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Edmund W. Schuster
biography
Edmund W. Schuster is a research engineer at the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity - Data Center Program, which is part of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, MIT. He is currently working with Dave Brock to develop new approaches to connecting data and mathematical models in a machine understandable way. This involves an innovative treatment of XML semantics through the M Language, an open computing system being developed at MIT. In addition, Ed is working on establishing the MIT Field Intelligence Lab. This group focuses on agricultural systems productivity, environmental sampling, the megalopolis program, and marketing spatial diffusion.
Previously, Ed held the appointment of Director of the Affiliates Program in Logistics at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics and also worked for a time at MIT Auto-ID Center and Labs. Before MIT, Ed worked as corporate manager of operations planning at Welch Foods (Concord, MA) and also for Oscar Mayer. His business career has concentrated in the field of logistics with responsibilities including the management of corporate raw materials and operations.
Besides his twenty years of management experience in the consumer goods industry, Ed has also served as adjunct faculty at Penn State-Erie, The Behrend College, lecturing in the areas of business logistics, operations management, and quantitative business analysis. While there, he co- founded and served as associate director of the Center for Process Manufacturing. The Center made a number of contributions in master production scheduling and mathematical modeling.
Ed has published over 100 articles on the application of management science to solve real world problems. His research interests include the application of models to logistical and planning problems experienced by industry. Ed's research work has appeared in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, the Journal of Business Logistics, Interfaces, and Production and Inventory Management Journal. Several of these articles focus on new areas such as capacitated materials requirements planning and mathematical modeling of the risk associated with an agricultural harvest. Other areas of research include Auto-ID technology, economics of information, master schedule stability, Asian logistics systems, visualization, the practice of modeling, and semantic modeling.
Ed's major innovations include; a method for bias adjusted safety stock in the consumer goods companies including schedule stability; simulating warehousing costs; techniques for achieving capacitated MRP in practice; harvest risk; semantics, data, and models for computing systems; track and trace for the pharmaceutical industry; marketing spatial diffusion; and a data-driven approach for agricultural systems.
In January 2007, Ed’s book titled GLOBAL RFID: The Value of the EPCglobal Network for Supply Chain Management was published in the US by Springer Verlag (New York and Berlin). It is also available worldwide. The book was co-authored with Stuart Allen and Dave Brock, and contains a number of case studies on the application of RFID technology in addition to the role of the EPCglobal Network.
In January 2008, Ed established a Literary Agency with the goal of handling publications from authors new to the United States market. He is currently working on placement of a book about China's rapid economic growth. Additional publication ideas or manuscripts are welcome.
Interview - MIT (2000)
Interview - Taiwan EBWA (2002).
