About

Seyed M.R. Iravani is a Professor of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University, serving as the Director of Graduate Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Toronto, Canada, and both a Master's and Bachelor's degree in Industrial and System Engineering from Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran, Iran. His research focuses on the applications of stochastic processes, queuing theory, and game theory in the design and control of manufacturing, service operations, healthcare systems, and supply chains. Iravani has contributed to the understanding of complex systems through his work on priority systems, supply chain coordination, and product development efficiency, among other areas.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Economics
• Commerce
• Business
• Microeconomics
• Industrial organization
• Computer network
• Mathematical optimization
• Neoclassical economics
• Mathematics
• Discrete mathematics
• Mathematical analysis
• Marketing
• Physics
• Applied mathematics
• Advertising

Selected publications

• Tactical and Strategic Risks From Supply Disruptions in Competing Supply Chains

  Naval Research Logistics (NRL) · 2026-04-12

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Supply chain disruptions can lead to both tactical (i.e., loss of short‐term sales during a disruption) and strategic (i.e., loss of long‐term market share) consequences. We model the impact of a supply disruption on competing supply chains in which two firms compete for a limited backup supply. We describe strategies for both firms in a two‐stage game comprising (i) Preparation , which involves investment prior to the disruption to secure backup supply, and (ii) Response , which involves post‐disruption purchasing from the secured backup supply for a component whose availability has been compromised. Firms maximize their long‐run profit while simultaneously deciding their preparation and response strategies. We find the equilibrium strategy for firms in the two stages of the game. We describe the conditions under which a firm can use its preparation investment to not only minimize its disruption risks but also capture more market share. We also introduce a Leader‐Follower‐based game‐theoretic model that helps measure each firm's risk exposure by estimating the benefit of preparation. We identify the primary factors that influence the firm's preparation investment and affect customer satisfaction, and show that these depend on the size of the firm and the length of the disruption. This enables us to characterize the appropriate balance between protecting market share and exploiting a disruption to gain market share.

  PublisherDOI

• Self-matching guarantees in a brand omni-channel retailer

  European Journal of Operational Research · 2025-09-11

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Group Warranty Contracts to Coordinate Assembly Supply Chains With Nontestable Components

  Production and Operations Management · 2024-02-01 · 5 citations

  article

  We consider a supply chain where multiple suppliers and a manufacturer contribute to the assembly of a product (through providing components or labor). The product fails if any of its components (or elements of work) fails, but finding the faulty component can be prohibitively difficult. We study group warranty contracts for the manufacturer to induce suppliers to improve their quality levels. When information is symmetric and the manufacturer can contract on his own quality level, we show that a group warranty contract can achieve the first-best outcome. When the manufacturer’s quality level is not contractible, we show that the manufacturer and all the suppliers under-invest in qualities. We then extend our model to the asymmetric information case where suppliers have private quality cost information. Further, we consider whether the manufacturer benefits from sourcing multiple components from a single supplier, that is, supply consolidation. We find that supply consolidation benefits the manufacturer when his quality level is not contractible, but hurts him in the presence of asymmetric quality cost information of the suppliers.

  PublisherDOI

• Asymptotically Optimal Clearing Control of Backlogs in Multiclass Processing Systems

  Operations Research · 2024-06-20

  article

  Processing systems, such as make-to-order production or service systems, are often faced with backlogged demand, which results in a prolonged period in which the system is congested, although it has sufficient processing capacity to handle all newly arriving demand. In “Asymptotically Optimal Clearing Control of Backlogs in Multiclass Processing Systems,” Yu, Iravani, and Perry consider a processing system, modeled by a multiclass queueing model, that faces the problem of optimally clearing a large backlog from several classes of customers (or orders). For the special case of two classes, the authors prove that a static priority policy following a discounted cμ/θ rule is asymptotically optimal. When there are more than two classes of customers, the authors show that any admissible control that follows the best-effort rule becomes asymptotically optimal after a relatively short time. An extensive numerical study shows that these proposed policies are effective and provides guidance on when to choose among the policies in practice.

  PublisherDOI

• Survey on patient-provider communication in healthcare systems: an operational perspective

  IISE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering · 2024-11-06 · 3 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Scheduling policies to minimize abandonment costs in infomercial call centers

  IISE Transactions · 2024-03-18 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Infomercial call centers answer calls in an order that reduces the number of abandoned calls to minimize lost revenue. We study a multi-class queuing system with a single server and customer abandonment, motivated by the case of infomercial call centers. We fully characterize the structure of the server’s optimal scheduling policy that minimizes the long-run average customer abandonment cost. We show that the optimal service policy is a static priority policy. We derive sufficient conditions under which the so-called bμ–rule is optimal. Under the bμ–rule, it is optimal to give priority to the customer type that has a higher service rate (μ) and higher abandonment cost (b), i.e., higher index bμ. We numerically test the robustness of our proposed policy in more general settings, including multi-server infomercial call centers.

  PublisherDOI

• Admission and routing control of multiple queues with multiple types of customers

  IISE Transactions · 2023-09-25 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  We study the routing and admission control problem in a parallel queueing system with heterogeneous servers serving multiple types of customers. The system makes admission decision regarding whether to admit a customer upon arrival as well as routing decision of the queue to which the admitted customer is assigned. The objective is to maximize the expected profit, which includes customer-dependent revenues and holding cost and server-dependent cost. We first characterize the structure of the optimal policy for the case with two servers and two types of customers that have the same holding cost. We show that the optimal admission and routing policy has a complex non-monotone structure; however, we show that this non-monotone structure is the result of overlapping of three pairwise dominant policies that have a monotone structure. Utilizing the above structure, we propose three heuristics for the general case of multiple servers and multiple types of customers. Through a numerical study, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our heuristics, and provide conditions under which each heuristic performs well. Lastly, we provide insights on the effect of holding cost on customer rejection and the effect of fixed production cost on capacity allocation.

  PublisherDOI

• Group Warranty Contracts to Coordinate Assembly Supply Chains with Non-testable Components

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• admission and routing control of multiple queues with multiple types of customers

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2023-09-05 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  This is the code and data for producing the results in Table 1 and Figure 13 in the paper "admission and routing control of multiple queues with multiple types of customers".

  PublisherDOI

• Should suppliers allow capacity transfers?

  Production and Operations Management · 2022 · 5 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Industrial organization

  This research considers situations in which buyers pay to reserve their suppliers' capacity for future use. The study specifically explores whether suppliers should provide transfer rights, allowing buyers unable to use all of their reserved capacity to transfer the excess to another buyer, and whether they should charge a transfer fee. The study finds that, in most cases, the supplier maximizes financial outcomes when the buyer releasing the excess capacity keeps most of the retail‐level profit from the transfer and the supplier does not charge a transfer fee.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Design and Control Principles for Mobile Health Care Operations Management -- The Case of Asthma Control

  NSF · $330k · 2011–2015

• Collaborative Research: A Design Methodology for Operational Flexibility

  NSF · $150k · 2005–2009

• Collaborative Research: The Positive Role of Queues on Customer Value Perception: Mathematical Models and Laboratory Experiments

  NSF · $244k · 2013–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Wallace J. Hopp

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  24 shared

• Izak Duenyas

  Ross School

  13 shared

• Sarang Deo

  University of Hyderabad

  11 shared

• Karen Smilowitz

  9 shared

• Kenan Arifoğlu

  7 shared

• Mark P. Van Oyen

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  7 shared

• Bora Kolfal

  University of Alberta

  7 shared

• David Simchi‐Levi

  6 shared