This interview took place at Cornell University.
Interviewer: Robert G. Sargent
Interview place: Ithaca, New York
Interview date: 2014-06-11
William L. Maxwell is the Andrew Schultz Jr. Emeritus Professor of Industrial Engineering at Cornell University. He spent his career as a faculty member at Cornell, where he also received his BME (1957) and Ph.D. (1961). During his extensive career, he held visiting faculty appointments at the University of Chicago, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University. Maxwell is known for his work in scheduling, production planning, and simulation. He developed methods for employing simulation to solve scheduling and production planning problems in the early days. He received awards for his teaching.
Maxwell was a co-developer of the XCELL Factory Modeling System for simulating factories and was involved in the development of the Cornell Computing Language (CORC). He has authored or co-authored numerous research papers and five books, including the classic, The Theory of Scheduling (1967) with Conway and Miller, which is still frequently cited. He has held various editorial positions with many journals. Maxwell has worked on numerous projects for the National Science Foundation and has consulted for a wide variety of companies in the areas of simulation methods and applications, shop flow control procedures, analysis of material handling systems, production planning systems, and data processing systems development. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) in 1998, and was named a member of the National Academy of Engineering in the same year. In 2002 Maxwell was named a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS).