ISyE Graduate Seminar: Freight Railway Operations Research
Please join us for our next seminar of fall semester. This analytics seminar will feature Marc Meketon from Oliver Wyman's Transportation Practice who will discuss optimization models for distributing feed.
Livestreaming: Again this year we are coordinating with the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications to livestream our seminars on the IMA YouTube Channel. Attend in person or watch the livestream
3:15 p.m. - Refreshments
3:30 p.m. - Graduate Seminar
Marc Meketon
Vice President
Oliver Wyman
About the seminar
The freight railways in North America have been actively using operations research for strategic and operational goals over the past 30 years, with some major successes in the last 20. Several Franz Edelman awards—both first place and finalist—have been given to these efforts. Meketon will discuss some of the top achievements and delve lightly into the modelling. He will also describe some of the higher profile ‘failures’ where the most sophisticated approaches have not realized their potential and have been abandoned by the railways.
About the speaker
Marc Meketon, a vice president in Oliver Wyman’s Transportation Practice, specializes in the design and development of software applications for optimization and analysis of transportation and logistics plans. He has developed applications ranging from optimization of railway operating plans to freight revenue management optimization to airline maintenance. Prior to Oliver Wyman, he led the operations research activities of Conrail for several years, managed a similar group at U.S. Airways, and managed airline fleet assignment research and development at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
Meketon has published papers on statistical analysis of simulation output, linear programming, communications, and simulation optimization. Two of his papers received top awards in their field. He has served on the board of the Railroad Applications Section, as well as president of the local Philadelphia chapter of INFORMS. He holds one patent. In 2003, he won the Franz Edelman Prize for Achievement in Operations Research and Management Science for helping Canadian Pacific save over $300 million. In 2016, won the Oliver Wyman Innovation Competition for his work on aircraft end-of-life planning. Meketon has a B.S. with honors in mathematics from Villanova University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in operations research from Cornell University.