORMS Speakers Series. He gave a fabulous talk on greening the supply chain.  Sara received her PhD in Management Science from the Isenberg School in 2016 and Jose did so in 2004.  I was honored to chair their doctoral dissertation committees.

Shortly thereafter, I will be off to Europe, first to speak at the EURO HOpe Conference, which is organized by the EURO Group on Humanitarian Logistics and the Vienna University of Economics and Business, with Professor Tina Wakolbinger, also an Isenberg PhD alumna in Management Science, class of 2007. At this conference, I will present the paper, A Generalized Nash Equilibrium Network Model for Post-Disaster Humanitarian Relief, which I co-authored with Emilio Alvarez Flores and Professor  Ceren Soylu, and which was published in Transportation Research E 95: (2016), pp 1-18. Emilio graduated with honors from the Isenberg School in 2016.

Then it will be time to travel to Greece, where I have co-organized the 3rd Dynamics of Disasters conference with my super colleagues: Professors Ilias S. Kotsireas of the Wilfrid University in Canada, Panos M. Pardalos of the University of Florida, and Fuad Aleskerov of the National Reearch University Higher School of Economics in Russia. We are putting the final touches on the program but you can see the exciting talk topics here.


At this conference, we will have the pleasure of presenting the paper, A Variational Equilibrium
 Framework for Humanitarian Organizations in Disaster Relief: Effective Product Delivery Under Competition for Financial Funds. This paper is joint work with Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania in Italy, my long-time collaborator and also member of the Supernetwork Center team, Emilio Alvarez Flores, and Patrizia's student, Valeria Caruso. It will be fabulous to see these collaborators at an exotic venue. I will also deliver the paper,  A Multitiered Supply Chain Network Equilibrium Model for Disaster Relief with Capacitated Freight Service Provision.

Then it will be back to Massachusetts and before you know it, it will be time to go to the IFORS Conference in Quebec City, Canada.

 There we will have two papers for presentation.  The first paper, A Game Theory Model for Freight Service Provision Security Investments for High-Value Cargo, is co-authored with Shivani Shukla, who recently successfully defended her PhD in Management Science at the Isenberg School, Professor Sara Saberi, mentioned above, and also Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney, who will present the paper. The second paper is on our recent work on blood supply chains with Professor Amir H. Masoumi of Manhattan College and Professor Min Yu of the University of Portland in Oregon. They also were my former PhD students at the Isenberg School of Management and it is wonderful to continue our collaborations on perishable product supply chains and healthcare!

 For those, interested, you can find the titles and abstracts of my former PhD students' (more recent ones) doctoral dissertations on the Supernetwork Center site.