Tava Lennon Olsen

Professor of Operations and Manufacturing Management/Faculty Development Chair

Areas of Expertise:

Critical Thinking; Management Science - Math Programming; Management Science - Simulation Modeling; Management Science - Stochastic Processes; Operations & Manufacturing Management - Inventory Control, Production Planning, and Scheduling; Operations & Manufacturing Management - Operations Strategy

Research interests:

Supply chain management, pricing, and inventory control
Stochastic models of production, service & telecommunications systems

Selected Publications:

To view publications by this professor, visit the Publications and Working Papers section of our site.

• "Service Level Agreements in Call Centers: Perils and Prescriptions," Management Science, with J. Milner, forthcoming
• "Multi-Product Systems with Both Setup Times and Costs: Fluid Bounds and Schedules," Operations Research, Issue May/June, with W. Lan, May/June 2006
• "Coordinating Production and Delivery Under a (z,Z)-type Vendor Managed Inventory System," M&SOM, with M. Fry, R. Kapuscinski, Spring 2001
• "On Mutually Interfering Parallel Servers Subject to External Disturbances," Operations Research, with K. Wasserman, Sept/Oct 2001
• "A Production/Inventory System Subject to Failure with Limited Repair Capacity," Operations Research, with I. Duenyas, S. Iravani, 2000
• "Scheduling of a Multi-Class Single Server Queue Under Non-Traditional Performance Measures," Operations Research, 2000
• "A Practical Scheduling Method for Multi-Class Production Systems with Setups," Management Science, 1999

Academic/professional activities:

Associate Editor, M&SOM
President, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society
Senior Editor Production and Operations Management

Awards/honors:

NSF CAREER Award, 1999
University of Michigan IOE Department Teaching Excellence Award, 1996, 1997
Thomas W. Ford Fellowship, from Stanford University, 1993
Senior Scholarship in Applied Mathematics, University of Auckland, 1989

Personal interests:

Professor Olsen enjoys hiking, aerobics, cooking, and reading. She is married with two daughters named Ebba and Kaia.