Delaram Heydarian
PhD Candidate Operations Research Northwestern IEMS
I'm Delaram Heydarian, a fifth-year Ph.D.candidate in Operations Research at Northwestern University, advised by Prof. Achal Bassamboo and Prof. Seyed MR Iravani.
I am on the academic job market for the 2026–27 academic year.
My research interests are broadly in Operations Management, stochastic systems, service operations, and queueing theory. I study customer routing and system design in service environments with heterogeneous customers and service resources, with particular interest in how information, congestion, and service heterogeneity shape individual decisions and system performance.
My current research focuses on customer routing in heterogeneous service systems under both observable and unobservable congestion. I study how customers choose among service alternatives, how decentralized decisions generate equilibrium behavior, and how these outcomes compare with socially optimal routing policies. My work combines queueing theory, stochastic modeling, equilibrium analysis, optimization, and simulation.
One stream of my research examines checkout externalities in systems with fast and slow servers and multiple customer classes. In this work, customers differ in basket size and choose between a faster staffed checkout and a slower self-checkout; the analysis studies the externalities generated by these routing decisions and develops practical routing policies.
A second stream studies routing in unobservable service systems, when customers do not observe queue congestion and make routing decisions based on expected system performance. I examine the resulting equilibrium behavior and compare decentralized routing with the allocation preferred by a social planner.
🎤 Job Market Presentation
Checkout Externalities: A Slow Server Problem with Two Classes I will present my job market paper at the 2026 INFORMS Annual Meetings in the session Service Operations, Supply Chains, and Experimentation.
Monday, November 2, 2026 | 1:15-2:30 PM Moscone South 205 (Level 2) If you are attending INFORMS and would like to discuss my research or meet during the conference, please feel free to reach out.