This event is open to all U-M students, faculty, and staff.

Title:
Systems Engineering Methods for Return to Operations During a Pandemic

Abstract:
The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has led to huge challenges for schools, workplaces, and communities trying to return to operations while ensuring everyone's safety during the pandemic. In this talk, we present a few examples to demonstrate how optimization models and data analytics tools can be used for understanding (i) how infection status dynamically affects mobility patterns and travel behavior, (ii) how to optimize business/state reopening and closedown strategies, and (iii) how to redesign public transit systems like city buses to reduce passengers’ infection risk.

Bio:
Siqian Shen is an Associate Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan and also serves as an Associate Director in the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery & Engineering (MICDE). Her theoretical research interests are in integer programming, stochastic/robust optimization, and network optimization. Applications include optimization and risk analysis of energy, healthcare, cloud computing, and transportation systems. She is a recipient of the IIE Pritsker Doctoral Dissertation Award (1st Place), IBM Smarter Planet Innovation Faculty Award, and Department of Energy (DoE) Early Career Award, and several best paper prizes from INFORMS. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, and industry funds.