Benjamin Lev

Benjamin Lev is an American-Israeli Trustee Professor of Decision Sciences and Management Information Systems Department at Drexel University.^[1] He has been a prolific author and has made significant contributions in Operations Research and Management Science. He has contributed to the areas of inventory control, mathematical programming, and operations planning and scheduling. He is well known for his developments of Inventory Control Models, Transportation Problems, DEA and Fuzzy Decision Analyses.^[2][1][3]

His present editorial positions include the Editor-In-Chief of OMEGA - The International Journal of Management Science^[4] and the Co-Editor-In-Chief of International Journal of Management Science and Engineering Management.^[5] He is often invited as a guest speaker to lecture about OMEGA Journal at various universities around the world.^[6]

Education[edit]

Lev received his PhD. in Operations Research from Case Western Reserve University under the supervision of Leon Lasdon. He has M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

Academic career[edit]

Administrative and faculty appointments[edit]

Lev is a Trustee Professor and former Head of Decision Sciences Department at Drexel University, Philadelphia PA since 2009. During 1990-2009 he served as the Dean of School of Management, the Chair of Department of Management Studies, Professor and an Emeritus Professor at University of Michigan–Dearborn, MI. From 1987 to 1990 he served as the Head of The Management Department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester MA and during 1970 to 1987 he served as the Chair of Management Department and a Professor at Temple University, Philadelphia PA.

He is holding or has held a series of short faculty appointments at several universities as visiting professor, honorary professor, or adjunct professor at following

• 1986: Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
• 1974-1975: Tel Aviv University
• 1987: San Jose State University
• 1986: Tianjin University^[7]
• 2017–2020: Beijing Jiaotong University^[8]
• 2017–2020: Chengdu University^[9]
• 2018–2020: Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics^[10]
• 2018 - present: Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology^[11]
• 2018 - present: Nanjing Audit University^[12]

Conferences organized[edit]

• National ORSA/TIMS, General Chair, October 1990, Philadelphia PA.
• INFORMS International, General Co-Chair, June 28-July 1, 1998, Israel.
• The International Federations of Operations Research Societies, 16^th Triennial Conference, General Chair, Program Committee, July 8-12, 2002, Edinburgh, Scotland.
• The ALIO-INFORMS 2010 International Meeting, Co-Chair, June 6-9, 2010, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
• November 2013: International Conference on Management Science and Engineering Management, Organizing Committee Chair, Drexel University

INFORMS/ORSA/TIMS[edit]

• Served as the last Vice President of Meetings for TIMS
• Served as the first Vice President of Meetings for INFORMS
• INFORMS Fellow since 2003

A recent Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Project is to preserve the origin of Operations research. To do that, INFORMS initiated Oral History project where they interviewed various individuals about the history of OR. One of the first individuals interviewed was Benjamin Lev.^[13]

Honors and awards[edit]

• Biographical sketch in Young Scientists in Israel, pp. 148‑156, Remba, Rubin Mass, 1971.
• Intergovernmental Professional Act (IPA), Dept. of Energy, Washington, D.C., 1978.
• Trustee Professor, Drexel University, Philadelphia PA since 2014.

Selected contributions[edit]

Inventory Control Models[edit]

Classical inventory models assume fixed parameters. Lev and co-authors relaxed those requirements by allowing finite horizon models, price changes, holding cost changes, fixed costs changes. This work resulted in several publications in major journals.^{[14][15][16][17]}

Transportation Problems[edit]

Classical transportation problems attempt to minimize distribution cost. It is counter intuitive that shipping more goods will result in lower distribution cost. Lev and co-authors worked on More-for-Less transportation problems as well as Fixed Charge Transportation problems. This effort resulted in several publications in major Operations Research journals.^{[18][19][20][21][22][23]}

DEA and Fuzzy[edit]

Since 2010 Lev has shifted much of his focus to DEA; Fuzzy; Multi-criteria Group Decision; Bi-level multi-objective problems. Lev and co-authors applied those techniques to numerous real-life problems mainly in China, such as water resources, banking, industrial parks, layouts, power dispatching, hospital scheduling, construction projects, portfolio selection and many others. Those research projects were published in several scientific journals.^{[24][25][26][27]}

Books[edit]

Dr. Benjamin Lev co-authored and co-edited ten books:

• Lev, Benjamin; Weiss, Howard J. (1982). Introduction to mathematical programming: quantitative tools for decision making. North Holland. ISBN 9780444005915.^[28]
• Lev, Benjamin (1983). Energy models and studies. North-Holland Publishing Company. ISBN 9780444866011.^[29]
• Environment, Operations Research Society of America Special Interest Group on Energy, Natural Resources, and the (1984). Analytic techniques for energy planning: proceedings of the first symposium. North Holland. ISBN 9780444868848.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)^[30]
• Lev, Benjamin; Bloom, Jeremy A. (1987). Strategic Planning in Energy and Natural Resources: Proceedings of the Second Symposium on Analytic Techniques for Energy, Natural Resources, and Environmental Planning. North-Holland. ISBN 9780444702302.^[31]
• Márquez, Fausto Pedro García; Lev, Benjamin (2013-03-06). Engineering Management. BoD – Books on Demand. ISBN 9789535110378.^[32]
• Márquez, Fausto Pedro García; Lev, Benjamin (2015-01-24). Advanced Business Analytics. Springer. ISBN 9783319114156.^[33]
• Márquez, Fausto Pedro García; Lev, Benjamin (2016-11-15). Big Data Management. Springer. ISBN 9783319454986.
• Márquez, Fausto Pedro García; Lev, Benjamin (2019). Data Science and Digital Business. Springer. ISBN 9783319956510.^[34]
• Production Management: Methods And Studies. North Holland. 1986. p. 249. ISBN 0444879862.^[35]

References[edit]