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Michael Gorman, Associate Professor of Operations Management and Decision Sciences
Michael F. Gorman is an associate professor of operations management and decision sciences. For 10 years, he worked in the rail industry at BNSF Railway, and he regularly consults for both shippers and carriers in transportation and logistics issues.
Dr. Gorman has published more than 20 scholarly articles as well as a number of general interest articles. He was named a finalist in INFORMS Daniel Wagner Competition for Applied Research in 2005, a semifinalist for the INFORMS Edelman Competition in 2008 and a finalist in the Edelman Competition in 2009. He is currently the deputy editor of Interfaces and serves on the editorial review board of Journal of Operations Management.
Dr. Gorman holds a Ph.D. in business and economics and a master's degree in economics from Indiana University. He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and economics from Xavier University.
The Story - The Edelman Award is known as the Super Bowl of operations research. It's the biggest award the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science offers. It celebrates the application of operations research in practice.
I’m Mike Gorman, associate professor in the department of MIS operations and decision sciences. It’s a very big honor to be among the final six projects in the world. To that end, I think that we’ve already succeeded getting this far.
The CSX project is one of the most successful applications of operations research in the rail industry. It has to do with allocating empty rail cars to customer orders. It’s a really complicated problem because there are so many rail cars and so many customers on any given day, and those conditions change throughout the day. Operations research technology really helps optimize and automate those decisions. That system has been in place for over a decade, and teams of people worked on putting it in place.
This project really promotes this application as one of the best examples of applied operations research in the world. CSX spent about $5 million implementing the system in the late '90s and over the last decade plus they’ve saved $55 million a year — or $550 million in total. More importantly, they’ve avoided acquiring additional rail cars, saving another $1.4 billions. That’s $2 billion in savings from this $5 million investment. It’s a pretty impressive return. On top of that, we calculated U.S. public benefits in total by about $600 million worth of reduced pollution and greenhouse gases, reduced congestion and improved safety. So in total, we’re talking about a $2.6 billion dollar benefit from this system. It continues to go on and continues to generate benefit into the future.
I like doing research that furthers the knowledge in theory but also in practice. I’m kind of an impatient person. I like to see these ideas put into place. Then, I can take those ideas that I see in practice, and I can use them in the classroom to help students realize some of the benefits that operations research brings to the real world.
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