• Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology, 1973.
• M.S. in Industrial Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1970.
• B.S. in Industrial Engineering, University of Arkansas, 1968.

Many of the companies in the Richardson Telecom Corridor are involved in the design, development, and deployment of fiber-optic telecommunications networks. In order to meet customer demand for information services with high reliability and fast response times, these networks must be fault-tolerant. To be economically viable, they must be efficiently designed. Designing the least-cost, fault-tolerant network can be quite challenging. Many factors must be taken into consideration, such at the cost and capabilities of the available networking equipment, but the key data that drives the design process is a forecast of the demand that will placed on the network.

Unfortunately, demand in the telecom industry is notoriously difficult to predict and there is concern that a design for an erroneous forecast may prove to be inferior. If the forecast is too low, the network will not have enough capacity to handle the demand and network owner will likely lose business. Conversely, a network designed for forecast that turns out to predict more demand than is realized will be over provisioned with expensive, underutilized equipment. In our project, we are developing a design methodology that accounts for the uncertainty in the demand forecasts and provides designs that will work well over a wide range of possible demand scenarios. [Project Details]

• Telecommunication Design
• e-Commerce
• Optimization

• Education Committee Member ORSA 1979 - 1981
• Lanchester Prize Committee 1982
• Program Chair - ORSA/TIMS Dallas 1984
• President, Local Chapter of Sigma Xi 1985
• Cluster Chair ORSA/TIMS Los Angeles 1986
• Organizer, Computer Science Tech. Section Conf. of INFORMS 1996
• Arrangements Chair - INFORMS Dallas 1997
• Operations Research Area Editor for Computing (1988 - 1995)
• Computational Optimization and Appl. Editorial Board (1992 - present)
• Networks Associate Editor (1999 - present)
• Telecommunication Systems Associate Editor (2000-present)

• J. Kennington and R. Helgason, 1980, Algorithms for Network Programming, John Wiley and Sons.
• J. L. Kennington, V. S. S. Nair, and M. H. Rahman, 1999, Optimization Based Algorithms for Finding Minimal Cost Ring Covers in Survivable Networks, Computational Optimization and Applications, 14, 219-230.
• J. L. Kennington and J. E. Whitler, 1999, An Efficient Decomposition Algorithm to Optimize Spare Capacity in a Telecommunications Network, INFORMS Journal on Computing, 11, 149-160.