Huseyin Topaloglu is the Howard and Eleanor Morgan Professor in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell Tech. He got his B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from Bogazici University of Turkey and his Ph.D. in Operations Research and Financial Engineering from Princeton University. He has been a faculty member at the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering since 2002. He is currently serving as the Program Director for the Master of Engineering Program in Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell Tech. Professor Topaloglu works on large-scale stochastic optimization problems that arise in areas such as revenue management, inventory control, transportation logistics, and supply chain management. He is the department editor for Revenue Management Department of Product and Operations Management Journal. He serves as an associate editor for the journals Management Science, Mathematical Programming C, Naval Research Logistics, Operations Research, Transportation Science, IIE Transactions, and Surveys in Operations Research and Management Science.
One line of research pursued by Professor Topaloglu deals with operations management models that incorporate customer choices. In many settings, including online retail, customers are offered a variety of choices among which they make a choice according to a choice model. In this case, the challenge is to come up with a way to model the choices of customers and to decide which assortment of products to offer to customers. Professor Topaloglu also works on large-scale airline network revenue management models that decide which itinerary products should be open to customers for sale as capacities on the flight network get depleted over time. He formulates these problems as large-scale stochastic optimization problems and seeks tractable solution methods. Another line of work focuses on ambulance redeployment problems that require dispatching ambulances to serve emergency calls in an effective fashion. He views these problems as large-scale stochastic control problems and develops approximation methods.
Research Group MembersProfessor Topaloglu teaches courses on machine learning, optimization methods, simulation modeling, revenue management, and systems engineering. His machine learning course emphasizes the algorithmic and foundational concepts in machine learning, along with large-scale computational implementation. His optimization methods course covers the theory and practice of optimization with an eye towards using optimization to develop business intelligence. His simulation modeling course is devoted to how to model, simulate, and analyze complicated systems operating under uncertainty. Emphasis is on analysis of the data that are fed into the model, model building, and analysis of the model output. His revenue management course covers effective pricing, product offering, inventory control, and market segmentation strategies when demand for products occur randomly over time and one is forced to make the best use of limited and perishable product inventory. The ideas in this course find applications in airline pricing, hospitality, and online retail. His systems engineering course studies design and analysis of complex systems with the use of operations research tools.
Huseyin Topaloglu serves as the department editor for Revenue Management Department of Product and Operations Management Journal. He is also an associate editor for the journals Management Science, Mathematical Programming C, Naval Research Logistics, Operations Research, Transportation Science, IIE Transactions, and Surveys in Operations Research and Management Science. He worked on organization committees for various conferences, including International Symposium on Mathematical Programing, INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Conference, Production and Operations Management Conference, and the stochastic programming track of INFORMS Annual Meeting. He served as the vice-chair for stochastic programming in INFORMS Optimization Society. He co-chaired the INFORMS Nicholson Prize Committee and INFORMS Revenue Management Section Prize. He served as the chair of the INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics Dissertation Award Committee. His service to Cornell includes working in various strategic planning, faculty recruiting, and curriculum committees.
