Michael Trick's Personal Home Page

Contact Information

Address:
Tepper School of Business
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA
USA 15213
+1 (412) 268-3697
Fax: +1 (412) 268-7057
Email: trick@cmu.edu

Current Position

I am a Professor of Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business (formerly the Graduate School of Industrial Administration). From 1998 through 2005, I was President of the Carnegie Bosch Institute for Applied Studies in International Management, an independently funded part of Tepper concentrating on research and executive education in international management.

In 2002, I was the President of INFORMS (the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences). I am currently the Vice President/North America for the International Federation of Operational Research Societies.

My Full Vita (A Short Bio)

Research

I have fairly wide interests in combinatorial optimization, with a somewhat applied bent.

• Social Capital and Operations Research is an interest of mine for my presidential year of INFORMS
  • OR Alone? some thoughts and pointers on the subject.
• In my presidential year, I published some expository pieces on OR
  • Optimize Magazine
  • Information Week
• Modeling Issues
  Formulations and Reformulations in Integer Programming (FORMUL'04 Workshop) pdf powerpoint
• Sports scheduling. I am working on integer and matching techniques to schedule baseball and basketball leagues.
  • Scheduling a Major College Basketball Conference (Operations Research, 1998) ps pdf modifications to writeup.
  • A Schedule and Break Approach to Sports Scheduling ps pdf
  • Integer and Constraint Programming Approaches to Sports Schedulingpdf
  • The Traveling Tournament Problem: Description and Benchmarks Full version pdf Short version pdf
  • A bender's approach for the constrained minimum break problem pdf
  • The Timetable Constrained Distance Minimization Problem pdf
  • Round Robin Scheduling - A Surveypdf
  • Some Challenge Instances
  • Further sports scheduling pointers
• Constraint Programming is a very interesting area. I think the relationship between constraint programming and integer programming, and methods to unite them is a tremendous research opportunity.
  • A Dynamic Programming Approach for Consistency and Propagation for Knapsack Constraints ps pdf
  • Constraint Programming and Hybrid Formulations for Life ps pdf
  • Constraint Programming: A Tutorial ppt
• Branch and Price is an extremely effective computational technique for solving hard integer programming problems.
  • A Branch-and-Price Approach for Graph Multi-Coloring pdf
  • Enhancing Value by Optimal Segmentation: Application to Determine Newspaper Zones ps pdf
  • A Column Generation Approach to Graph Coloring pdf
• Scheduling and Network Flows.
  • Scheduling Multiple Variable Speed Machines pdf
  • A Linear Relaxation Heuristic for the Generalized Assignment Problem pdf
• Voting systems and voting rules.
  • Small Binary Voting Trees
  • Sophisticated Voting Rules implement.pdf
• Stochastic dynamic programming.
  • Building a Better Game through Dynamic Programming: A Flip Analysis
  • A Linear Programming Approach to Stochastic Dynamic Programming pdf
  • Spline Approximation Problems. pdf
• Special Metrics
  • George Christopher did his thesis on the topic of totally decomposable metrics, which I think is a very interesting topic. pdf

Teaching

I teach in the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, mainly in the MSIA (MBA equivalent) and Ph.D. programs. My main courses are the required introductory operations research courses and electives on the applications of operations research. I use projects in linear programming, nonlinear programming, and integer programming to get ideas across. Other interesting projects would be very much appreciated.

For a full example of one of my courses, here is the page for my Management Science Techniques for Consultants course taught at the Sloan School at MIT (at Carnegie Mellon, a similar course is entitled Operations Research Applications).

Personal Information

• I very much like the books of Patrick O'Brian, and keep the archive for an active mailing list called the Gunroom. Here I am with the official Gunroom cap on the Discovery in Dundee.
• My son, Alexander Atticus Trick, was born May 20, 2004. Here are some pictures.
• A Bizarro cartoon that sums up my current personal situation with Ilona. Ilona and I were married on September 10, 1994. Here's the invitation and a summary of the wedding (which is included on Wedding Page. I also have a picture of us white-water rafting and scuba diving in Montserrat (before the volcano) and in Cozumel.
• My folks lived through the great Winnipeg flood, and have pictures to prove it!
• A picture of my bike outside a pub in England.
• I received my Ph.D. from Georgia Tech (in Industrial and Systems Engineering) in 1987. Here's the Ramblin' Wreck song.

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