Maged M. Dessouky, Ph.D., is Dean’s Professor and Chair in the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.  Previously, he was Director of the Epstein Institute at the University of Southern California.  Prior to joining the faculty at USC, Dr. Dessouky was employed at Hewlett-Packard (Systems Analyst), Bellcore (Member of Technical Staff), and Pritsker Corporation (Senior Systems Analyst).    

Dr. Dessouky’s research focuses on developing simulation and optimization models in improving the efficiency of large-scale complex systems, and in particular supply chain and global logistics networks.   His simulation models have been used for capacity analysis of the Southern California rail network.  He has developed location and routing models for the distribution of medical supplies in the event of a large-scale emergency. Dr.  Dessouky was recipient of the 2007 Transportation Science & Logistics Best Paper Prize for the paper “Optimal Slack Time for Schedule-Based Transit Operations” published in Transportation Science and is a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IIE).  

He has been a principal investigator or co-principal investigator of over 50 funded research projects totaling over 50 million dollars supported by the National Science Foundation, Society of Manufacturing Engineers, Caltrans, Federal Transportation Administration, Los Angeles County and Department of Defense, among others.  This research has led to over 100 refereed journal articles that are either in print or have been accepted for publication in leading journals of the field including IIE Transactions, Transportation Science, Mathematics of Operations Research, ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation, IEEE Transactions on ITS, Transportation Research – Part B, and European Journal of Operational Research. 

One on-going project which is funded by the National Science Foundation is the use of a co-simulation optimization control (COSMO) approach for the freight routing and load balancing problem. Transportation networks are complex dynamical systems with nonlinear dynamics, random phenomena and uncertainties that cannot be accurately captured by traditional flow-based or queuing theory-based mathematical models. The use of real time traffic flow simulators accounts for all kind of interactions on the vehicle and infrastructure levels, geometry of the road, traffic lights and stop signs etc. The simulator generates estimates of the states of the system which in this case are the link travel times and/or density which are used by the optimization block to generate optimum routes for freight. 

Professor Dessouky is area/associate editor of Computers & Industrial Engineering, IISE Transactions, and Transportation Research Part B: Methodological. He previously served as Area/Associate Editor of ACM Transactions of Modelling and Computer Simulation and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, and was on the Editorial Board of Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review.  He was Program Chair of the 2003 Industrial Engineering Research Conference.

He teaches supply chain and operations research courses both at the undergraduate and graduate level.  He has won a number of teaching awards including the Orange County Engineering Council Outstanding Engineering Educator Award, IISE OR Teaching Award, USC Associates Award in Teaching (Top University Award for Teaching), and the TRW School of Engineering Teacher of the Year Award.

Dr. Dessouky received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University in 1984 and 1987, respectively. He received a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1992.