Biographies

Dr. Bill Brunger

President and Chief Executive Officer

bill.brunger@podsresearch.com

Dr. Bill Brunger was a founding participant in the MIT/PODS Revenue Management Research Consortium, and has consulted using PODS insights and analyses for many years, advising numerous global airlines on revenue management, distribution and strategy issues. Bill retired as Senior Vice President of Network at Continental Airlines Inc., in December 2005, after a 25-year airline career. In that position, his department was responsible for developing and implementing the airline’s route network, including economic forecasting, route planning, scheduling, pricing, revenue management and the decision support functions related to those disciplines. Previously, he was Vice President of Distribution Planning for Continental, and sat on the Boards of Directors of Amadeus, Orbitz.com, the Airline Reporting Corporation and Airline Ventures. He is a frequent keynote speaker and panelist at airline industry conferences, discussing topics ranging from Industry “Best Practices” to algorithms to Revenue Management humor.

Bill completed his Doctorate in Management at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in 2008. His dissertation, “The Impact of the Internet on Airline Fares,” was summarized in the Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management in 2010. Bill also has a Master of Business Administration degree with distinction from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with concentrations in market modeling and decision sciences, and a Bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College. His honors include designation as an AGIFORS Fellow by the Airline Group of the International Federation of Operations Research Societies.

Craig Hopperstad

Vice President and Chief Scientist

craig.hopperstad@podsresearch.com

Craig Hopperstad has been engaged in mathematical model development for the past 45 years. His initial efforts were for the Boeing Aerospace Company, building models for strategic and tactical weapon systems effectiveness analysis. Then, turning his focus to the airplane business, he constructed a great variety of models in support of Boeing engineering and Boeing marketing, culminating in the construction of PODS. After retiring from Boeing, his consulting company, Hopperstad Consulting, Inc., continued the development of PODS for the MIT/PODS Revenue Management Research Consortium. Hopperstad Consulting has also developed proprietary versions of PODS in support of studies for a number of airline and non-airline clients, including investigations of alliance rules, pricing strategies and optimization schemes.

Besides PODS, Craig has contributed widely to air transportation, including the development of the Decision Window Model (DWM), development of the Boeing Mode Split Simulator (BMOSS) and as a participant in the development of Demand Driven Dispatch (D**3). He is the author of numerous presentations and papers, many involving PODS and PODS results. He holds a BA and MA from the University of Montana in General Science and Anthropology. His honors include designation as an AGIFORS Fellow by the Airline Group of the International Federation of Operations Research Societies.

Dr. Peter Belobaba

Vice President of Research, Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer

peter.belobaba@podsresearch.com

Peter P. Belobaba has been involved in the development and testing of PODS since 1996. He is the Director of the MIT/PODS Revenue Management Research Consortium, in which airline members sponsor research into current RM challenges and new directions for RM forecasting, optimization and seat inventory control. He is Principal Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he also teaches graduate-level courses on the airline industry, airline management and air transportation operations research, and is Program Manager of MIT’s Global Airline Industry Program. Dr. Belobaba holds a Master of Science in Transportation and a Ph.D. in Flight Transportation Systems from MIT.

Dr. Belobaba has been a consultant on revenue management system selection, implementation, testing and evaluation at over fifty airlines and other companies worldwide. His doctoral dissertation, “Air Travel Demand and Airline Seat Inventory Management,” which proposed the EMSR methods still used by many RM systems, is the first Ph.D. thesis published on the topic of airline yield management. He has also published articles dealing with revenue management and airline competition in Airline Business, Operations Research, Transportation Science, Decision Sciences, Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management and Journal of Air Transport Management. He is also lead contributor and editor of the recently published textbook, “The Global Airline Industry (2nd Edition). In 2016, Dr. Belobaba was awarded the INFORMS Impact Prize for his “pivotal role in the creation and wide-spread adoption of revenue management”.

Matthew Berge

Vice President of Development

matthew.berge@podsresearch.com

Matthew Berge has over thirty-five years of experience in the design, development, and use of models and optimization approaches to solve problems arising in operations, engineering, marketing, sales, and product strategy. Before retiring from Boeing in 2009, he was a Boeing Technical Fellow and a member of the Operations Research group of the Mathematics & Computing Technology organization. He has authored numerous technical papers and given conference presentations on topics including airline revenue management, airline scheduling and fleet assignment, future airline schedule modeling, air traffic flow management, and arrival sequencing and scheduling. He was a co-inventor for a patent pertaining to multiple target tracking, and is the sole inventor for patents filed on behalf of Boeing and pertaining to airline schedule recovery and arrival sequencing and scheduling. Matt has also been a lecturer at the University of Washington where he designed and taught a graduate-level class in Industrial Engineering on “Applications in Discrete and Network Optimization”. He has a Master of Science degree in Mathematics from the University of Illinois.

Matt was involved in early PODS simulator development where he developed an efficient network optimization-based bid-price algorithm which is still in use in PODS. More recently he developed a Demand Driven Dispatch (D3) assignment algorithm for PODS and has been the principal investigator for the PODS Perpetuation Project, under which the simulator code was re-architected, documented and rewritten into C++. In this capacity he has developed a new network optimization algorithm and has combined advanced object-oriented capabilities with development of a Fortran-to-C++ language translation capability to create a C++ version of the PODS simulator.