Dr. Erhan Kutanoglu

Dr. Erhan Kutanoglu is an Assistant Professor of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Kutanoglu’s core areas of research include applied operations research and optimization. Dr. Kutanoglu has successfully delivered results oriented research in academia and industry. His dissertation research involved developing multi-agent models and distributed algorithms that reconcile global (system-wide) optimization and (local) agents’ preferences using production scheduling as a problem domain. As real-life problems drive most of Dr. Kutanoglu’s research, the main application domains are manufacturing planning and scheduling, production and distribution logistics, logistics network design, and inventory management. His research approach involves modeling these challenging problems, and developing and testing scalable and provably near-optimal solution techniques, either by taking advantage of the state-of-the-art optimization solvers, or, as needed, by developing new tools and algorithms.

Dr. Kutanoglu’s industry-related experience includes full-time and consulting engagements with IBM Global Services, (Service Parts Solutions Group in Mechanicsburg, PA), Tyson, Inc., of Springdale, AR (Planning and Supply Chain Group), and Freescale Semiconductor (Industrial Engineering and Integrated Production Scheduling). Through several research projects, Dr. Kutanoglu has worked as an investigator with companies such as ConAgra (frozen food division), J.B. Hunt (truck-load trucking), A.B.F (less-than truck-load trucking), Defense Logistics Agency (inventory management), and AMD (semiconductor wafer fabrication). The projects with these companies range from streamlining sanitation activities (frozen food production) to developing optimization-based scheduling/dispatching algorithms (semiconductor manufacturing) to large-scale strategic distribution network design modeling (service parts logistics).