Lehigh ISE Professor Luis F. Zuluaga has built an impressive portfolio of Pennsylvania industry-driven research projects, with total awarded funding exceeding $500K across diverse sectors such as supply chain optimization, industrial gas operations, and correctional systems planning. Supported by the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance (PITA), Dr. Zuluaga has led or co-led eight projects since 2013, often in collaboration with industry leaders such as Air Products and Johnson & Johnson. His work consistently bridges academic innovation with real-world impact, addressing complex operational challenges through advanced optimization techniques and delivering optimal solutions to real-world decision-making problems.
The most recent project, entitled “Uncertainty Management in Supply Chain Operations” and awarded in 2025, will be conducted in collaboration with Air Products scientists and a graduate student from Lehigh’s ISE department. Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. (AP), headquartered in Allentown, is a leading global producer of industrial gases such as oxygen (used in hospitals), nitrogen (for chemical plants), argon (for the metal industry), and hydrogen (for refineries). To produce and deliver these essential products, AP relies on capital-intensive assets and highly complex processes that operate in a dynamic, competitive, and rapidly evolving environment. In this context, researchers at AP, in partnership with Prof. Zuluaga, aim to develop novel decision-support tools that will help optimize the use of production plants and delivery systems—ultimately improving how products are delivered to customers.
Prof. Zuluaga says that “Although for decades, AP has been working in house on developing operations research tools to improve their production and customer delivery operations based on state-of-the-art results in the literature, the resulting implementations have failed to convince AP decision makers to implement them. We expect that in close collaboration with Lehigh ISE, AP will now be able to develop tools that decision makers will feel confident implementing and lead to real economic benefits."
