Michael O. Ball

About

Michael O. Ball is Professor Emeritus at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. He holds a joint appointment within the Institute for Systems Research in the Clark School of Engineering and is a member of the Decision, Operations and Information Technologies Department within the Smith School. Dr. Ball has authored over 200 scholarly publications covering a range of subjects including air transportation, revenue management and pricing, supply chain management, and system reliability. He is the co-director and principal investigator of NEXTOR-III, an 8-university consortium funded by the FAA to conduct research in aviation operations research. Throughout his career, Dr. Ball has been involved in various research and consulting projects that have led to implementations in industry and government. In recent years, he has served on expert panels advising organizations such as the United Nations, the FAA, the National Academy of Engineering, and multiple airport authorities on aviation policies. He has been an active member of INFORMS, serving as area editor for Transportation and Optimization for Operations Research and currently as an associate editor for Operations Research and Transportation Science. Dr. Ball received BES and MSE degrees from Johns Hopkins University in 1972 and a PhD in Operations Research from Cornell University in 1977.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Operations research
• Mathematics
• Mathematical optimization
• Microeconomics
• Economics
• Engineering

Selected publications

• The use of auctions for allocating airport access rights

  Transportation Research Part A Policy and Practice · 2017-11-09 · 34 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Stochastic Optimization Models for Transferring Delay Along Flight Trajectories to Reduce Fuel Usage

  Transportation Science · 2017-02-24 · 31 citations

  articleSenior author

  In a typical aviation environment today, the precise landing times of en route aircraft are not set until each aircraft approaches the airspace adjacent to the destination airport. In times of congestion, it is not unusual for air traffic controllers to subject arriving aircraft to various maneuvers so as to create an orderly flow of aircraft onto an arrival runway. Typical maneuvers might include flying in zigzag patterns and flying in circular holding patterns, as well as others. These maneuve…

  PublisherDOI

• Quantity-Contingent Auctions and Allocation of Airport Slots

  Transportation Science · 2020 · 29 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  In this paper, we define and investigate quantity-contingent auctions. Such auctions can be used when there exist multiple units of a single product and the value of a set of units depends on the total quantity sold. For example, a road network or airport will become congested as the number of users increase so that a permit for use becomes more valuable as the total number allocated decreases. A quantity-contingent auction determines both the number of items sold and an allocation of items to b…

  PublisherDOI

• Equity and Strength in Stochastic Integer Programming Models for the Dynamic Single Airport Ground-Holding Problem

  Transportation Science · 2020 · 14 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  We study stochastic integer programming models for assigning delays to flights that are destined for an airport whose capacity has been impacted by poor weather or some other exogenous factor. In the existing literature, empirical evidence seemed to suggest that a proposed integer programming model had a strong formulation, but no existing theoretical results explained the observation. We apply recent results concerning the polyhedra of stochastic network flow problems to explain the strength of…

  PublisherDOI

• Causal analysis of flight en route inefficiency

  Transportation Research Part B Methodological · 2021-07-29 · 10 citations

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  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• DDDAS-SMRP: Dynamic Real-Time Order Promising and Fulfillment for Global Make-to-Order Supply Chains

  NSF · $633k · 2006–2010

Frequent coauthors

• Alexander Estes

  University of Maryland, College Park

  15 shared

• David J. Lovell

  13 shared

• Mark Hansen

  12 shared

• Vinai S. Trichur

  Akamai (United States)

  11 shared

• Zhenying Zhao

  Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology

  11 shared

• John S. Baras

  10 shared

• Yufeng Tu

  Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital

  10 shared

• Wolfgang Jank

  University of South Florida

  10 shared

Education

• PhD, Operations Research

  Cornell University

  1977

Awards & honors

• Smith Provides PhD Fellowships Named for Michael Ball

Similar researchers at University of Maryland, College Park

• Bruce L. Goldenh-74
• Siva Viswanathanh-60
• Sujin Kimh-34