ISyE Seminar Series: Marc Meketon

"Freight Railway Operations Research:  A look at the most important O.R. applications in the past 20 years"

Presentation by Marc Meketon
Vice President
Oliver Wyman

Wednesday, November 13
3:15pm - Refreshments, Lind Hall 305
3:30pm - Graduate Seminar, Lind Hall 305

About:

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 over the past 20 years.  Several Franz Edelman awards (both first place, and finalist) have been given to these efforts.  This talk discusses some of the top achievements and delves lightly into the modelling.  It also describes some of the higher profile ‘failures’ where the most sophisticated approaches have not realized their potential and have been abandoned by the railways.

Bio:

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.