Warren B. Powell

Biography

It can become difficult to sort through 30 years of professional experience and identify the work that matters the most. Below is an attempt - I am sure this will evolve. This work could not have taken place without the contributions of 24 Ph.D. students, 9 masters students, and a large number of undergraduate senior thesis projects. Of particular importance in my industrial work are the contributions of my two senior staff members: Dr. Hugo Simao and Dr. Belgacem Bouzaiene-Ayari.

• Warren Powell is a faculty member in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University where he has taught since 1981. In 1990, he founded CASTLE Laboratory which spans research in computational stochastic optimization with applications initially in transportation and logistics. In 2011, he founded the Princeton laboratory for ENergy Systems Analysis (PENSA) to tackle the rich array of problems in energy systems analysis.
• In the 1980's, he designed and wrote SYSNET, an interactive optimization model for load planning at Yellow Freight System, where it was used for over 20 years. In 1988, he founded the Princeton Transportation Consulting Group which marketed the model as SUPERSPIN, which was adopted by the entire less-than-triuckload industry. SUPERSPIN was used in the planning of American Freightways (which became FedEx Freight), Roadway Package Systems (which became FedEx Ground), and Overnight Transportation (which became UPS Freight).
• Also in the 1980's he developed a series of models for truckload trucking, starting with LoadMAP (written by Ken Nickerson '84), which then evolved to an integrated stochastic model for driver assignment called MicroMAP (the senior thesis of David Cape '87). As of 2011, MicroMAP was being used to dispatch over 66,000 drivers for 20 of the largest truckload carriers in the U.S.
• He has started two consulting firms: Princeton Transportation Consulting Group (1988) and Transport Dynamics (1995), but he has continued to do his developmental work through CASTLE Laboratory at Princeton University, where he has worked with the leading companies in less-than-truckload trucking (Yellow Freight System and United Parcel Service), truckload trucking (Schneider National), rail (primarily Norfolk Southern Railroad but also Burlington Northern Sante Fe), air (Netjets and Embraer), as well as the Airlift Mobility Command. Click here for a complete list.
• Motivated by these applications, he developed a method for bridging dynamic programming with math programming to solve very high-dimensional stochastic, dynamic programs using the modeling and algorithmic framework of approximate dynamic programming. This work has been used in a variety of applications including fleet management at Schneider National (50,000 variables per time period, and a state variable with 10^{20} dimensions), the SMART energy resource planning model (175,000 time periods), and locomotive optimization at Norfolk Southern.
• His work in industry is balanced by contributions to the theory of stochastic optimization, machine learning and signal processing.
• Prizes - Winner, Daniel Wagner Prize for extending approximate dynamic programming to very high-dimensional problems for Schneider National. Best Paper Prize from the Society for Transportation Science and Logistics (on the same problem). His students have won many awards (Dantzig Prize for best dissertation in Operations Research, several winners of the Transportation Science dissertation prize, Doing Good with Good OR Competition, Nicholson Prize). Finalist in the prestigious Edelman competition in 1987 and 1991. Informs Fellows Award, Presidential Young Investigator Award, various best paper prizes.
• Books: He is the author of Approximate Dynamic Programming: Solving the curses of dimensionality and co-author (with Ilya Ryzhov) of Optimal Learning (both published by Wiley).
• Just the numbers: $24 million in research funding since 1990, 190+ refereed papers, two books, 24 Ph.D. students (16 in academia and research laboratories), 9 Masters, 160+ undergraduate senior theses, h-number (on Google) of 43, ~7,000 citations, 34,000 visitors per year to my website, ... (let me know if you can think of any more).
• He has served in numerous leadership and service roles, including President of the Transportation Science Section, Informs board of directors, director of several NSF workshops, Area Editor for transportation at Operations Research (8 years), and numerous prize, review and service committees. In 1991 he co-founded the triennial conference TRISTAN, now the leading international conference for transportation systems analysis. In 2003 he designed the Informs Impact Prize and served as the first chair in 2004.
• Click here for my full c.v (updated March 2013). Note that I use this for reporting purposes, so it includes, among the usual chatter, everything that I have to put in various progress reports for funding agencies.