Armann Ingolfsson, PhD, SM, BSc

Area of Study / Keywords

Operations Management Operations Research Business Analytics Healthcare Emergency Medical Services Queueing Theory

About

Armann Ingolfsson is a Professor of Operations Management. He received a PhD in operations research from MIT. His research interests focus on operations management in the service and health care sectors and developing methodology to analyze congested systems. He has published articles on these topics in Management Science, Operations Research, Production and Operations Management, INFORMS Journal on Computing, and various other journals. He is past Editor-in-chief of INFORMS Transactions on Education, current Associate Editor for INFOR , Health Care Management Science, and Queueing Models and Service Management,  past Guest Editor for a special issue of Operations Research on behavioral queueing science. He has taught operations management, analytics, data visualization, and statistics to undergraduate, MBA, executive education, and PhD students. He is a past President of the Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS) and has served in various other roles for CORS.

Research

My research program focuses on developing mathematical models and algorithms to predict and optimize the performance of production and service systems, with emphasis on health care in general and emergency medical services in particular. Services employ the majority of the workforce in most developed economies. Productivity, by most measures, is considerably lower in services than other sectors, so there are clear opportunities for performance improvement in services. The health care sector forms a large and growing portion of the service sector and it is a prime source of interesting and important planning problems. Health care planning is important not only in economic terms but also because improved planning could save lives or increase quality of life. My objectives are to develop tools that are useful to planners in making decisions about, for example, capacity planning or facility location. The models underlying the tools should be sufficiently realistic to be credible to practitioners and sufficiently accurate to distinguish between the consequences of different decisions, they should be tractable, and it should be possible to use them on typical computing devices. At the same time, I strive to pose and solve problems that are interesting and challenging, and through doing so, contribute to the methodological basis of operations research.

Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=o--KHAQAAAAJ&hl=en

Orcid profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2213-2736

Teaching

I teach courses on operations management, decision models, data visualization, and data analysis. In my courses, I strive to create opportunities for students to learn to convert raw data into information that is useful for decision making. I focus on learning by doing because I believe that doing leads to the longest-lasting learning. The central skill that students in my courses learn is to analyze data and create and analyze models using spreadsheets. That is also the skill that I test on computer-based exams. I often use current events and real data to illustrate the relevance of operations management and decision modeling. Finally, I strive to be an instructor who is organized, available, and fair.

OM 421 - Data Visualization

Visual displays of quantitative information include charts, tables, maps, dashboards, animations, and more. Such displays can be used to understand, to inform, and to convince. This course will focus on strategies for carefully and clearly communicating analytical findings to the people who need to take action based on them. We will learn to use both basic tools (MS Excel) and advanced tools (Tableau and R) to create visual displays. Evaluation components will include assignments, presentations, and exams (midterm and final exam). Prerequisites: MGTSC 312.

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