The Grainger College of Engineering

Tezcan receives NSF CAREER Award

2/2/2010

Tolga Tezcan, an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering (IESE), has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

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Tolga Tezcan, an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering (IESE), has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

 

“My research focuses on the management of service operations under demand uncertainty,” Tezcan explained. “This involves utilizing and coming up with new analytical tools in the areas of applied probability, stochastic systems, optimization and statistics. My main area of focus is in call centers and health-care systems. Currently, my focus is on constructing robust control and staffing policies for complex service systems under demand uncertainty.”

The NSF-funded project, entitled, “Robust Design and Control of Parallel Server Systems: Analysis via Augmented Fluid Models and Heavy-Traffic Asymptotic Regimes,” is aimed at identifying effective control policies and building new theoretical tools for the analysis of these and other commonly used policies in complex systems operating under demand uncertainty.
Tolga Tezcan
Tolga Tezcan

“If successful, this project will provide explicit solutions for the stability region of commonly used policies in practice,” Tezcan added. “This will, in turn, improve the design of systems arising in modern service, manufacturing and communication networks. The resulting policies can affect a variety of applications facing time-dependent and random arrival rates as well as in those applications that may become overloaded. Applications in service systems and communications networks will result in effective use and distribution of available resources on a real time basis among users with different characteristics.

“The findings of this research will be integrated into undergraduate and graduate courses as well. Contemporary applications, especially from service systems, will be incorporated into teaching activities via collaborations with companies from the industry.”

Tezcan joined the Illinois engineering faculty in 2006 after completing his PhD in industrial and systems engineering at Georgia Tech. He also holds MS degrees in industrial and systems engineering and mathematics from Colorado State University, Pueblo, and from Georgia Tech, respectively. He earned his BS degree in industrial engineering from Bilkent University in Turkey.
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Contact: Tolga Tezcan, Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering, 21/244-5439.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, Engineering Communications Office, 217/244-7716, writer/editor.
 

 

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This story was published February 2, 2010.