I am an Operations Research Scientist at Convoy. I work on building the network efficiency of the Convoy Freight Network and optimize routing and capacity planning for time-based carrier contracts. With this product, carriers are guaranteed to be paid for the time they dedicate towards Convoy and do not have to spend a lot of time anymore to manage their schedule, as Convoy manages their schedule for them. The upsides for Convoy are that there is a lot more flexibility in how to allocate loads and in what order to execute them by specific drivers, reducing empty miles and bringing the organization closer to its main goals of reducing empty truck miles and optimizing the freight network as a whole.

Before my current position, I worked as a Pre-Doctoral Research Associate at the Supply Chain Transportation & Logistics Center at the University of Washington. I also received my Master’s and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Industrial Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle. Throughout my graduate school experience I worked in supply chain and logistics related intern positions at Amazon and Tesla. Prior to graduate school I worked as a Supply Chain Improvement Manager at the aerospace manufacturer Airbus in Hamburg, Germany and Toulouse, France after completing my Bachelor’s degree at the FH Nordakademie Hochschule der Wirtschaft in Industrial Engineering & Business Management. Originally from Kiel, Germany, I enjoy water and outdoor sports and have a close connection to Northern German cuisine.

I am mostly interested in problems that evolve around logistical challenges and decision making in goods and people movement. Previous research projects of mine have focused on mainly two areas:

Evacuation Modeling and Optimization for Isolated Communities

This research mainly focuses on the modeling of evacuation routes for areas that cannot rely on road-based evacuation, such as islands and remote mountain valleys. Thus, a coordinated set of resources needs to be used to evacuate the population.
This problem is vastly understudied and increasingly relevant with increasing risks of disasters caused by natural hazards. A major contribution in this space is a new formulation for isolated community evacuation and corresponding solution methods. In this research we further collaborated with an isolated community on how to leverage such optimization tools together with ground level data and subject matter expertise.

Driver Decision Making and Routing in Urban Freight & Logistics

Most of my research in this space evolves around decision making for parking seeking behavior of commercial vehicles. We identified different types of inefficiencies that occur during parking seeking in urban areas. Our research furthermore investigated the effects of using an app for parking availability and the incorporation of expected parking availability in route optimization.

Timed Contracts in Dynamic Freight Marketplaces

In this project my research focuses on how we efficiently can match carriers to time-based contracts instead of matching drivers to loads individually. Especially in local range freight delivery in high density areas, this tool allows substantial efficiency gains for the marketplace as this allows for efficient routing solutions, low empty miles, and a high flexibility in assigning loads despite disruptions. Carriers benefit from not having to worry about scheduling and a guarantee of time-based payments. Shippers benefit from dedication-like services. The problem in a dynamic marketplace then become how to match carriers to contracts effectively and efficiently. Our research here uses equilibrium-based marketplace optimization techniques to find solutions for this problem.