Ziv Katalan

Ziv Katalan is Managing Director for Wharton Global Initiatives and an Adjunct Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions. He received his BS in Mathematics from TelAviv University (1987), and his PhD in Management Science/Operations Research from Columbia University (1995).

Since 1994, Dr. Katalan has taught courses in decision models and uncertainty, business analytics, operations management, supply chain management, mathematical modeling and its applications in finance, and quantitative finance at Wharton's MBA and MBA for Executives programs and Penn’s EMTM program. He received a number of teaching awards from the Wharton MBA and MBA for Executives programs. During 20022007, Dr. Katalan served as CoDirector of the Executive Master's in Technology Management (EMTM), a program jointly sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and the Wharton School.

Dr. Katalan's research interests include the design and analysis of production and service systems, and their interface with a company's marketing strategy, scheduling and allocation of resources, and the impact of increasing product variety on manufacturing performance.  His research papers were published in Queuing Systems, Management Science, Operations Research, and Naval Research Logistics.

Sergei Savin, Morris A. Cohen, Noah Gans, Ziv Katalan (2005), Capacity Management in Rental Businesses with Two Customer Bases, Operations Research, 617631.

Abstract: We consider the allocation of capacity in a system in which rental equipment is accessed by two classes of customers. We formulate the problem as a continuoustime analogue of the oneshot allocation problems found in the more traditional literature on revenue management, and we analyze a queueing control model that approximates its dynamics. Our investigation yields three sets of results. First, we use dynamic programming to characterize properties of optimal capacity allocation policies. We identify conditions under which “complete sharing”—in which both classes of customers have unlimited access to the rental fleet—is optimal. Next, we develop a computationally efficient “aggregate threshold” heuristic that is based on a fluid approximation of the original stochastic model. We obtain closedform expressions for the heuristic’s control parameters and show that the heuristic performs well in numerical experiments. The closedform expressions also show that, in the context of the fluid approximation, revenues are concave and increasing in the fleet size. Finally, we consider the effect of the ability to allocate capacity on optimal fleet size. We show that the optimal fleet size under allocation policies may be lower, the same as, or higher than that under complete sharing. As capacity costs increase, allocation policies allow for larger relative fleet sizes. Numerical results show that, even in cases in which dollar profits under complete sharing may be close to those under allocation policies, the capacity reductions enabled by allocation schemes can help to lift profit margins significantly.

Ziv Katalan (Work In Progress), The Effect of Product Variety on Manufacturing Performance, (with A. Federgruen and G. Gallego), The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA (1999).

Ziv Katalan and A. Federgruen (1999), The Impact of Adding a MaketoOrder Product Line to a MaketoStock Production System , Management Science, Vol. 45, pp. 980994.

Ziv Katalan and A. Federgruen (1998), Determining Production Schedules under BaseStock Policies in Single Facility MultiItem Production Systems , Operations Research, Vol. 46, pp. 883898.

Ziv Katalan (Work In Progress), MaketoStock: That is the Question; Novel Answers to An Ancient Debate, (with A. Federgruen), The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA (1996).

Ziv Katalan and A. Federgruen (1996), Customer Waiting Time Distributions under BaseStock Policies in Single Facility MultiItem Production Systems , Naval Research Logistics, Vol. 43, pp. 533548.

Ziv Katalan and A. Federgruen (1996), The Stochastic Economic Lot Scheduling Problem: Cyclical BaseStock Policies with Idle Times , Management Science, Vol. 42, pp. 783796.

Ziv Katalan and A. Federgruen (1996), The Impact of Setup Times on The Performance of MultiClass Service and Production Systems , Operations Research, Vol. 44, pp. 9891001.

Ziv Katalan and A. Federgruen (1994), Approximating Queue Size and Waiting Time Distributions in General Polling Systems , Queueing Systems, Vol. 18, pp. 353386.

Wharton MBA Program Core Teaching Award, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 2013 Wharton MBA Program for Executives Elective Teaching Award, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Class of 19992003, 2006, 2011 MBA Core Curriculum Cluster Teaching Award, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 1997, 1999, 2001 First Place Student Paper Award, The ORSA Technical Section on Manufacturing and Operations Management, 1994 Honorable Mention in George E. Nicholson Student Paper Competition, 1994