Quote

“[M]y first dream was to be an astronaut. My father dug the idea too. He envisioned me (his namesake) perishing in some space mishap, immortalizing us both. I chose a less glamorous and, unless someday I get a disgruntled grad student, less dangerous career.”

Otis Jennings - Associate Professor, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business

Bio

Otis Jennings is Associate Professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. His main research interests are: analyzing large-scale service systems; highly utilized multi-product processing networks with and without switch-over delays; and health care facility operations and public policy; applied probability and queueing theory.

Prof. Jennings earned a BSE in Civil Engineering/Operations Research (Magna cum laude, 1994) from Princeton University. He holds an MS in Operations Research (1999) and a PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering (2000), both from Georgia Tech. His dissertation was titled “Multiclass Queueing Networks with Setup Delays: Stability Analysis and Diffusion Approximation”. Prof. Jennings continued on to a year and a half postdoc at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.

In 1998 he taught in the School of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Prof. Jennings has received an Intel Graduate Fellowship, the Georgia Tech President's Fellowship, the Bell Laboratories Cooperative Research Fellowship and the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.

The MIT Sloan School of Management and the Operations Research Center hosted Prof. Jennings as a MLK Visiting Scholar from 2001 to 2003.  He taught 15.760 Operations, a core MBA operations-management course.

Publications

Jennings, O. B., A. Mandelbaum, W. A. Massey and W. Whitt, "Server Staffing to Meet Time-Varying Demand," Management Science, 42, 1381—1394, 1996.

Jennings, O. B. and W. A. Massey, "A Modified Offered Load Approximation for Nonstationary Circuit Switched Networks, " Select Proceedings of the Third INFORMS Telecommunications Conference (Telecommunication Systems, editors R.B. Cooper and R. Doverspike), 7, pp. 253-265, 1997.

Jennings, O. B., W. A. Massey and C. McCalla, "Optimal Profit for Leased Lines Services, " with Proceedings of the 15th International Teletraffic Congress - ITC 15 (editors V. Ramaswami and P. E. Wirth), pp. 803-814, June 1997.

Dai, J. G. and O. B. Jennings, "Stability of General Processing Networks," In Stochastic Models and Optimization, D. D. Yao, H. Zhang and X. Y. Zhou, editors, pp. 193--243, Springer, New York, 2003.

Dai, J. G. and O. B. Jennings, "Stabilizing Queueing Networks with Setups," Mathematics of Operations Research, Vol. 29, pp. 891-922, November 2004.

de Véricourt, F. and O. B. Jennings, "Dimensioning Large-Scale Membership Services," Operations Research, Vol. 56, pp. 173-187, Jan 2008.

Jennings, O. B., "Heavy-Traffic Limit Theorems for Queueing Networks with Polling Stations: Brownian Motion in a Wedge," Mathematics of Operations Research, Vol. 33, pp. 12-35, Feb 2008.

Hampshire, R. C., O. B. Jennings and W. A. Massey, "A Modified Fluid Delay Model for the Optimal Design of a Dynamic Call Center,” Probability in the Engineering and Informational Science, Vol. 23, pp. 231-259, Apr 2009.

Jennings, O. B., “Averaging Principles for a Diffusion Scaled Heavy Traffic Polling Station with K Job Classes,” Mathematics of Operations Research, Vol. 35, pp. 669- 702, Aug 2010.

Jennings, O. B. and J. E. Reed, "An Overloaded Multiclass FIFO Queue with Abandonments," Operations Research, v60 n5 (201210): 1282-1295.