Phone: (732)445-5474
E-mail: mtortore@rci.rutgers.edu
Busch Campus, CORE Building, Rm 204

      Dr. Michael Tortorella is Research Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He came to Rutgers in September 2001 upon retiring as a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff from Bell Labs - Lucent Technologies. Dr. Tortorella is a leading expert in reliability management, engineering, modeling, and life data analysis, encompassing both the development of new methodologies and their implementation in industry. During a 26-year career at Bell Telephone Laboratories, AT&T Bell Laboratories, and Bell Labs - Lucent Technologies, he was responsible for research into fundamental system, network, and service reliability engineering methodologies as well as for management of reliability in such critical projects as the SL-280 undersea cable system, the world's first application of fiber-optic technology in an intercontinental, undersea system. His research interests include stochastic processes and their applications to reliability, life data analysis, and telephone traffic, as well as design for reliability methods and technologies, process science, service and network reliability and performance, numerical methods in operations research and engineering, and stochastic stability. Dr. Tortorella has published extensively in these areas.
Dr. Tortorella was for 10 years the technical manager of the Design for Reliability Processes and Technologies Group in Bell Laboratories. There, he spearheaded the development of the first CAD-linked reliability modeling and management tools used at Bell Labs. He retired from the Next Generation Networks Service and Network Reliability Group where he created the Bell Labs Optical Networking reliability program and initiated several fundamental studies of reliability in packet networks and packet-network-based services. He holds M. S. and Ph. D. degrees in mathematics from Purdue University and the B. A. degree in mathematics and philosophy from Fordham University. He serves the IIE Transactions on Quality and Reliability Engineering as Area Editor for Reliability Modeling and Optimization and was Guest Editor of the December 1998 Special Issue on Reliability Economics. He also serves Naval Research Logistics as an Associate Editor and will be Guest co-Editor, with Jerry Griggs, for an upcoming issue on Computations in Networks. As a SIAM Visiting Lecturer, he has lectured extensively before undergraduate and graduate students on applications of mathematics and mathematical careers in industry. He is a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, The Institute for Operations Research and Management Science, and a Senior Member of the American Society for Quality.
His current research activities include limit theorems for stochastic flow networks, analysis of pooled life data counts, generalizations of Little's Law, pseudo-renewal processes, rates of convergence in the renewal theorem, and design for reliability expert systems. He is also working to raise the visibility of the Department with state government and with key industries in New Jersey. If you would like to meet Dr. Tortorella and learn more about research projects or consulting, please visit CoRE 204, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.