Focus Areas

Dr. Burak Ekşioğlu’s work in the supply chain and logistics area focuses on procurement strategies in the presence of product substitution by consumers as well as uncertain supply. In such settings, coordination of decisions between suppliers and manufacturers become complicated. To solve these challenging problems Dr. Ekşioğlu employs stochastic and game theoretic approaches. The primary objective of Dr. Ekşioğlu’s work in the transportation area is to develop an integrated and sustainable intermodal transportation system. This work has been funded by the Department of Transportation.

Selected Publications:

Dr. Sandra Ekşioğlu’s work in this area is focuses on developing mathematical models and solution approaches for large-scale supply-chain related problems. Some of the models she developed capture the availability of different modes of transportation in the supply chain and their impacts on costs and CO2 emissions. Other models capture the impact of product characteristics (such as, perishability, seasonality, spatial distribution, etc.) on supply chain related decisions. Dr. Ekşioğlu uses problem characteristics to develop algorithms to solve these problems which are often nonlinear and stochastic in nature. In addition to conducting research, Dr. Ekşioğlu has organized a number of workshops and summer programs to introduce students and K-12 teachers to this research area. Her work has been funded by NSF, USDOT, and Mississippi DOT.

Selected Publications:

Dr. William G. Ferrell applies operations research models and methods to important problems faced in practice to improve operations. For example, how a company selects the number of vehicles and their routes to deliver a product to scattered customers before the promised deadline can influence how millions of dollars are spent. When the product has a limited lifetime so production must be integrated with distribution, the financial implications and complexity of the problem are dramatically increased. Developing, analyzing and solving models that address these types of issues in a rigorous but practical way characterizes Ferrell’s research that is funded by a variety of industries and government organizations including the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. He was also involved in developing the Material Handling and Logistics U.S. Roadmap that speculates on the future systems that will be required to move the volume of freight projected for 2025 and addressing some of these issues is influencing the future research problems that he intends to address.

Selected Publications:

Devapriya, P., W. Ferrell, and N. Geismar, ”Optimal Fleet Size of an Integrated Production and Distribution Scheduling Problem for a Perishable Product,“ In Final Review for European Journal of Operational Research.

Gue, K., E. Akcali, A. Erera, B. Ferrell, G. Forger (2014). Material Handling & Logistics U.S. Roadmap, Material Handling Industry, http://www.mhlroadmap.org/roadmap.html.

Dr. Amin Khademi has a broad methodological background, and his research primarily focuses on the application of operations research, particularly stochastic optimization in healthcare. Dr. Khademi is also interested in challenging and novel problems in applications related to supply chain management and energy, and ways to solve challenging, applied problems where current techniques fail. Dr. Khademi’s recent research focuses on finding optimal and fair allocation policies for organ transplantation as well as investigating optimal dispatching and redeployment policies of ambulances.

Recent Publications:

Dr. Mason’s primary current research focuses on how to cost effectively improve supply chain and transportation logistics operations for companies in today’s global economy.  Given his endowed chair’s charge to develop and maintain active research relationships with both private and public sector organizations to foster economic development, Dr. Mason’s research in this area has been supported by companies such as Glen Raven Custom Fabrics, Boeing, and Walmart, the South Carolina Department of Transportation, and federal sources such as NSF and the US Air Force.

Recent Publications:

Masoud, S.A., Mason, S.J., ”A Bi-criteria Hybrid Metaheuristic for Analyzing an Integrated Automotive Supply Chain,“ Journal of the Operational Research Society, to appear, 2015.

Dr. Neyens’ work in this area examines transportation safety and driving behavior. This includes examining crash data to evaluate the factors that influence crash types, injury severity, and the healthcare costs associated with traffic crashes. Dr. Neyens uses a driving simulator to investigate driver behavior and how drivers respond to system failures within semi-autonomous vehicles in terms of reaction and regaining control of the vehicle. Dr. Neyens’ work in this area has been supported by NHTSA.

Selected Publications:

Dr. Smith’s work in this field includes transportation and logistics problems involving competition or auxiliary considerations.  For instance, supply chain procurement problems rarely occur in a vacuum, and must anticipate and accommodate competitors’ future actions.  These problems can involve nonlinear, stochastic, and game theoretic considerations, thus necessitating the development of new solution techniques.  Other research problems involve generalizations of classic network flow problems (such as the celebrated TSP).  Dr. Smith’s research in this area has been supported by the NSF and the Department of Defense.

Recent Publications:

Dr. Kevin M. Taaffe’s research involves includes problems that address traffic flow, emergency response, and health and humanitarian logistics, with a common thread of improving outcomes for the people involved in the event. Dr. Taaffe has received grants from university transportation centers, as well as other organizations.

Selected Publications:

Using techniques and tools from human factors and systems engineering, cognitive psychology and computing science, Dr. Chalil Madathil conducts basic and applied research to analyze, design and evaluate health informatics user interfaces, care processes, and medical technology to improve the quality of care.

Selected Publications:

Dr. Byung Rae Cho’s research in healthcare systems engineering involves Gage R&R and lean Six Sigma in healthcare operations, and has been funded by the Greenville Health System several times.

Recent Publications:

To address important challenges in bioinformatics, high throughput data technologies are needed to interpret biological data efficiently and reliably. Clustering is widely used as a first step to interpret high dimensional biological data, such as the gene expression data measured by microarrays. A good clustering algorithm should be efficient, reliable, and effective, as demonstrated by its capability of determining biologically relevant clusters. Dr. Ekşioğlu’s work in the healthcare area focuses on addressing this important problem by developing minimum spanning tree based heuristic solution approaches.

Selected Publications:

Dr. Greenstein’s research focuses on the development of computer based tools that improve the access healthcare consumers, their families, and their caregivers have to high-quality information. He is currently a member of a research team at Clemson University and the University of South Carolina developing mobile technologies to improve communication and coordination in health care systems. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the team is using mobile devices, learning systems, data analytics, education, and training to enhance communication and coordination among hospital perioperative services personnel.

Recent Publications:

Gmitro, S. C., Greenstein, J. S., & Wilson, R. P.(2015). Design of a sign-out process to improve surgical safety. To appear in the Proceedings of the 2015 International Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Los Angeles, CA.

Koikkara, R., Greenstein, J. S., & Chalil Madathil, K. (2015). The effect of graphic organizers on the performance of electronic consenting systems. To appear in the Proceedings of the 2015 International Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Los Angeles, CA.

Dr. Amin Khademi’s primary research interest is in the application of operations research, particularly stochastic optimization in healthcare. Dr. Khademi’s recent research focuses on finding optimal and fair allocation policies for organ transplantation as well as investigating optimal dispatching and redeployment policies of ambulances. The applications that he considers are not limited to healthcare. He is also interested in challenging and novel problems in applications such as supply chain management and energy.

Recent Publications:

Dr. Neyens’ work in healthcare centers in applications of human factors in healthcare systems focuses on operator’s behaviors with complex healthcare systems and requires examining patient preference and patient safety with a systems perspective. Dr. Neyens has investigated the introduction of new technology in various settings (e.g., compounding pharmacies, patient informed consent processes, assessing patient preferences). He has also expertise in understanding and evaluating patient safety from a risk acceptance perspective and from incident data.

Selected Publications:

Neyens, D.M., & A.K Childers (accepted, 2015) Barriers and facilitators for willingness to use a personal health information management (PHIM) system within a worksite wellness program (WWP). American Journal of Health Promotion.

Hobbs, M.A., S.N. Robinson, and D.M Neyens (2014) Alcohol-based hand sanitizer (AHS) stations at hospital entrances: The effect of the location on visitors’ utilization rates. Poster presented at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 2014 International Symposium on Human Factors in Health Care, March 16-19, 2014.

Dr. Robert J. Riggs’ research incorporates integer programming and combinatorial optimization, healthcare systems engineering, Six Sigma and process improvement, applying lean enterprise to healthcare and manufacturing applications, and optimization of disassembly and remanufacturing systems.

Recent Publications:

Dr. Sara Lu Riggs’ work in this field has focused on display design, primarily focusing on supporting task sharing, attention management, and interruption management. Dr. Riggs has also conducted work addressing systems level challenges within the NICU to improve communication between doctors, nurses, and specialists during the rounding process and to develop a means to assess and improve safety culture on a day-to-day basis. Dr. Riggs’ research has been supported by the AHRQ.

Selected Publications:

Lu, S., Nemshak, M., Schumacher, R., & Seagull, F.J. (2013). Identifying, quantifying, and projecting single-day quality measures within the neonatal ICU. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (pp. 1760-1764). San Diego, CA. September.

Li, H., Lu, S., Schumacher, R., & Seagull, F. (2011). Why multidisciplinary rounds are not multidisciplinary: Examination of a neonatal ICU rounding process. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (pp. 758-762). Las Vegas, NV. September.

Dr. Kevin M. Taaffe’s healthcare research involves the improvement of patient flow, as well as the communication and coordination of staff tasks, on the day of surgery. The operating room, and functions that support it, must be correctly planned and staffed for patient care to be delivered consistently and with high quality. Thus, another key element is appropriately planning for the day of surgery days or weeks in advance. Dr. Taaffe has been supported by NSF, AHRQ, and multiple hospitals as well.

Selected Publications:

Dr. S.D. Ekşioğlu has contributed in this area of research by developing models which integrate production and supply chain decisions of bioenergy production plants. Her models identify supply chain network designs to deliver biomass (in the form of, forest products and waste, agricultural and animal waste etc.) to bioenergy plants. These models capture a wide spectrum of factors which impact supply chain decisions, such as, product quality, disruptions in the transportation network, financial incentives (such as, production tax credits), environmental policies (such as, clean power plan), etc. These models not only optimize their impact of supply chain decisions on costs, but also, their impacts on the environment and society. Her work in this area has been funded by agencies such as, NSF, USDOT, and USDOE.

Selected Publications:

Dr. Mason’s research efforts focus on supply chain viability, infrastructure disruptions, and integrating renewable energy resources into the electrical grid. In these systems, conditions are often unknown and/or frequently changing such that strategic, deterministic analyses are insufficient and can lead to misleading conclusions. The inherent uncertainty in these problems leads to many different solution techniques, including stochastic optimization, scenario-based analyses, and multi-level optimization modeling using distributed computing. The NSF, DHS, and AFOSR have supported Dr. Mason’s research in this area.

Selected Publications:

Dr. Smith’s primary current research area examines how to optimally secure critical infrastructure using operations research. Many such problems seek to assess network robustness by conducting interdiction analyses. These problems range from determining the vulnerability of a system to distributed and coordinated attacks (or accidental failures), to prescribing how a system should be fortified against attackers that adapt to fortified networks. Because Dr. Smith’s work models telecommunication, energy, transportation, and other related networks, agencies recently funding his research include AFOSR, ONR, DARPA, and DTRA.

Selected Papers:

Dr. Cho’s recent research in the area of production and manufacturing systems involves multivariate analysis for the processes with mixed quality characteristics and statistical inference for special populations.

Selected Publications:

The stochastic lot-sizing problem with piecewise linear concave ordering costs is very common in practice since it relates to a variety of settings involving quantity discounts, economies of scales, and use of multiple suppliers. Dr. Ekşioğlu’s work in this area focuses on implementing the (R, S) policy which is appealing from a practical point of view because it completely eliminates the setup-oriented nervousness - a pervasive issue in production control.

Selected Publications:

Bill Ferrell applies operations research models and methods to important problems faced in practice to improve operations with much of his work in this area focusing on material flow through storage facilities. For example, many unit load containers moved in warehouses can now be stacked for movement and stored both stacked and two deep. Nearly all routing algorithms for equipment moving these unit loads in warehouses are distance based; however, activities required to stack and move the unit loads can be significant, so time-based model are needed for improved operations and this is a current research interest. Ferrell also works on operational issues for storage facilities in future logistics systems like high volume, high velocity mixing centers with decentralized control, a topic that is currently only starting to be investigated.

Selected Publications:

Hassan A. and W. Ferrell, ”Reducing Warehousing Costs with Stackable Pallets and Multi-command Operations,“ Proceeding of the 17th International Working Seminar on Production Economics, Innsbruck, 2012.

Dr. Tugce Isik’s work focuses on decision making under uncertainty in manufacturing and service systems. Often, control of these system involves policies that dynamically respond to changing demand and congestion levels. Common issues include management of the workforce, costs, and service levels. Dr. Isik's research provides management strategies for agile manufacturing and service systems using techniques from queueing and stochastic optimization theory.

Selected Publications:

Isik, T., Andradottir, S. & Ayhan, H., ’Optimal Control of Queueing Systems with Non-Collaborating Servers,“ Queueing Systems, Under Review, 2014.

In the area of Production and Manufacturing Systems, Dr. Kurz focuses on assembly systems. Her industry-funded work on line balancing and variety (configuration) management focuses on solving industry-relevant problems that utilize large data sets with incomplete and error-prone data. Dr. Kurz and her collaborators have published in a variety of outlets that emphasize the implementation of the developed results.

Selected Publications:

Dr. Mason’s work in this field includes practically motivated production scheduling problems in semiconductor manufacturing, public education busing, and automotive manufacturing. The complex realities inherent in real world systems leads to the necessity for developing fast, effective, real-time heuristic solution methodologies that can be deployed in practice. Dr. Mason’s research in this area has been funded by a number of industrial organizations and research consortiums.

Selected Publications:

Cheng, J., Fowler, J.W., Kempf, K., Mason, S.J., ”Multi-mode Resource-constrained Project Scheduling Problems with Non-preemptive Activity Splitting,“ Computers & Operations Research, To appear, 2014.

Dr. Robert J. Riggs’ research incorporates integer programming and combinatorial optimization, healthcare systems engineering, Six Sigma and process improvement, applying lean enterprise to healthcare and manufacturing applications, and optimization of disassembly and remanufacturing systems.

Selected Publications:

Dr. Taaffe’s research addresses the role of customer choice in the manufacturer or supplier’s plans on providing sufficient product to meet the demands. Individual customers have unique price points, however each customer will have a tendency to be more or less reliable in actually purchasing the product. Dr. Taaffe works on problems where risk must be measured and included in the decision or objective, and he has received numerous industry grants to study manufacturing processes using simulation and optimization techniques.

Selected Publications: