Image courtesy of Prof. James Renegar

There are great opportunities for undergraduate research at Cornell and the College of Engineering.  Students are encouraged to further their classroom experience by working directly with faculty on research projects building on their desire to learn about and explore real issues in engineering.

The College of Engineering, through its Engineering Learning Initiatives, offers a comprehensive approach to exploring research opportunities and finding a Faculty mentor.  It also offers a Student Grant Program.

Within Operations Research and Engineering, interested students have opportunties to work closely with Faculty on research projects. An example of current undergraduate research at the School follows.

Material Returns: Why Dealers Return A-Parts

A large fraction of material returns for an automotive parts distribution company are actually parts that are fast-selling (A-parts). It is counterintuitive that dealers would return parts that, if they are fast-selling, the dealers will be reordering in the near future. To explore the reasons for dealer returns, a group of 20 undergraduate students at Cornell University, under the leadership of Prof. Peter Jackson, conducted interviews and surveys with a variety of the automobile company dealers in New York State. The 2005 study yielded several surprising results and pointed to the company's recommended stocking guide program as playing a significant role in the phenomenon. The students summarized the reasons for returning A-parts and suggested possible corrective actions. 

Airline Crew Scheduling

For major airline corporations, costs associated with flights crews are second only to acquisition costs of jet fuel. Once flight schedules have been fixed, there are typically an astronomical number of ways in which the flight crews for given airlines could be allocated to cover the flight commitments. Choosing the best (i.e., least costly) among the possible crew assignments is a difficult large-scale discrete optimization problem. Sponsored by the College’s Engineering Initiatives, the undergraduate research program, three ORE majors worked with Prof. Leslie Trotter to study computational techniques for solving large crew scheduling models. This grew into a research project with over a dozen undergraduate participants studying computational software for linear and discrete optimization.

Polyhedral Combinatorics

Linear programming, due to its broad applicability and effective solution methodology, is one of the premier tools of Operations Research. Study of the geometric structure of polyhedra present in linear programming models have algorithmic implications, not only for linear models, but also for discrete models of combinatorial optimization. The intimate connection between linear programming and algorithmic complexity was demonstrated over 40 years ago by the work of Edmonds on the matching problem: in an undirected graph, find a largest number of mutually nonadjacent edges. Undergraduate Presidential Research Scholar Mehmet Saglam has worked with faculty mentor, Prof. Leslie Trotter, in studying the polyhedral structure of certain models which generalize the matching problem. This work has identified new facet/vertex adjacency properties of these polyhedra.

Learn more about research at Cornell and how the University’s research initiatives contribute to technology transfer and economic vitality.