MIT-Zaragoza Speaker Series: John Bartholdi

John J. Bartholdi, III
Global Research Director, The Supply Chain & Logistics Institute
The Manhattan Associates Chair of Supply Chain Management
School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

"Self-coordinating buses improve service "

The main challenge for an urban bus system is to maintain constant headways between successive buses. Most bus systems try to adhere to a schedule, but the natural dynamics of the system tends to collapse headways so that buses travel in bunches. We propose a method of coordinating buses that abandons the idea of a schedule and any a priori headway and instead allows equal headways to emerge spontaneously. We also report on the implementation of our scheme on a bus route in Atlanta. (Joint work with Donald D. Eisenstein, University of Chicago).

Bio

John Bartholdi is a Professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is Director of Global Research at The Supply Chain and Logistics Institute and holds the Manhattan Associates Chair of Supply Chain Management. Dr. Bartholdi graduated in 1968 with a B.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Florida and then served two tours of duty in Southeast Asia as a paratrooper in a Naval Special Warfare unit. He returned to the University of Florida to complete the Ph.D. program in operations research in 1977 and later served on the faculties at the University of Michigan, the Shanghai Institute of Mechanical Engineering, and the National University of Singapore. Dr. Bartholdi was named a “Presidential Young Investigator” by the National Science Foundation for 1984-1989. He won the 1999 Award for Technical Innovation by the Institute of Industrial Engineers and in 2005 was named a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science. His research centers on problems of warehousing and distribution; but he reserves some time to publish on wider-ranging interests, including structural mechanics, voting, geography, computer science and biology. He is co-author of the book Warehouse & Distribution Science. He is also a founder of the Wine Supply Chain Council.