Professor Avishai Mandelbaum

General Information

Prof. Mandlebaum has a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science and an M.A. in Statistics, both summa cum laude from Tel-Aviv University. His Ph.D. is in Operations Research, from Cornell University. After graduation, in 1983, he joined the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He left the U.S.A., in 1991, to assume a position at the Technion, the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM). This faculty, as well as his current interests, constitute a convex-hull of all the areas that he has been involved with.

At the Technion, Prof. Mandlebaum has been teaching courses in probability, stochastic processes and service engineering. In IE&M, he served as the coordinator of IE&M graduate studies and was the Associate Dean for Research; he is a past member of the Technion Academic Development Committee and a present member of the Prize committee of the Applied Probability Society.  Since 1995, he has been the faculty advisor for IE&M outstanding students.

Prof. Mandelbaum's teaching has been acknowledged by the Technion Mani Award for Excellence in Teaching, 1999; the Technion Excellence in Teaching Award, 2000 (for the course Service Engineering); and the inaugural Meir Rosenblatt Prize for teaching, 2004.  His research contributions have been acknowledged by the ORSIS Yosef Levy prize, 2001; the Mitchner Prize for Quality Sciences and Qaulity Management, 2003; and the inaugural Markov Lecture of the Applied Probability Society , INFORM 2005.

Research Summary

Prof. Mandelbaum has been doing research in the area of stochastic processes, from the perspectives of operations research, statistics, engineering and management. His work has been mainly theoretical but with a clear practical inspiration, aimed at supporting decision making in complex operations.

His most recent activities have concentrated on queueing networks. These provide useful models for a wide spectrum of real-world operations, spanning services, telecommunication, computers, manufacturing and transportation. Through research and teaching, he has been attempting to specialize the theory of queues to service networks, focusing on those with high level of customer/server interaction, either face-to-face, by telephone or Internet. Outside the Technion, in Israel, Europe and the U.S.A., he has been teaching, conducting workshops and consulting numerous organizations on how to properly design, control and manage service operations.

Prof. Mandelbaum is currently an associate editor of the journals Management Science (since 1997) and Queueing Systems, Theory and Applications (QUESTA, since 1994). He was an Associate Editor of Mathematics of Operations Research (MOR) between 1991-1999, and a Senior Associate Editor of Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (M&SOM) between 2003-2006.

Current Research Projects

• Service engineering and management: measurements, modelling, design, analysis and inference 

• Fluid and diffusion approximations of stochastic networks

• Dynamic allocation of resources in the face of uncertainty: multi-armed bandits

• Tele-Services: call/contact centers; interfaces among Operations Research, Statistics, Marketing, Psychology, and Industrial Engineering

• Call Center Empirical and Statistical Analysis and  

• Customers Behavior, for example Impatience, Redials

• Staffing

• Skills-Based Routing

Selected Publications

CV

Dynkin, E.B. and Mandelbaum, A. (1983), Symmetric statistics, poisson point processes and multiple wiener integrals, The Annals of Statistics 11, 739--745.

Mandelbaum, A. (1987), Continuous multi-armed bandits and multi-parameter processes, The Annals of Probability 15, 1527--1556.

Chen, H. and Mandelbaum, A. (1991), Discrete flow networks: Diffusion approximations and bottlenecks, The Annals of Probability 19, 1463--1519.

Mandelbaum, A. and Pats, G. (1995) State-Dependent Queues: Approximations and Applications, Stochastic Networks, IMA Volume 71, Editors F. Kelly and R.J. Williams, Springer-Verlag, 239-282.

Adler, P., Mandelbaum, A., Nguyen, V. and Schwerer, E. (1996), Getting the most out of your product development, Harvard Business Review March-April, 134-152.

Jennings, O.B., Mandelbaum, A., Massey, W.A. and Whitt, W. (1996), Server staffing to meet time-varying demand, Management Science 42, 1383-1394.

Mandelbaum, A. and Reiman, M.I. (1998), On pooling in queueing networks, Management Science 44,971-981.

Mandelbaum, A. and Zeltyn, S. (1998), Estimating characteristics of queueing networks using transactional data, Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications (QUESTA) 29, 75-127.

Kaspi, H. and Mandelbaum, A. (1998), Multi-armed bandits in discrete and continuous time, The Annals of Applied Probability 8 (4), 1270-1290.

Mandelbaum, A., Massey, W.A. and Reiman, M.I. (1998), Strong approximations for Markovian service networks,Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications (QUESTA) 30, 149-201.

Mandelbaum A. and Shimkin N. (2000) A Model for Rational Abandonments from Invisible Queues. Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications (QUESTA), 36, 141-173.

Garnett O., Mandelbaum A. and Reiman M. (2002) Designing a Call Center with Impatient Customers. Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, 4(3), 208-227.

Gans, N., Koole, G., Mandelbaum, A.  (2003) Telephone Call Centers:  Tutorial, Review and Research Prospects.  Invited review paper by Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (M&SOM), 5 (2), pp. 79–141.

Mandelbaum A. and Stolyar A. (2004) Scheduling Flexible Servers with Convex Delay Costs: Heavy-Traffic Optimality of the Generalized cm-Rule. Operations Research, 52(6), pp. 836-855.

Atar R., Mandelbaum A. and Reiman M. (2004) Scheduling a Multi-Class Queue with Many iid Servers: Asymptotic Optimality in Heavy-Traffic.  The Annals of Applied Probability, 14(3), pp. 1084-1134.

Borst S., Mandelbaum A. and Reiman M. (2004) Dimensioning Large Call Centers. Operations Research, 52(1), pp. 17-34.

Brown, L., Gans, N., Mandelbaum, A., Sakov, A., Zeltyn, S., Zhao, L. and Haipeng, S. (2005) Statistical Analysis of a Telephone Call Center: A Queueing-Science Perspective. Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol 100: 36-50.

 Mandelbaum A. and Zeltyn S. (2005) Service Engineering in Action: The Palm/Erlang-A Queue, with Applications to Call Centers. Technion Technical Report.

Feldman Z., Mandelbaum A., Massey W.A. and Whitt W. (2005) Staffing of Time-Varying Queues to Achieve Time-Stable Performance. To be published in Management Science. 

 Gurvich I., Armony M. and Mandelbaum A.  Service Level Differentiation in Call Centers with Fully Flexible Servers. Draft, April 2006.

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