Zwart is one of twelve new Fellows named this year. INFORMS recognizes his sustained fundamental contributions to applied probability and its applications to computer, communication and electricity networks.
About INFORMS
INFORMS, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, is an international professional association with more than 12,000 members in academia, industry and government. Its members use mathematics and data to improve decisions in areas such as healthcare, transport and energy. The Fellowship recognizes outstanding achievements over a career, including contributions to research, practical applications, education and service to the profession.
The research
Much of Zwart’s research focuses on ‘heavy tails’. These describe situations in which extreme outcomes, such as very long delays or very large power outages, are more likely than many standard statistical models would suggest. Zwart has made several major contributions to the analysis of systems with heavy-tailed phenomena over the past 25 years, ranging from developing fundamental probabilistic tools, to applications that require specific domain knowledge.
For example, a single fault in a power grid can set off a chain of failures. Zwart and his collaborators study how these failures spread and how uncertainty in electricity supply and demand affects a grid’s reliability. Their work includes mathematical explanations for the wide variation in blackout sizes, as well as methods for accounting for failure risk when deciding how to operate a grid.
In addition, Zwart studies how computer and communication networks share limited capacity and how the order in which tasks are processed affects delays. Other work explores how businesses can learn about customer demand while setting prices. Across these topics, he combines probability, statistics and optimization to analyse systems shaped by uncertainty.
About Bert Zwart
Alongside his role at CWI, Zwart is professor of Stochastic Operations Research at Eindhoven University of Technology. His earlier distinctions include the Erlang Prize in 2008 and the Van Dantzig Prize in 2015.
