FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a five-year, $375,000 CAREER Award to Erhan Kutanoglu, an assistant professor of industrial engineering at the University of Arkansas, to support his research in service parts logistics systems.

The prestigious CAREER Award recognizes and supports young researchers who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. The NSF annually selects 200-300 young science and engineering faculty from across the country to receive the award.

Kutanoglu will use the award to develop an integrated research and teaching program that addresses multi-dimensional coordination and integration issues in distributed logistics systems. An extensive education component based on the research will include real-world case study material for UA industrial engineering students and enhance the current undergraduate and graduate programs offered in applied operations research and logistics.

"We are very pleased that the National Science Foundation has selected Erhan for this honor," said Otto J. Loewer, dean of engineering. "The award helps to confirm the fact that the faculty in the UA College of Engineering are among the very best in the nation"

Kutanoglu’s research is based on the challenges currently being experienced by companies using service parts logistics (SPL). SPL is a complex system that determines the parts that should be stocked and where they should be located in specific warehouses across the country to best serve a company and its customers. Through Kutanoglu’s research, a company will be better able to manage millions of parts without excessive facility and inventory investments, allowing significant cost savings that could be passed on to the consumer.

IBM is participating in the project by providing the actual SPL data needed for the research. Kutanoglu anticipates that by using the real-world data, the project results will help improve the company’s operations as well as make a significant contribution to the service parts logistics industry.

Kutanoglu joined the UA industrial engineering faculty after receiving his doctorate from Lehigh University in 1999.

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