Peter Jackson is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering. Born in Nipigon, Ontario, Canada, he received a B.A. in Economics with Mathematics in 1975 (University of Western Ontario), a M.Sc. in Statistics in 1978 (Stanford University), and a Ph.D. in Operations Research in 1980 (Stanford University). He has served at Cornell since 1980. He was Director and Director of Graduate Studies for the Systems Engineering Program within the College of Engineering. He also served as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for ORIE.
Jackson has published in IIE Transactions, Journal of Manufacturing and Operations Management, Management Science, Mathematical Programming, Mathematics of Operations Research, Naval Research Logistics Quarterly, and Operations Research. Professor Jackson has consulted with several companies in these areas, including Agco, PTC-Servigistics, General Motors, Cleveland Clinic, Xelus, Clopay Building Products, General Electric, Aeroquip, and Quaker Oats. He is the recipient of a General Motors Research and Development Innovation award in 2011 for a business process to optimize retail inventories.
Professor Jackson was also active in educational curriculum development for operations research and systems engineering. He is the recipient of several awards for curriculum innovation in addition to numerous student-voted awards for teaching excellence. He is the author of an introductory textbook to systems engineering, Getting Design Right: A Systems Approach.
Jackson's research interests include planning and scheduling for integrated production, transportation and inventory management systems, supply chain management, and business modeling and data analysis. Typically, his research involves modeling a stochastic system, developing analytic approximations of the system performance, validating the approximations with simulation, and, finally, developing custom techniques to optimize the system performance.
Professor Jackson emphasizes the practical application of operations research and systems engineering techniques to problems of design, manufacture, and organization. His thirty years of guiding student projects and providing external consulting services has resulted in a wealth of detailed simulations, case studies, industrial datasets, and challenges to share with his students. He now concentrates on bringing the integrative tools of systems engineering together with the more analytical tools of operations research. An ideal course for him now would include discovery processes, vision, mission, and goal formulation, system architecture specification, and detailed operational planning.
Professor Jackson is a member of INFORMS. He also offers short courses in core practices in systems engineering and in supply chain design and optimization.
