Service Systems Engineering and Management

This new textbook will provide state-of-the-art models, concepts and solution methods important in the design, control, operation, and management of service systems. It will cover supply chain management, warehouse & distribution, financial engineering, revenue management in airlines, retail engineering, health systems, and financial services, etc... The textbook is for the engineering market, emphasizing the application of operations research models to optimally design and manage service systems. Currently, no such textbook exists in the market. Service management textbooks tend to be focused on the business school audience and therefore treat the topic overly, or exclusively, qualitatively. Many do not include health systems, retail industries, or financial sectors in their coverage.

A. Ravi Ravindran has been a professor and former department head of industrial and manufacturing engineering at the Pennsylvania State University (1997-2017). He is an Emeritus Professor now. Formerly, he was a faculty member in the school of industrial engineering at Purdue University (1969-1982) and at the University of Oklahoma (1982-1997). At Oklahoma, he served as the Director of the school of industrial engineering for 8 years and as the Associate Provost for the university for 7 years. He received his B.S. in electrical engineering with honors from BITS, Pilani, India, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in industrial engineering and operations research from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests are in multiple criteria decision-making, financial engineering, healthcare delivery systems and supply chain optimization.

Dr. Ravindran has published 8 books (Operations Research, Engineering Optimization, Operations Research and Management Science Handbook, Operations Research Methodologies, Operations Research Applications, Supply Chain Engineering, Multiple Criteria Decision Making in Supply Chain Management and Big Data Analytics using Multiple Criteria Decision-Making Models) and over 150 journal articles in operations research. His recent book on Supply Chain Engineering received the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) Book-of-the-Year Award in 2013. He is a Fellow of IIE and a Fulbright Fellow. In 2001, he was recognized by IIE with the Albert G. Holzman Distinguished Educator Award for significant contributions to the industrial engineering profession by an educator. In 2013, he received the Outstanding Teaching Award in the college of engineering from the Penn State Engineering Alumni Society. He also received the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Logistics & Supply Chain division of IIE in 2017. He has been a consultant to AT&T, CNH America, General Motors, IBM, Kimberly Clark, General Electric, U.S. Department of Transportation, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association and the U.S. Air Force. He currently serves as the Operations Research Series Editor for Taylor & Francis Group/CRC Press.

Paul Griffin is the St. Vincent Health Chair and Director of the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering at Purdue University and a professor in the Schools of Industrial Engineering and Biomedical Engineering (2017-present). Previously, he was the Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Chair and Professor in the School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) at Georgia Tech (2015-2016). Prior to this, he served as the Peter and Angela Del Pezzo Chair and Department Head of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Penn State (2009-2015). He began his academic career as an assistant professor in ISyE at Georgia Tech in 1988.

Paul received his B.A. in Chemistry and B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas in Austin, his M.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Texas at El Paso, and his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M University. His research interests are in healthcare engineering, health analytics, cost and comparative effectiveness in public health, and supply chain coordination.

Vittal Prabhu is currently a Professor in the Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Penn State, where he started his academic career as an assistant professor in 1996. He also serves as the Director of Service Enterprise Engineering 360. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also got his M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Manufacturing Systems Engineering. He received his B.E. in instrumentation technology from Bangalore University. Vittal works in the area of distributed control systems with a focus on manufacturing and service enterprises consisting of discrete-events, physical processes, and service processes. He teaches courses in manufacturing systems, service systems engineering, retail services engineering, and distributed controls. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers. He is also an active member of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers and the International Federation for Information Processing - Working Group 5.7: Advances in Production Management Systems.