Rene Haijema is Associate Professor in Operations Research and Logistics at Wageningen University. His main research interest is inventory management and food waste reduction at retail supply chains.

He graduated with distinction from University of Amsterdam. In 2008 he obtained a PhD degree from the University of Amsterdam. His PhD thesis shows fundamental research on applying Markov Decision Theory to amongst other production and inventory management of blood products. The software he has developed is upgraded for practical use by blood banks.

This work has been awarded with national and international prices and nominations, e.g. ORTEC Excellence in Advanced Planning Award awarded by Dutch association of operations research (NGB) and ORTEC, INFORMS Best Poster Award, and finalist of the KNAW-Christiaan Huygens Science Award, and of the Euro Excellence in Practice Award.  He is member of the Executive Committee of the International Society of Inventory Research (ISIR).

In recent research at Wageningen University he collaborates in multi-disciplinary teams with scientists and industry to do science with practical impact. He participates in national and European projects on combating food waste. He has supervised in the past years four PhD students and currently supervises three PhD students on topics around food supply chains and digital cities. In EU-Horizon-2020 project REFRESH he collaborates and supervises a PhD student on the topic of dynamic pricing and inventory management to reduce food waste.

My interest are in perishable inventory management, and in applying stochastic dyamic programming and simulation to real world problems in logistics, transportation and beyond.

For example, I participate(d) in the following projects:

REFRESH (Horizon 2020)
Together with Marjolein Buisman, we combat food waste by developing models that show the effect on profit, waste, and customer service level of optimizing assortment and inventory levels, applying a dynamic shelf life (use by date), and a dynamic (expiration date based) pricing.

TIFN
As a parttime researchers I participate in TIFN research project RE-002: Reduction of spoilage of fresh and chilled products. Main deliverable is a DSS that simulates a supply chain, using information on actual product quality and order policies that take the perishable nature of fresh products into account.

DAVINC3I
Co-supervision of a PhD student on "Quality Controlled Logistics in a virtualizing global floricultural sector". This research is part of the strategic research project DAVINC3I (Dutch Agricultural Virtualized International Network with Coordination, Consolidation, Collaboration and Information availability), financed by Dinalog (www.dinalog.nl).

ORL 30306 - Decision Science 2 (Discrete event simulation)

ORL 30806 - Operations Research and Logistics (Stochastic Dynamic Programming, Inventory management, Revenue Management, Vehicle Routing),  coordinator.

ORL 33806 - Data Driven Supply Chain Management, coordinator

Food Supply Chain Intelligence, at Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (JADS), Den Bosch