Geert-Jan van Houtum

“Every user of a capital good wishes to have a high system availability and a low Total Cost of Ownership. My research is about innovations leading to a higher system availability against a lower TCO.”

Geert-Jan van Houtum has been a Full Professor and chair of Maintenance, Reliability, and Quality at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) since 2008. Since September 2017, he is also vice-dean IE of the Department IE &IS. His areas of expertise include maintenance optimization, spare parts inventory control, inventory theory in general, and operations research.

Geert-Jan carries out research on the maintenance and reliability of capital goods. In particular, his focus is on design and control of spare parts networks, predictive maintenance concepts, and product design choices that have a strong effect on system availability and TCO. In this research, also the value of remote monitoring data and other degradation data is investigated. Much of this research is carried out in cooperation with the industry, working with companies such as ASML, Dutch Railways, Philips, Océ, Marel, the Royal Dutch Airforce and Navy, and Vanderlande.

Geert-Jan obtained his MSc and PhD in Applied Mathematics from TU/e, in 1990 and 1995, respectively. After that, he held positions as assistant/associate professor at Mechanical Engineering at the University of Twente and at Industrial Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology, and he was visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University in 2001. In 2008, he was appointed as full professor. Geert-Jan has more than 80 publications in international refereed journals such as Operations Research, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, IISE Transactions, European Journal of Operational Research, OR Spectrum, and International Journal of Production Economics. With Bram Kranenburg, he authored ‘Spare Parts Inventory Control under System Availability Constraints’.

In addition, Geert-Jan is associate editor of Manufacturing and Service Operations Management and the Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal. Further, he is a board member of the Service Logistics Forum. He was the scientific director of research school Beta from 2008-2017.