Douglas Popken Biographical Sketch

 
Dr. Douglas Popken is a former Air Force officer and business school professor with nearly 20 years of hands-on experience in operations research applications and consulting. For Cox Associates, he has developed simulation models of complex business systems and processes, including leading all aspects of a case that identified a way to reduce trouble-ticket handling delays at a major telecommunications company by over 50%. He has also conducted pioneering research on the application of advanced statistical and signal processing algorithms to prediction of customer behaviors, successfully demonstrating in 1998 that signal processing techniques can predict customer purchasing behaviors more successfully than competing methods from econometrics and time series analysis. Outside Cox Associates, Dr. Popken offers management science consulting services through his company, Systems View.

Prior to becoming a full-time consultant in 1996, Dr. Popken was Project Manager and Principal Investigator at Sumaria Systems in an advanced software research and development effort. Previously, as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Management Information Systems/Decision Sciences at the University of Dayton School of Business, he taught Production and Operations Management, Applications of Management Science, Analysis of Factory Systems, and Experimental Design. While in the Air Force, he developed new simulation modeling techniques for rapid analysis of military logistics capability. The resulting systems have been adopted as a new Air Force modeling standard. In his assignment with the Defense Logistics Agency, Dr. Popken was Principal Investigator in a variety of internal consulting projects focusing on distribution, warehousing, and transportation applications. His work is credited with saving the Defense Logistics Agency millions of dollars.

Dr. Popken's research interests center on transportation networks and object-oriented simulation techniques applied to logistics and manufacturing problems. His original and hands-on software development has resulted in innovative approaches published in journals such as Operations Research, Transportation Research, Simulation, the International Journal in Computer Simulation, and Expert Systems with Applications; he has also contributed to the book: Object-Oriented Simulation.

Dr. Popken holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research from UC Berkeley and BS and M. Engr. degrees in Operations Research from Cornell University. He is an active member of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), the American Production and Inventory Control Society (APICS), the Council for Logistics Management (CLM), and the Military Operations Research Society (MORS).