OUR FACULTY MEMBERS MET THE FRESHMAN STUDENTS

        

Our faculty members met the freshman students as a part of the orientation program. Students had the chance to meet the faculty members individually and ask questions regarding the academic program, rules and policies.

         

ALUMNI MEETING

Our department chair Prof. Sabuncuoğlu met some of our graduates in İstanbul on September 4, to discuss what else can be done to strengthen the bonds between the department and the alumni.

TWO TEAMS FROM OUR DEPARTMENT RANKED FIRST AND SECOND ON YA/EM

        

Two teams from Bilkent University Industrial Engineering Department ranked first and second in the student project competition at the 27^th National Operations Research and Industrial Engineering Conference (YA/EM) organized at Izmir. There were 35 projects from over 20 universities all over Turkey at the competition.

 

The project titled “Market Analysis and Network Design for Demijohn Water” for Coca Cola Company had the first place at the competition. The team members are Sezgin Ayabakan, Ayse Celik, Ezgi Erdogan, Ceylan Karakan, Serkan Kocak and Dincer Konur. Coca Cola Company entered the market in Ankara with a new brand of Demijohn water called “Damla”. The first part of the project involved a detailed analysis of the Demijohn water market to estimate the demand for Damla in each neighborhood in Ankara and to understand the consumer behaviors. In the second part of the project, the team proposed the locations to open agencies to distribute Damla in Ankara as well as the number of vehicles and employees needed at each agency. These results are obtained using integer optimization techniques. The proposed solution is implemented and Coca Cola Company is distributing Damla Su with 15 agencies in Ankara.   

 

The project that won the second prize at the competition is titled “Hybrid System Design for the Distribution of Unilever Products to Retailers with Low Revenue”. Efe Burak Bozkaya, Ersin Korpeoglu, Emre Nadar, and Derya Sever are the team members. The project involves the design of a distribution system to serve low revenue retailers which are not accessible within the current system at Unilever Company. The team members proposed a hybrid system where the retailers are partitioned into three categories according to their revenue levels: the first category retailers are visited regularly by vehicles for “sicak satis”, the second category retailers can order by telephone and the third category retailers are encouraged to visit the GIMAT depot of Unilever. With the proposed system, the ratio of the total cost to the total revenue, which is a key performance measure used at Unilever to evaluate efficiency, decreased from 12% to 6.28%. The results of the project are applied at Unilever company and additional 1182 retailers are reached within the new system.

 

1. BILKENT UNIVERSITY WORKSHOP ON SUPPLY CHAIN AND LOGISTICS

 

1. Bilkent University Workshop on Supply Chain and Logistics was held on the 22^nd of June, 2007 at the Department of Industrial Engineering. There were 86 participants from various universities and industrial organizations.  The workshop aims at bringing supply chain and logistics researchers together to share their experiences and discuss recent developments. The workshop is scheduled to take place every year in June.

Detailed information: http://www.ie.bilkent.edu.tr/calistay

Click here for the photos.

PROF. BOPAYA BIDANDA GAVE A TALK AT OUR DEPARTMENT

   

Prof. Bopaya Bidanda, Chairman of University of Pittsburgh has visited our department to give a seminar on the future of Industrial Engineering and application areas. He has also met our Chairman Prof. Ihsan Sabuncuoğlu for joint research possibilities between Bilkent and University of Pittsburgh.

 

FIFTH EMFUAR PROJECT FAIR TOOK PLACE ON FRIDAY MAY 18, IN MİTHAT ÇORUH AUDITORIUM

The Industrial Engineering Project Fair and Competition took place on Friday, May 18, in the Mithat Çoruh Auditorium. The fourth year students in IE are required to develop an implementable project in cooperation with corporate sponsors. These projects introduce students to the issues faced by the Turkish Industrial sector. Nine project groups presented their projects in detail to the participants. The senior IE students also introduced their projects at information stands along with posters they had prepared. All participants voted on the posters and the winning group for the poster session was the Türksat “activator” project. For the project competition, Coca Cola’s demijohn market design of distribution networks ranked first, the UNILEVER mixed system design for distribution of products to retail points with low endorsement ranked second, while the MAN design, a planning system for efficient bus assembly, ranked third.

Following the presentations, the students had a chance to talk to the participants at a cocktail reception held in the EB building.

The event was very exciting for the senior students because it is one of the last events of their undergraduate academic life at Bilkent. It was the end of a very exhausting, but great experience.

EMRE ALPER YILDIRIM RECEIVES INFORMS YOUNG RESEARCHER AWARD

            

Assistant Professor Emre Alper Yildirim Receives INFORMS Optimization Prize for Young Researchers

The Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) awarded a Bilkent IE member, Emre Alper Yildirim, the Optimization Prize for Young Researchers in 2006. This annual prize is given to an esteemed and promising researcher who is at the beginning of his or her academic or industrial career for the most outstanding paper in optimization that is submitted to and accepted, or published in a refereed professional journal. The award includes a cash amount of US $1,000 and a citation certificate.

 

Dr. Yildirim received his B.S. from Bilkent and his Ph.D. from Cornell University (USA). He is now an assistant professor in the Industrial Engineering Department at Bilkent University. Dr. Yildirim received this award for his paper "On the minimum volume covering ellipsoid of ellipsoids" published in SIAM Journal on Optimization Vol. 17 (2006), pp. 621 - 641. The award committee described the contribution of this publication as presenting a novel polynomial-time algorithm for computing an approximation of the minimum volume covering ellipsoid of the convex hull of a given finite number of ellipsoids. The paper generalizes previous results on covering a finite set of points by developing an innovative semidefinite programming formulation that leads to the surprising result that the asymptotic complexity of computing the ellipsoid-covering is the same as that for the point-covering, despite the very different topologies of these sets. With a fluid style and clear presentation, the paper also illustrates potential extensions to other input sets and forms a solid foundation for further studies in this area. Dr. Yildirim is invited to give a half an hour presentation of his award winning paper at the INFORMS Annual Meeting to be held in Pittsburgh, USA on November 5, 2006.

2. GELENEKSEL IE 271 DERSİ PROJE YARIŞMASI 1 MART 2007 PERŞEMBE GÜNÜ YAPILDI IE 271 - Faliyetler Analizi ve Tasarımı dersi 2. proje yarışması 1 Mart 2007 Perşembe günü bölüm başkanımız Prof. Dr. İhsan Sabuncuoğlu, dersi veren öğretim üyelerimiz Yrd. Doç. Dr. Osman Alp ve Yrd. Doç Dr. Mehmet Taner ve diğer öğretim üyelerimizin katılımıyla Mithat Çoruh Konferans Salonunda gerçekleştirildi. 2. sınıf öğrencilerimizin ders projesi olarak endüstri kuruluşlarında yaptıkları toplam 48 tane proje arasında yapılan yarışmada 4 proje ödüle layık bulundu. Ödül alan öğrencilerimiz ve proje yaptıkları şirketler: Muhammet Fatih Erken, Samet Ensar Sarı, Ahmet Oğuzhan Özlü - Örümcek İskele Sanayi Tic. Ltd. Şti. Filiz Sayın, Seda Üstüner, Özgün Yanaz - Barkom Ltd. Zeynep Yetiş, Ceyda Elbaşoğlu, Anıl Yıldırım - Yurtiçi Kargo Bilkent Şubesi Mehmet Özcan, Tardu Selim Sepin, Tolga Şahin - Aktürk Şekerleme A.Ş. Öğrencilerimizi kutlar, başarılarının devamını dileriz.