Improving Transportation Networks Is Focus for New Industrial Engineering Faculty Member

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Kelly Sullivan

Kelly Sullivan, assistant professor of industrial engineering, has a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree, both in industrial engineering, from the University of Arkansas. After earning a doctoral degree at the University of Florida, he has returned to Arkansas as an assistant professor in the industrial engineering department. He explained that he’s seen a lot of exciting changes taking place in the department since he was last here, including the latest top-20 ranking in the U.S. News and World Report’s college rankings.

“It's a growing place,” said Sullivan, “an exciting place to be. It seems like a place where I can grow as a faculty member.” He added that his research interests overlap with those of several other faculty members in the department and the College, and he looks forward to collaborating with his colleagues and with research centers such as the Center for Excellence in Logistics and Distribution and the Mack-Blackwell Rural Transportation Center.

Sullivan’s research focuses on network security. A network is any set of interrelated objects, places or people, such as an electrical grid, a communications system or a social group. Currently, Sullivan is focusing on transportation networks. He develops mathematical models that can help researchers identify threats and vulnerabilities in order to design networks that can stand up to disruption.

Sullivan’s research has applications in the fields of defense and homeland security, as well as the broader field of logistics. In one of his current projects, Sullivan models geographical networks, such as roads, in order to predict ways that natural disasters might affect them.

In another project, Sullivan is figuring out how to secure a country’s borders against smugglers trying to transport nuclear material. His models can show security professionals which checkpoints are the optimal places to install radiation detectors, taking into account the available resources. Sullivan explained that one of the biggest challenges in this project is accounting for human intelligence: in order to be effective, his model must be able to outsmart the smuggler.