Joint work with Daniel Freund, Nanjing Jian, Eoin O’Mahony, David Shmoys

Cornell’s work on bike sharing with Citi Bike and its parent company Motivate relies on a combination of data analysis, stochastic modeling and optimization to help inform both the design and operation of the largest bike-sharing operations in North America. I’ll discuss our work and its impact, but focus on some of the inner workings of the stochastic modeling. This includes the use of (one of) the Poisson equation(s) in the computation of a central performance measure, a proof that the resulting objective function has important structural properties, and a heuristic underlying a simulation-optimization principle that is likely useful in many other contexts.

Bio: Shane G. Henderson is professor and former Director of the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University. He has previously held positions in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Auckland. He is the editor in chief of Stochastic Systems. He has served as chair of the INFORMS Applied Probability Society, and as simulation area editor for Operations Research. He is an INFORMS Fellow. His research interests include discrete-eventsimulation, simulation optimization, and emergency services planning.

He likes cats, climbing walls, biking, soccer, Harry Potter and being a Dad.