What does it take to successfully apply optimization in the airline industry and build a company around it? I will try to answer this and related questions in my presentation and use Carmen Systems as an example. Carmen develops and implements resource management and optimization solutions for demanding transportation operations. Clients include five of the ten largest airlines in the world, namely Air France, British Airways, Delta Air Lines, Lufthansa, Northwest Airlines, and Deutsche Bahn (German Railways), one of the largest passenger transportation companies in the world.

Short Biography: Dr. Stefan E. Karisch

Stefan Karisch is Vice President of Operations Research at Carmen Systems, a company that specializes in resource optimization systems and solutions for large transportation companies in general, and airlines and railways in particular. At Carmen Systems, Stefan has served in a variety of management and technical roles. Prior to Carmen Systems, he was a research assistant professor at the Technical University of Denmark, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), and a research professional at Graz University of Technology (Austria).

Stefan is a long-time member of INFORMS (the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences), AGIFORS (the Airline Group of IFORS), the Mathematical Programming Society, and OeGOR (the Austrian Society of Operations Research). He currently serves as Vice-Chair of the Aviation Applications Section of INFORMS, a subdivision that specializes in the application of Operations Research to the airline industry. Stefan received the degrees Doctor technicae and Diplom-Ingenieur in Mathematics from Graz University of Technology (Austria) and a Masters of Mathematics degree from the University of Waterloo (Canada).